Six Degrees of Separation – The Last Banquet to The Eyre Affair

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.

Cover images

Kate’s given us the choice of starting from last month’s end point or from the last book we finished. I’ve plumped for The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood from my last Six Degrees in which the eighteenth-century French main protagonist relishes eating absolutely anything.

Set against the background of the French Revolution, A D Blakemore’s The Glutton is about a man with an insatiable appetite.

Much of Edward Carey’s Little, about Madame Tussaud, also takes place during the French Revolution.

Carey illustrates his novel with his own drawings as does Ann Stafford in Army Without Banners based on her ambulance-driving experiences in the Second World War.

Stafford was the co-author of Business as Usual whose letter-writing main protagonist works in the book department of a thinly disguised Selfridges.

A bookseller features in Charlie Hill’s Books a smart slice of satire on the book trade

My review of Books mentions Jasper Fforde in the subheading leading me to his novel The Eyre Affair, a delight for book lovers with a taste for puns.

This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from an eighteenth-century boy, first spotted relishing stag beetles, to a pun-filled literary detective story. 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.

31 thoughts on “Six Degrees of Separation – The Last Banquet to The Eyre Affair”

  1. I haven’t read any of these, but I do have Little on the TBR. I love books with illustrations – they always add something special to the reading experience, I think.

      1. I was just going to ask about this, how many you’d read. I read the first two in short order when they were new but never returned…maybe I had some of the fatigue that Annabel described. But perhaps with some distance between they would be good fun between more serious reads!

        1. I’ve only read a couple quite some time ago now. I can see that the joke becomes increasingly thin but maybe one after a particularly gruelling read might work. Perhaps I’ll suggest that to my partner who’s currently mired in a long history of WW2 from an Eastern European perspective.

  2. I enjoyed Business as Usual so much. I wish my libraries had more from that publisher.

    I’m doing a “book chain” challenge on litsy, but it’s more formal; the links are pre-decided.

Leave a comment ...

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.