Six Degrees of Separation – The Naked Chef to Mailman

Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six others to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the titles on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

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This month we’re starting with Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef, the first in a series of cookbooks which made him into a celebrity chef. I have a lot of time for Oliver who has done his best to promote healthy, affordable food, often in the face of abuse.

I’d expected food to be the theme for this chain but the first title that popped into my head was Desmond Morris’ ‘60s bestseller The Naked Ape all about how we humans behave.

Which led me to Jenny Diski’s Monkey’s Uncle in which Freud, Marx and Darwin all appear.

Freud is also a character in Robert Seethaler’s The Tobacconist, giving relationship advice to the shop’s young apprentice.

The translator of The Tobacconist is Charlotte Collins who also translated Benedict Wells’ The End of Loneliness which I enjoyed very much.

Loneliness leads me to Denis Thériault’s The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman which sees a nosy postman falling for a woman who sends haiku to her beloved.

J. Robert Lennon’s Mailman also reads letters he should be delivering, juggling his many problems and neuroses until things get out of control.

This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from a celebrity chef with a conscience to a mailman on the verge of going postal. Part of the fun of this meme is comparing the very different routes other bloggers take from each month’s starting point. If you’re interested, you can follow it on Twitter with the hashtag #6Degrees, check out the links over at Kate’s blog or perhaps even join in.

28 thoughts on “Six Degrees of Separation – The Naked Chef to Mailman”

  1. I loved The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman, and Thériault’s other books too. Also The Tobacconist , and I’m sure I read The Naked Ape back in the day. A nice chain from which I’ll check out your other titles.

  2. I’ve still got my late mum’s copy of The Naked Ape – the original paperback. A seminal book – and Morris is such a good writer too. I love your translator link too – but must admit, I’m yet to read Seethaler, something to remedy one day I hope.

  3. Great chain – I particularly like your translator link. I tried to stick with a food/chef theme this month, but abandoned that idea after the second book!

  4. Great chain. A lot of interesting books to follow up on.

    The Naked Ape also brings back memories for me. I read it probably 50 years ago, when I was in my first marriage. I read a larger variety of books when I was younger, a good think I guess. Then for decades I read mystery novels almost exclusively. And now I seem to be trying new things again.

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