6 Degrees of Separation

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 month we start with the 2025 Women’s Prize winner, The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden. I haven’t read this book.

first degree

The most recent 6 Degrees of Separation starter book that I hadn’t read is last month’s, Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser. But I have read it since writing last month’s post.

second degree

The book I read right after Theory & Practice is Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor. In this novel, two budding scientists drop out of Harvard and create a tech start-up to work on developing a new drug. Zoe, who came up with the theory behind the elusive product, becomes the CEO and PR face of the new company. Her partner, Jack, is charged with putting the theory into practice in the lab. The novel’s plot includes a trial. 

third degree

A trial also occurs in the book I read right after Notes on Infinity, The Better Sister by Alafair Burke. Like all the previous books listed here, this novel depends on the life stories of its main character and her sister.

fourth degree

The fantasy novel The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern also deals with life stories, especially how the life stories of various people may intersect with or diverge from those of other people.

fifth degree

In the introduction of his novella The Life of Chuck, Stephen King writes about the origin of the story (that has recently been made into a movie):

One day on my morning walk, I was musing on an African proverb that says, “When an old man dies, a library burns down.” . . . The proverb led me to think about Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” where he says, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” I thought to myself, What if it isn’t a library that burns when a man dies? What if it’s a whole world? His world?

In The Life of Chuck, King combines three sections that, taken together, consider the concept of how different peoples’ lives may interact with one another. 

sixth degree

The Life of Chuck is short, only 128 pages. But Stephen King has also worked on the concept of life stories more deeply in his novel Billy Summers, which weighs in at 517 pages.

Most of my favorite fiction deals with the lives of interesting characters, and all six of these novels meet that criterion. In fact, make that all seven, since the description of The Safekeep sounds like a novel I would also appreciate. But I probably won’t get to it any time soon. “So many books, so little time” and all that.

I look forward to reading where this month’s 6 Degrees has taken other readers.

© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown