Six Degrees of Separation from A Christmas Carol to Mr. Ive's Christmas

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 other books, forming a chain. Every month she provides the title of a book as the starting point.

The starting point this month is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, thus this is a perfect first post for December. I am sure I have read this story long ago, but then maybe I am just familiar with film adaptations. (My favorite is Scrooged with Bill Murray.) I do have the illustrated edition pictured here, and I will be reading it this month.

For my first link I will make the obvious connection, another book with a Christmas theme.


The Shortest Day by Jane Langton is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Homer and Mary Kelly are teaching a class at Harvard University. Mary is participating in the annual Christmas Revels when a young singer in the event dies in an automobile accident. When other deaths follow, Homer resists getting involved, even though he was once a homicide detective.

I next link to another book featuring an academic setting ... Murder is Academic by Christine Poulson. The UK title is Dead Letters. This is the first book in Poulson's Cassandra James series. Cassandra becomes the Head of the English department at St. Etheldreda's College at the University of Cambridge, after the former Head, a close friend, dies. This is one of my favorite academic mysteries.

I move on to another book set at the University of Cambridge, The Cambridge Theorum. The main character, Derek Smailes, is a police detective assigned to investigate the death of an undergraduate. It is a combination of a police procedural and an espionage novel.

My next choice would be The Becket Factor by Michael David Anthony, which also includes elements of espionage with another subgenre, this time a clerical mystery. Published in 1990, politics, local and national, are also touched on. The main setting for this book is a cathedral, Canterbury Cathedral, and its surroundings, which leads me to another book set in a Cathedral close.

Close Quarters by Michael Gilbert was my first exposure to life in a Cathedral close, which made it doubly interesting. That book was published much earlier, in 1947, and is very much a traditional puzzle-type mystery.

My last book in the chain has even more of a religious emphasis, and takes us back to the Christmas theme. Mr. Ive's Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos is a novel that tells the story of a man's life and the grief he suffers when his son dies in a senseless robbery a few days before Christmas. Mr. Ives' religious beliefs and faith are at the center of this book, but family relationships and friendships are also stressed.

My chain this month began and ended with Christmas stories, and in the middle there were books with academic or ecclesiastical settings. I look forward to seeing the direction of other Six Degrees posts.

Mr. Ives' Christmas: Oscar Hijuelos

Mr. Ive's Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos is a novel that tells the story of a man's life and the grief he suffers when his son dies in a senseless robbery. Mr. Ives' religious beliefs and faith are at the center of this book. He lives in a neighborhood in upper Manhattan, with a mix of ethnic groups, and he likes it that way.

From the description at Goodreads:

Hijuelos' novel tells the story of Mr. Ives, who was adopted from a foundling's home as a child. When we first meet him in the 1950s, Mr. Ives is very much a product of his time. He has a successful career in advertising, a wife and two children, and believes he is on his way to pursuing the typical American dream. But the dream is shattered when his son Robert, who is studying for the priesthood, is killed violently at Christmas.

A central theme in the book is religion, and faith, and whether faith is enough for Mr. Ives. His life is forever altered by his son's death, as are his relationships with his wife and daughter and friends.

I had a very emotional response to the book. It is a sad story and there are no easy answers. My religious beliefs and experiences are not close to those of Mr. Ives, yet I felt there was a universality in his experiences related to loss and grief. My father had deep religious beliefs and he did truly try to live those beliefs everyday, as Mr. Ives does. I did not realize until I had finished the book how much Mr. Ives reminded me of my father. All of the characters seemed very believable to me. I think that this is one of the gifts of the book, that we can all see something of ourselves in the family relationships and friendships depicted here.

I discovered this book via Moira's Clothes in Books blog. See her posts on this book here and here. Each post has an excerpt and you can get a look at the writer's style.

I also liked this article at NPR Books, titled 'Mr. Ives' Christmas' a Holiday Hymn to New York. The author likes the depiction of New York. An excerpt is also included there.