Six Degrees of Separation: from Normal People to Over Sea, Under Stone (Modern Dublin to the Holy Grail)

It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place as other readers, add six books, and see where one ends up.   This month’s starting point is Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018):

 

I read Rooney’s first book Conversations with Friends last year but found the lack of quotation marks pretentious and the characters unlikable.  I doubt I would have finished if it hadn’t been for my book group.  However, this one seems more interesting and the new miniseries is getting great reviews (except from the Bishop!) so I suspect I will try it some time. 

Can you think of instances where a movie or miniseries is significantly better than the book? 
I read this and saw the movie so long ago it really took some digging to remember the title - The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992), which is my first book. 

It won the Booker but I found it impenetrable.   However, the movie won nine Academy Awards with a great cast, including Colin Firth, Kristen Scott Thomas, and Ralph Fiennes.  I recall taking a client to see it in Ann Arbor, on a business trip back when Borders was in flower.

My second book is also set in Italy during WWII: A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell (2005).  This is a story of Jewish refugees being hidden and saved by Italian Catholic resistance fighters.  What is memorable was that I won my book group a visit from the author.  It turned out she was in Ohio and it was a virtual visit back before we were all virtual.  2006 wasn’t that long ago but we had to meet at the home of the only person who had a speaker phone! 

My third book is written by another prominent Ohio author, And the Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer (1982).  I think this is the most famous book written about a book club, following a group of women after the Civil War as they and their small town grow and change over the years.  Not a quick read but very enjoyable.

 

My fourth book is The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (1989) about a club that also revealed people's changing lives.  This was a big bestseller set in 1949 about four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, who meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China.  Remember this beautiful cover?

Joy reminded me of my fifth book, Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis (1955), which I had forgotten is not about his marriage to Joy Gresham but his conversion to Christianity.   I know the Narnia books very well and enjoyed the Perelandra trilogy but have only skimmed his nonfiction, with the exception of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, which I used extensively in college.

Finally, my sixth book is Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper (1965) which came to mind because I just read an interview about her experience as an Oxford undergraduate when C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were teaching:

I never personally met Tolkien or Lewis, and I’d never heard of Narnia, but we were all waiting eagerly for the third volume of The Lord of the Rings to come out, and I loved going to Lewis’s booming lectures on Renaissance literature. Tolkien lectured on Beowulf and was rather mumbly, except when declaiming the first lines of the poem in Anglo-Saxon, beginning with a great shout of “Hwaet!”

 

There were a couple professors when I was in college who were so famous that students would attend an occasional lecture even if they weren’t taking a course with them.  It was also a tradition to clap after the last lecture of the semester.  I am not sure I have the audacity to imagine sneaking in the back of the lecture hall to gaze admiringly at Tolkien or Lewis and, as I recall, Dorothy Sayers was one of the few women allowed near their inner circle, so I might not have been welcomed.

Next month (July 4, 2020), Six Degrees begin with What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt (2002).  She is a brilliant writer in her own right and I first learned about her when I worked at Penguin.  My coworkers had crushes on Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster, whom we published, and were very envious of her!  Now they have probably matured and would admire her as a writer.  I hope!

This was another lovely cover!