Six Degrees of Separation – Land to Porterhouse Blue

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.

This month we’re starting with Maggie O’Farrell’s Land which I’ve not read but the blurb tells me it’s inspired by the mapping of Ireland

Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World reimagines the parallel lives of Alexander van Humboldt, who travelled the world measuring it, and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss who mapped the universe in his head.

Kehlman’s novel was translated by the late, great Carol Brown Janeway who also translated Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader.

Schlink is a lawyer bringing to mind barrister John Mortimer who wrote the Rumpole series, the first of which was Rumpole of the Bailey.

When I was a bookseller, I once served Leo McKern who played the irascible Rumpole on TV. Another famous customer was John Thaw who played Morse in the series which began with Colin Dexter’s The Dead of Jericho.

Dexter’s Morse novels were set in Oxford as was Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, one town the other gown.

Which has to be balanced by Tom Sharpe’s Cambridge-set academic satire Porterhouse Blue.

This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from mapping to a Cambridge campus novel by way of a few brushes with fame. 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.