Six Degrees of Separation: From The Safekeep to Tales of the South Pacific

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 The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden. The book is set in 1961 Netherlands; Isabel is living in the family home alone, when her brother asks her to let his girlfriend Eva move in with her. This book won the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction.

1st degree:

Using the title of the starting book, but inverting it in a way, I have chosen I'll Keep You Safe by Peter May as my first book in the chain. It is a crime fiction novel mostly set on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Niamh and Ruairidh Macfarlane are on a business trip to Paris to promote their luxury brand of tweed, when Ruairidh is killed by a car bomb. After talking to the police, Niamh is allowed to return to Lewis. The story focuses on Niamh's life in Lewis following her husband's death, and the policewoman who is investigating the crime. I am a fan of Peter May's books but I have not read this one.

2nd degree:

I have read another book by Peter May set on the Isle of Lewis. It is the first book in the The Lewis Trilogy, The Blackhouse. In this book, Fin Macleod, a detective from Edinburgh, is sent to the Isle of Lewis because of previous connections to a similar crime. He does not want to return to the island because he grew up there. This was the first book I read by Peter May.

3rd degree:

For my third link, I am sticking with Peter May and another book he wrote which is set on two islands. Entry Island blends historical fiction with a present-day police procedural. Both stories come together in the end, as one would expect. The historical focus is on the Highland Clearances which take place on the Isle of Lewis and Harris in Scotland. The current investigation centers on a death on a small Canadian island, which is a part of the Magdalen Islands, in the province of Quebec. This was an unusual and compelling story.

4th degree:

I am liking the focus on islands, but I will move on to a different author. The next book is Mindful of Murder by Susan Juby, set at a spiritual retreat on one of British Columbia’s Gulf Islands. The island in the book is a fictionalized version of a real island. This is an unusual mystery with a unique sleuth and a different approach, sort of a cozy. The protagonist is a female butler, and I enjoyed learning about Buddhist beliefs and what today's butlers do in their jobs.

5th degree:

White Heat by M. J. McGrath is set on Ellesmere Island, Canada's northernmost and third largest island. The heroine is an Inuit hunter and guide, Edie Kiglatuk. When a man is shot and killed on an Arctic adventure that she is leading, the murder is investigated by police sergeant Derek Palliser. I enjoyed reading about this part of Canada, and the mystery was good too.

6th degree:

The last link is to Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener, a collection of short stories set during World War II, loosely connected to each other by recurring characters in the stories. The events take place on islands in the South Pacific, especially around the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, and the stories focus both on the people of the islands and the servicemen stationed there. I have not read this book, but we have a copy that I will be reading.

In my Six Degrees, I visited islands in different parts of the world, starting with Scotland, going next to Canada, and finally to islands in the South Pacific. Have you read any of these books? 

If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you?

The next Six Degrees will be on September 6, 2025 and the starting book will be the winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Ghost Cities by Siang Lu.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Theory & Practice to The Paris Diversion

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 Theory & Practice  by Michelle de Kretser. This book won the Stella Prize, a major literary award celebrating Australian women’s writing, and championing diversity and cultural change. Theory & Practice is described as autofiction; thus it is a blend between autobiography and fiction. When I was looking into this subgenre of fiction, I was both confused and interested in all the descriptions and various interpretations. 

1st degree:

My first link will be to Outline by Rachel Cusk, which is also described as autofiction. I have that book on my shelves, unread. So I hope to give it a try soon.

The main character in Outline is a novelist who goes to Athens, Greece to teach a writing course during the summer. She has ten conversations with people she meets on the way to Athens and during her stay there.

2nd degree:

The second link is to The Messenger of Athens by Anne Zouroudi. This book takes place mainly on the fictional Greek island, Thiminos. A woman is found dead at the bottom of a cliff; the local police call it an accident. Then a stranger comes to Thiminos from Athens, with the intention of solving her murder.

This is another book I have on my bookshelves. The Greek Detective series gets good reviews and I should read it soon.

3rd degree:

The Light of Day by Eric Ambler starts in Athens and ends up in Turkey.  Arthur Simpson, thief and con man, is hired to drive a car to Turkey. He does not know that he is smuggling illegal weapons in the car, and he is caught by border guards. The authorities force him to deliver the weapons to the people who hired him, in order to uncover their nefarious plans. 

The book was adapted to screen as Topkapi. Peter Ustinov won an Oscar for Supporting Actor for the role of Arthur. Maximilian Schell and Robert Morley also starred.

