Six Degrees of Separation, from Kairos to The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

Six Degrees of Separation is a monthly meme, now hosted by Kate @ books are my favorite and best.

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

This month we start from yet another book I haven't read:

0. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

"An unforgettably compelling masterpiece—tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears." ~ Goodreads

I feel a bit lazy today, so I'm going to do this in easiest possible way. My first chain would be a classic by another German author:

1. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffman

A Christmas classic I've read for the first time last year. I have never seen the ballet, but suspect that it would be much more beautiful than the book.

Another book with boy and girl siblings secondary characters but with no less importance to the story is...

2. Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy

It was my first Binchy, but loved it very much, I'll definitely read more of her. I read this for the last Ireland Month.

I would link this to another book with the word "scarlet" in the title:

3. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

It was called a classic for a reason. I found layer upon layer of depth beneath the story that I produced a lot of posts around it.

Still linking words in title, here's a book with "letter" in the title:

4. Dear Paris: The Paris Letters Collection by Janice MacLeod

I learned so much more about Paris from this collection of illustrated letters than from any other sources before. What a joyful book to read!

Another play with the same words in the title, my next chain shares the word Paris :

5. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico

A British charwoman won a lottery to buy her dream Dior dress in Paris was the most delightful read you'd come across!

For the last chain, here's another book with "Mrs" in the title, which shares similar elderly women who still have some spirits left in them for another life-changing adventures:

6. The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman

A charming, funny, and sweet story to enjoy, with spy-adventures - rather than thriller. It's also a good way of learning a little about the Cold War and Albanian culture in the 1950s.


Have you read those books? If you do #sixdegree, how it worked out for you this time?