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’s starting point is Colm Tóibín’s Long Island. Here’s the description from Goodreads:
From the beloved, critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work, twenty years later.
. . .
Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis’ life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.
Long Island sounds like I book I’d like to read, but, of course, I should read Brooklyn first. I would like to have been able to do that, since I love extended family sagas, but, you know, life happens.
first degree
Since I haven’t read the starting book, I’m boldly moving forward to another book I haven’t read, Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead. This novel features teenager Benji Cooper, whose family spends summers at Sag Harbor on Long Island, in a small, self-contained enclave of African American professionals. One description I read of this book suggested that a minor theme concerns the relationship between the summer people and the area’s year-round residents.
second degree
Another book (one I have read) that makes use of a setting where the local residents and the wealthy summer crowd must live side by side is The Last House Guest by Megan Miranda. In the coastal town of Littleport, Maine, local resident Avery Greer and summer visitor Sadie Loman have been good friends for nearly 10 years—until Sadie is found dead one summer. Although the police rule Sadie’s death a suicide, local residents suspect Avery might be responsible.
third degree
The word guest also features in the title of another novel, The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir, translated by Mary Robinette Kowal. In this novel (another one I haven’t read), the protagonist is a woman who wakes up every morning exhausted, though doctors are unable to find any physical cause for her fatigue. A reviewer on BookBrowse writes “Knútsdóttir’s novel is a horrifying look into how being a woman complicates prolonged exposure to trauma, whether it be physical, emotional, or a harrowing experience of both.”
fourth degree
The female protagonist of S.J. Watson’s debut novel Before I Go to Sleep also worries about what happens to herself during the night.
fifth degree
For years Mary Eliot spent her nights writing the novels that made her husband famous in Night Woman by Nancy Price. I read this book in 1993, and thinking about it for this exercise has made me want to read it again.
sixth degree
Repetition of the word woman brings us to The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud.
And there we have it: 2 books that I haven’t read and 4 that I have.
Did you participate in 6 Degrees of Separation this month? If you did, let me know in the comments.
© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown
I’m not much of a crime/thriller reader but I do remember being very impressed with Before I Go to Sleep, and the Messud is a favourite, too.
Oh, very nice. I like how you switched things up here. That Night Woman sounds familiar, but maybe there was a similar movie.
Oh, very nicely done. That Night Woman sounds familiar, but maybe I’m thinking of a movie about a woman who wrote all her husband’s novels.