4th degree:

The James Bond spy thriller From Russia with Love (1957, Ian Fleming) is set in Instanbul, Turkey. The Russians plot to rid themselves of James Bond by faking the defection of a female cipher clerk. Bond is sent to Istanbul to help the defector escape. They take the Orient Express from Istanbul to Paris, where the story ends. Also made into a very successful film, starring Sean Connery.

5th degree:

A good portion of the last book took place on a train and it ended in Paris. That takes me to The Sleeping-Car Murders by Sébastien Japrisot, a French author, screenwriter and film director. This novel was first published in French in 1962. The night train from Marseilles arrives in Paris. In the sleeping car, the body of a young woman is found dead. This is a police procedural and the investigation takes place in Paris.

6th degree:

My last link is to a book that also takes place in Paris. The Paris Diversion by Chris Pavone is an espionage thriller which begins with a terror attack on Paris. It is the second book featuring Kate Moore and her husband Dexter. The first book was The Expats. This is a very fast-paced thriller (at times) but the story is told very well.

This is another Six Degrees where I rediscovered some books on my own shelves that I have not read yet. 

My Six Degrees took me from Athens, Greece to Turkey and then ended up in Paris, France. Have you read any of these books? 

If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you?

The next Six Degrees will be on August 2, 2025, and the starting book will be the 2025 Women’s Prize winner, The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden.

  

Six Degrees of Separation: From All Fours to The Spellman Files

 

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 All Fours by Miranda July. Although the book has been very successful, I know very little about it, so I am linking to my first book using the author's first name.

1st degree:

Linking from the author's name, Miranda July, my first book in the chain is City of Secrets (2011) by Kelli Stanley; the main character in this book is Miranda Corbie. I think Miranda is a lovely name. I haven't read this book but my husband has, and here is his brief review from Goodreads:

This excellent private eye thriller - the second of the Miranda Corbie series - weaves a genuinely sinister plot line into an evocative 1940 San Francisco setting. A strong protagonist (who drinks and smokes lots!), well drawn supporting characters, and style to burn.

2nd degree:

Using Kelli Stanley's last name, I link to a book from the Stanley Hastings series, Favor (1988) by Parnell Hall. My husband and I both read this book, but his review (at Goodreads) is much better than mine:

Stanley Hastings is a lowly-paid leg man for an ambulance chasing lawyer, a wannabe sort of private eye and writer, a self-deprecating and loving family man. In this, the third of Parnell Hall's series, we find Stanley off to Atlantic City to do a quick favor for someone who's not really even a friend. Before too long, he finds himself charged with grand larceny (the way he tries to get out of that is elegant) and in the frame for two murders. The characters are all sharply drawn, the pace is swift, the plot is complex in a good way, and there is a light tone throughout. There are nearly 20 in the series and I can't wait to get to the next one.

3rd degree:

Parnell Hall was a prolific author with multiple series. For my next link I choose a book by another author with the last name of Hall. Adam Hall was a pseudonym used by Ellestor Trevor, and under that name he wrote a long-running series of spy novels featuring Quiller, a British secret agent for a covert organization of spies, unacknowledged by the government. Quiller is a very unusual spy fiction protagonist in that he doesn't smoke, drink, or carry a gun. The Quiller Memorandum (1965) is set in the 1960s in Berlin, and Quiller has finished a long string of assignments to find Nazi war criminals and bring them to trial. He is planning to return to England the next day, but is enticed into a new assignment when another agent is killed.

4th degree:

Moving from a spy series written in the 1960s to another series written at about the same time, my next link is to Funeral in Berlin (1964) by one of my favorite authors, Len Deighton. In this story, the nameless spy (called Harry Palmer in the movie adaptations) is sent to East Berlin to facilitate the defection of an East German scientist. He must work with the Russian security-chief Colonel Stok and Hallam of the British Home Office. An elaborate plan is set up to get the scientist out of East Berlin. This book was published only three years after the Berlin Wall was constructed; in the introduction, Deighton speaks of the time he spent in East Berlin shortly after the wall went up. The setting feels very authentic.

5th degree:

Funeral in Berlin is about a defector in East Berlin. My next book, Defectors (2017) by Joseph Kanon, is about a group of American and British spies living in and around Moscow during the Cold War, after defecting to the USSR. The focus is on the relationship of the two brothers in the story, Frank, the US spy who defected to Russia in 1949, and Simon, his younger brother, who had to leave his job in intelligence to work in publishing after Frank's defection. In 1961, Simon has been allowed to come to Moscow to work with Frank on publishing his memoirs. I loved the exploration of family relationships, but the story has plenty of action also.

