Saturday 4 September 2021

Six Degrees of Separation ~ Second Place

Second Place
Cusk, Rachel "Second Place" - 2021


#6Degrees of Separation:
from Second Place (Goodreads) to The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

#6Degrees is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. I love the idea. See more about this challenge, its history, further books and how I found this here.

This month's prompt starts with Second Place (Goodreads) by Rachel Cusk.

This month, Kate selected a book that was nominated for the Booker Prize. I have not been very lucky with those books so hardly ever touch them. However, there are always descriptions on Goodreads. This story is about "a woman who invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family."

And that reminded me of a book that also centres around an old house and some artists.

Morton, Kate "The Clockmaker's Daughter" - 2018

When hearing the name clock in a title, I always have to think about a very important dystopian work:

Burgess, Anthony "A Clockwork Orange" - 1962

And when thinking about oranges, what else is there to think of than the city of oranges, Jaffa.

LeBor, Adam "City of Oranges. An Intimate History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa" - 2006

I have several books with the word city in the title but this one is quite different because it is from a country we have all read little about: Albania.

Kadaré, Ismail "The Fall of the Stone City" (aka Chronicle in Stone) (Albanian: Darka e Gabuar) - 1971

And the same with stone, there are so many books with the word stone, so I chose one from another country whose authors are not that widely published abroad: the Netherlands.

Dorrestein, Renate "A Heart of Stone" (Dutch: Een hart van steen) - 1998

Which leads us to the last book this month. We have to get to the heart. And where do we hear the heartbeats? In Burma or Myanmar as it is also called.

Sendker, Jan-Philipp "The Art of Hearing Heartbeats" (German: Das Herzenhören) - 2002

Do the first and the last book have anything in common? Probably not. Though the word "art" appears in the last book and the first one is about artists. So, there you go.

Look for further monthly separation posts here.

6 comments:

  1. Such an interesting succession of relationships!

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    1. Thanks, Jen. I had fun looking through my reads and trying to find the next book that would fit. Such an interesting challenge.

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  2. woohoo, so neat t find another chain working with keywords! And cool to end up with art!!

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    1. Thanks, Emma. There are so many ways to do these links, I have enjoyed all of them. Sometimes, the title offers themselves to do it like this, sometimes you have to come up with other ideas. I always enjoy them.

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  3. I've never done a whole chain linking key words but might try it next time (or at least next time I feel stuck for that first link).

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    1. That's what I've done, I think with my first one. I try to do something different every month but I haven't done this for so long, so I*m sure I'll run out of new ideas at some point.

      Thanks for stopping by, Kate.

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