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.
For August, we start with Maggie O’Farrell’s new release (and already a best-seller), Land. Set in 1865, Land features a man, Tomás, and his son, Liam, working on the Ordnance Survey project of mapping all of Ireland.
first degree
The book I read before picking up Land was The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton. Land is about a man working on constructing a map; Last Murder features a map on its inside cover.
second degree
I got Last Murder from my local library. When I went to pick it up, I found another book I’ve been wanting to read, Whidbey by T Kira Madden, on the Lucky Day Shelf.
(People requesting new, popular books often find themselves on an 8-week or longer waiting list at the library. For this reason, a few copies of such books are kept out of the queue. As soon as those books are returned, they’re put out on the Lucky Day shelf and can be checked out by whoever is the lucky one to find the book first.)
The action of Last Murder takes place on an unnamed fictional island. Whidbey, an actual island off the coast of Washington State in the U.S., is the setting of the eponymous novel.
third degree
Yet another novel set on an island is Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. This book is STILL on my TBR shelf, and I really do intend to get to it soon.
fourth degree
Yes, I like my fiction dark. Another book still on my TBR shelf is All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker.
fifth degree
Of all the colors in the world, my favorite is purple—dark purple. The beautiful chair on the cover of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading by Nina Sankovitch is one thing that drew me to this book.
sixth degree
The subtitle of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, published in 2011, pays homage to my final selection, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, published in 2005. Both books details the author’s personal story of dealing with grief after the death of a loved one.
This month’s sequence has taken us to dark islands, dark colors, and dark times. Perhaps next month’s journey will be brighter, but I can’t promise that.
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
