It’s time for another adventure in Kate’s 6 Degrees of Separation Meme from her blog, Books Are My Favourite and Best. We are given a book to start with, and from there we free associate six books.
Kate has set as this month’s starting point a story that begins on New Year’s Eve – Rules of Civility by Amor Towles.
Because I’m still figuring out what I want to do in terms of a reading plan this year, I’m going to look at my TBR shelves for inspiration here. Every book sitting on those shelves is there for a particular reason, and I hope that a free-association look at the collection will help me shape my next reading.
So I’ll start with some easy associations. My book group read Rules of Civility back in 2012 and loved it. I was therefore eager to read any forthcoming novels by Amor Towles.
1. I put Towles’s book A Gentleman in Moscow on my shelf as soon as it was published.
2. But before I got around to reading A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles came out with The Lincoln Highway, which promptly joined its authorial sibling on the shelf.
3. Another Lincoln on that very same shelf is Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.
4. A recent interest in books about the writing of fiction prompted me to add A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, also by George Saunders, to the shelf.
5. Much larger than the collection of print books on my TBR shelves is my collection of not-yet-read books on my Kindle, most acquired through the daily “ebooks at reduced price” newsletters I subscribe to. One of those ebooks is At Swim-Two-Birds, a metafictional (a recent interest of mine) work by Irish author Flann O’Brien.
6. A current Irish author whose work I have followed since her debut novel is Tana French. Currently awaiting my attention on the TBR shelf is her recent novel The Searcher.
And now I have found 6 titles to incorporate as I begin to make a list of books I hope to read in 2022. Where did your 6 Degrees of Separation take you this month?
Happy New Year to All!
© 2022 by Mary Daniels Brown
Oh, I love your links Mary, not least because I’ve heard of all the authors and have even read a couple – A gentleman in Moscow and At Swim-two-birds. I also have Lincoln in the Bardo on my tbr. Fun linking too!
Happy New Year, Mary. I enjoyed having a nosy at what you’ve got on your TBR. I loved At Swim-Two-Birds. I also loved A Gentleman in Moscow. I’d completely missed that Amor Towles brought out a new book last year, and have just reserved it at the library.
I was less of a fan of Lincoln in the Bardo when I read it. So many people love it that I feel as though I ought to give it another go some day, but I have a groaning TBR already!