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.
Our starting book this month is the 2024 Booker winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey. I’ve just started reading it.
first degree
The characters in Orbital are astronauts in a spacecraft circling the earth. Their perspective on the world is different than usual, as if they had zoomed out on a photograph. For Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian aristocrat in A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, the world is his oyster. But that all changes in 1922, when he is considered an unrepentant aristocrat and is sentenced to spend the rest of his life in the Metropol hotel. This change in his situation forces him to zoom in on his surroundings for a close-up look at his life.
second degree
Count Rostov agrees to care for the young daughter of a friend and ends up raising the girl when her mother doesn’t return. The title character in the 1862 novel Silas Marner by George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans) also raises a young orphaned girl.
third degree
While Count Rostov and Silas Marner each raise a child not his own, the main character in another nineteenth-century novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, does the opposite: in a fit of drunken anger, he sells his wife and infant daughter to the highest bidder.
fourth degree
The town name Casterbridge reminds me of another village with a similar name, Kingsbridge, the setting of The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.
fifth degree
The bridge to my next entry is the word bridge: Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell. This book is on my TBR shelf. According to Goodreads, the novel portrays “the sapping ennui of an unexamined suburban life.”
sixth degree
Another novel with Mrs. in the title is Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing by May Sarton. In Sarton’s novel Hilary Stevens, a well known poet in her 70s, prepares for an interview with two journalists about her life in literature. In contrast to Mrs. Bridge, who lives an unexamined life, Mrs. Stevens uses the upcoming interview as the catalyst for examining her life in terms of her art and her romantic relationships.
We started out with one day spent in space with astronauts and ended up with another day spent with Mrs. Stevens evaluating her life from 7:00 one morning to 7:00 the next morning. By zooming out and zooming in, by comparing and contrasting, we’ve looked at a lot of human lives in all their delicious messiness.
Where did your 6 Degrees of Separation take you on this first Saturday of the New Year?
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
Someone else also went with the Towles book as their first link. Interesting idea!
Well, how intriguing. Your chain contains several book that have been on my TBR for a while, so I’ll move them up a few notches. Amor Towles, the Eliot and the Hardy, to name but three!