Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best. The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links. I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.
This month's starting point is is Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder
Using the word knife as my link I am choosing YA book The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.
A somewhat similar title, but a very different book is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, who is a very well known Japanese/British author.
If you want to talk about big name Japanese authors then Haruki Murakami would have to be right up there! I am choosing to use his book Norwegian Wood, for no other reason than we just got back from a cruise that went to Japan and Korea and we were on a Norwegian Cruise Line ship.
There were two main reasons for choosing the cruise that we chose. It visited Okinawa with it's interesting WWII and post WWII history, and it was cherry blossom season. A book that has both WWII history (albeit about Japanese POWs in Australia) and cherry blossoms on the cover is Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms by Anita Heiss.
Another book about POWs being incarcerated in a different county is The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies. This time though the POWs are German and are imprisoned in North Wales.
Now, if I am going to talk about books set in Wales, I can't go past the amazing Sharon Kay Penman for my final link. Her book Here Be Dragons is a book that has lived long in my memory! It is about Llewelyn, Prince of North Wales.
My chain is a bit all over the place this month which might be a product of my still on holiday brain, but part of the fun of Six Degrees is seeing the way that the links work in each participants mind. One thing that these books have in common is that they are all older books. I think the newest one is Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms which came out in 2016.
By the way, I mixed up my memes this month, and did a Six Degrees style post for my Top Ten Tuesday post last week. Interestingly that had quite a few WWII books as well. You can check it out here!
Next month, the starting point is an historical novel longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize, Rapture by Emily Maguire.
Will you be joining us?
Very nicely done.
ReplyDeleteThat cruise to Japan and Korea must have been awesome and enlightening. My wish is to see South Korea on the way to Japan by plane, one of these days. Have a good week.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed Here Be Dragons so much. I always intended to read more by this author.
ReplyDeleteI like how you linked your books to your travels, too.
What a fun challenge! I may need to try this. I imagine your cruise was incredible!
ReplyDeleteHere Be Dragons is great! I loved all three books in that trilogy.
ReplyDelete