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.
This time around, we start with the 2025 Stella Prize winner, Michelle de Kretser’s work of autofiction, Theory & Practice. Here’s part of the description of the novel from Goodreads:
What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? In Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in this gap. Peopled with brilliantly drawn characters, the novel also stitches together fiction and essay, taking up [Virginia] Woolf’s quest for adventurous literary form.
first degree
On my TBR shelf sits Practice by Rosalind Brown. The front flap of the dust jacket instructs me that “Practice is a novel about the life of the mind and the life of the body, about the repercussions of a rigid routine and the deep pleasures of literature.”
second degree
Practice is something that musicians must do, along with taking lessons. And Lessons by Ian McEwan is another book on my TBR shelf.
third degree
Yet another book on the TBR shelf is Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. And, according to Goodreads, both McEwan’s book and Garmus’s book deal with life’s unpredictability.
fourth degree
From chemistry we turn to another branch of science with Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. This one isn’t on my TBR shelf because I’ve already read it.
fifth degree
However, another book by Marisha Pessl, Night Film, is on my TBR shelf. According to Goodreads, this book features a journalist who decides to investigate a woman’s death and “is drawn deeper and deeper into [the victim’s] eerie, hypnotic world.”
sixth degree
Another novel featuring a journalist drawn into the “fantasies of murder and madness” of the person she wants to interview is The Crime Writer by Jill Dawson. The would-be interviewee of this story is none other than the creepy novelist Patricia Highsmith. And I’m grateful that this month’s 6 Degrees of Separation exercise has led me to rediscover this book that is also on my TBR shelf.
There we have it—one book I’ve already read and five that I haven’t. I always find it gratifying to root through the volumes stacked on my various TBR shelves and find some gems that still await my attention.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