6th degree:

My next book, The Spellman Files (2007) by Lisa Lutz, is also about family relationships. The Spellmans are a strange and dysfunctional family who run a detective agency. Before reading the book, I had the mistaken notion that this book was primarily a humorous and cozy mystery. It is humorous but not so cozy, and sometimes does not even seem like crime fiction. I loved the writing, and I found the book hard to put down.

My Six Degrees starts in the US, moves to Berlin, Germany, then Russia, and back to the US. If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you? 

Have you read any of these books? 

The next Six Degrees will be on July 5, 2025 and the starting book will be the 2025 Stella Prize winner, Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Rapture to State of Wonder

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 Rapture by Emily Maguire. This is a historical fiction novel, set in the 800s, about a young girl who becomes a monk by disguising herself as a male. I may read this book because it sounds interesting and is not overly long. The book was longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize, which celebrates the best writing by women and non-binary authors in Australia. 

1st degree:

My first link is to another Australian novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, published in 1967. The story is about a group of young female college students that go on a picnic. Some of the girls don't return. 

2nd degree:

Using "Rock" in the title of the previous book takes me to my next book, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, published in 1938. I haven't read much by Greene so I was happy to find this old hardback edition of Brighton Rock with the dust jacket mostly intact at the 2023 Planned Parenthood book sale. The protagonist is Pinkie, a teenage gang leader who has murdered a journalist and thinks he can get away with it. The book goes beyond a thriller to explore moral issues.

3rd degree:

The Zig Zag Girl by Elly Griffith's is my next link because of its setting – Brighton, in the 1950s. This is from the description at the author's website: "When the body of a girl is found, cut into three, Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is reminded of a magic trick, the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, is an old friend of Edgar’s. They served together in the war as part of a shadowy unit called the Magic Men." This is the first book in the Brighton Mysteries series, and I have not yet read it.

4th degree:

Another book with "Girl" in the title is Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart. This book is also the start of a historical mystery series, set in the early 1900s in New Jersey. It is based on a real woman who was one of the first female deputy sheriffs in the US. 

5th degree:

Again using a word from the title, I link to Gunshine State by Andrew Nette. This is a gritty heist novel set in Australia. Description at Goodreads: "Gary Chance is a former Australian army driver, ex-bouncer and thief. His latest job takes him to Surfers Paradise, Queensland, working for aging standover man, Dennis Curry. Curry runs off-site, non-casino poker games, and wants to rob one of his best customers, a high roller called Freddie Gao. ... Chance knows he can’t trust anyone, but nothing prepares him for what unfolds when Curry’s plan goes wrong." 

6th degree:

Gunshine State takes me to State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, a novel that is set in the jungles of Brazil. From the description at the author's website: "Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a pharmaceutical company, is sent to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have all but disappeared in the Amazon while working on what is destined to be an extremely valuable new drug. Nothing about the assignment is easy: not only does no one know where Dr. Swenson is, but the last person who was sent to find her, Marina's research partner Anders Eckman, died before he could complete his mission." 

My Six Degrees took me from Australia to the UK, then to the US and back to Australia, but ended in Brazil. I have not read any of the books in this post, but I have five of them on my TBR shelves. Have you read any of these books? 

If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you?

The next Six Degrees will be on June 7, 2025 and the starting book will be All Fours by Miranda July.

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.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Prophet Song to Rachel's Holiday

  

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 the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. I have not read that book, but from what I gather it is a dystopian novel set in Ireland and written by an Irish author. That novel follows one woman trying to keep her family together as the country moves towards totalitarianism. This sounds like a very good book and I may want to read it some day. 

The books that I have linked to for my Six Degrees chain are all set primarily in Ireland, and are written by Irish authors. 

1st degree:

My first link is to an Irish crime fiction book on my TBR pile – Winterland by Alan Glynn. From the book dust jacket: "The worlds of business, politics and crime collide in contemporary Dublin when two men with the same name, from the same family, die on the same night - one death is a gangland murder, the other, apparently, a road accident. Was it a coincidence? That's the official version of events. But when a family member, Gina Rafferty, starts asking questions, this notion quickly unravels."

