Six Degrees of Separation: From Knife to Valley of the Kings

  

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six books, forming a chain. The common points may be obvious, like a word in the title or a shared theme, or more personal. Every month Kate provides the title of a book as the starting point.

The starting book this month is Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie. I haven't read this book; I don't read many memoirs. And when I first read about Knife, I did not think I wanted to read it. But having since read many reviews that have praised the book, I do plan to read it. 

My first link is to another memoir. In 1946, Agatha Christie published Come, Tell Me How You Live, a memoir of the time she spent with her second husband, Max Mallowan, at archaeological digs in Syria. I have not read that memoir yet either, but it is on my shelves to read.

Next is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, Murder In Mesopotamia (1936), set at an archaeological dig in Iraq. This novel is part of the Hercule Poirot series. One of the members of the expedition is murdered. Poirot happens to be passing through the area and is called on to look into the death. The story is narrated by Nurse Leatheran, and that is what I liked best about the book. 

The books in the Gideon Oliver series by Aaron Elkins series feature a forensic anthropologist who often works at archaeological digs. In Curses, Oliver is invited to an archaeological dig on the Yucatan Peninsula. Both my son and I have read a few books in this series. The first book in this series was published in 1982. 

My next link is to a novel in a historical mystery series that I read years ago, the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters. Amelia begins her adventures in archaeology in Crocodile on the Sandbank, which is set in 1884 in Egypt.  

The fifth link of my chain, also set in Egypt, is a nonfiction book, The Tomb of Tutankhamen. The author, Howard Carter, was the leader of the excavation and this is his firsthand account of the discovery of the tomb and the artifacts discovered. This book is from my husband's bookshelves and he has several other books on this subject. We visited the Tutankhamen exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1978. 

Staying with Egypt and archaeology sites, the last book in my chain is another of my husbands books, also nonfiction, Valley of the Kings by John Romer. The Valley of the Kings is an area in Egypt where tombs were constructed for pharaohs and nobles for nearly 500 years. Per the Preface of this book, it is a nonfiction account of "two interlinked stories: the first is the history of the travellers and scholars who studied and excavated the royal tombs of the valley; the second is that of the tombs themselves and the motives and methods of the people who made them."

My Six Degrees focused on archaeological sites in fiction and nonfiction. If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you?

The next Six Degrees will be on May 3, 2025 and the starting book will be a book longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize, Rapture by Emily Maguire.