Six Degrees of Separation is a monthly link-up hosted by
Kate at
Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a
starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t
need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next
to it in the chain.
This month the book is
Alice in Wonderland. I have very pleasant memories, not only of reading it but my grandmother gave me LP versions of
Wonderland and
Through the Looking Glass which I listened to often as a child on my own little record player. At one point, I could quote long passages. Prior to this gift, I will admit I'd thought the book was called Allison Wonderland.
 |
Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, and Aloysius
(copyright Granada Television) |
Alice made me think of my first book which begins in Oxford:
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. When I visited Oxford, reminders of both books were everywhere! Brideshead is one of the few books of which I consider the miniseries as good or better.
It really captivated viewers when it first came out, including me. Oh, Anthony Andrews, I could watch you in anything! In fact, I loved you in a
movie of my second book:
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emma Orczy, set during the French Revolution, about an Englishman who plays the fop but is really a spy:
We seek him here, we seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven? — Is he in hell?
That damned, elusive Pimpernel
My third book is by Georgette Heyer, who was inspired by Orczy and Rafael Sabatini to try her hand at a romantic adventure story. I have a couple favorites but I am thinking about
Devil’s Cub, in which Mary Challoner pulls a gun on the young nobleman trying to seduce her as they travel to France.
Intrepid heroines are always my favorite! My fourth book is one I was thinking about earlier tonight,
Nobody’s Girl by Hector Henry Malot, translated from French and available through Project Gutenberg. Perrine’s dying mother makes her promise to find the grandfather who disowned his son for marrying beneath him: “Make him love you without revealing your identity!” An elementary school friend lent me this book when I was about 10 and I was happy to find a copy with the same pink cover not long ago.
My fifth book is also set in France. (Hmm, there are bits of Brideshead set in Paris so I guess there is a French theme for my chain that I hadn’t planned but will now maintain.) I am a big Daphne du Maurier fan and once persuaded my book group to read
The Scapegoat, an improbable tale of impersonation. Not all my friends like historical fiction as much as I do but this fascinated everyone.
Finally, for my sixth book, I will end with a book I just finished,
The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris by Jenny Colgan, who writes light-hearted women’s fiction but often surprises the reader with serious themes. Here, an unlikely friendship between Anna and her old French teacher results in Anna going to Paris to work for a famous chocolatier. This will help Anna recover from an accident and causes Claire to remember her magical time in Paris as an au pair when she was young and in love.
That's a great chain! I love The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Scapegoat is one of my favourite Daphne du Maurier books. Devil's Cub is one of the Heyer novels I still haven't read, but it's one that I'm particularly looking forward to.
ReplyDeleteSo much to say about this wonderful, mind-bending chain that leads in so many fruitful directions! (Gosh--in that photo Jeremy Irons [almost]looks young!) In my senior year at college, I took a Religion in 20th-Century Fiction course, which mystifies me that I chose it, because I was not at all religious then nor am I now, but I think the booklist intrigued me. (Carson McCullers, James Joyce, loads of others, and Brideshead Revisited. I liked the novel very much, though I found the characters so strange to my 21-year-old self. And not that many years after, the BBC production, which was incredibly mind-blowing, and which made me wonder if I understood the book at all on first reading!
ReplyDeleteOh, thank you, I must read The Scapegoat!! Adding it to my 2020 list.
And Jenny Colgan writes what I think is extraordinarily well done "romantic fiction." Really, I don't want to pigeonhole Colgan, she is too fine a writer, and she really digs into character and uses them to make her plots take fire. So very good, so I definitely will be reading the one you've listed!!
Thanks so much for the fun and memories you've evoked!