2nd degree:

Winterland can be described as dark and gritty, and that leads me to The Guards, the first of the Jack Taylor novels written by Ken Bruen. The series is set in Galway, Ireland. Jack Taylor was in the Garda Síochána (the police force of the Republic of Ireland), and thrown out because of serious problems with alcohol. He becomes, almost accidentally, a finder, a sort of private detective. One element of the writing is frequent mentions of books, especially mystery novels, and quotes interspersed here and there, often with no apparent connection to the story.  The mystery portion of the plot is slight. The emphasis is more on Jack, his relationships, his life, his battle with alcohol. It isn't a happy book, but it isn't depressing either.

3rd degree:

Like The Guards, the The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black is more of a character study than a mystery. And beautifully written. Set in Ireland in the 1950s, it is the 2nd book about Quirke, a pathologist working in a hospital in Dublin. Deirdre Hunt died and the assumption is that it was suicide; Quirke suspects that this is not correct, so he spends some time looking into her death. Dierdre also went by the name Laura Swan and ran a beauty salon, The Silver Swan. In looking into Deirdre's death, Quirke discovers that his daughter Phoebe has some connections to that salon also, and he becomes more interested. After reading this book, I was hooked on the series.

4th degree:

Benjamin Black is a pseudonym used by John Banville for some of his crime fiction books. In 2020, John Banville published Snow, set in Ireland in 1957. The Catholic Church is powerful in Ireland at that time. Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been sent to County Wexford to investigate the death of a priest, found dead in the home of a well-known Protestant family. DI Strafford is also Protestant, an unusual occurrence in the Garda. He finds himself in an uncomfortable position, isolated in the small community by the accumulating snow and getting little cooperation from the family or the townspeople. 

 

5th degree:

My next link also involves Garda detectives. The Secret Place is the 5th book in the Dublin Murder Squad series by Tana French. It is set in a girl's boarding school and the investigation takes place in one day. Holly Mackey, daughter of a policeman and student at St. Kilda's, brings a new piece of evidence related to the death of a teenage boy to Stephen Moran, a detective in the Cold Cases division who would really rather be in the Murder Squad. Stephen takes the information to Detective Antoinette Conway in the Murder Squad. They pursue the investigation. Tana French's mysteries are very good, but none end happily, and they usually leave me a bit down.

6th degree:

To be honest, most of the books in my chain are dark and bleak. For my last link, I am switching to the opposite. Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes is from my TBR pile. One Goodreads review described it as "dark, depressive, and sad" which is strange for a book categorized mainly as chick lit. Although the story is about a woman who returns to her home town of Dublin and goes into rehab for drug addiction, I believe this is handled with humor and wit. It is the 2nd book in the Walsh Family series; I read Watermelon and liked it, so I am expecting to like this one too, although it is close to 600 pages long.

In my Six Degrees I stayed in Ireland, although two of the books do go back to the 1950s.  If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you?

Have you read any of these books or authors?

The next Six Degrees will be on April 5, 2025, and the starting book will be Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Dangerous Liaisons to Before the Coffee Gets Cold

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 Dangerous Liaisons. This is a French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, published in 1782, with the original title of Les Liaisons dangereuses. It tells the story of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two lovers who plot to seduce and manipulate others. I don't know much about this book except that it was adapted to film many times; the one I am most familiar with is Dangerous Liaisons (1988), directed by Stephen Frears and starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich. Two other English language versions are Valmont (1989), directed by Miloš Forman, and Cruel Intentions (1999), which relocates the story to modern-day New York.

1st degree:

My first link is to another French novel adapted to the screen, titled D’entre les morts (1954), written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Hitchcock adapted the story as Vertigo, set in San Francisco instead of France.  The first translation of the  book to English was published in 1956 as The Living and the Dead. Pushkin Vertigo more recently issued a reprint of the novel with the title Vertigo.

2nd degree:

For my next link, I picked another book adapted to film by Hitchcock, The Rainbird Pattern (1972) by Victor Canning. It is the 2nd book in a loose spy fiction series called the Birdcage books. The film version was titled Family Plot, and is very different from the book. The basic elements of the plot remain, but the story is turned into a comedy.

3rd degree:

My husband and I have watched a lot of Hitchcock movies, and another novel that he chose to adapt was Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier. The adaptation, released in 1940, stars Laurence Olivier as the widower Maxim de Winter and Joan Fontaine as the unnamed woman who becomes his second wife.

4th degree:

Moving away from Hitchcock and adaptations, my next book is another by Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand (1969). I was surprised to find out that this book is a time travel story; my son found it for me in the science fiction and fantasy section of the book sale in 2023. I haven't read it yet so check out reviews at Constance's Staircase Wit blog and Kelly's Thoughts & Ramblings.

5th degree:

And now I move to another classic book of time travel, this time with a scientific basis: The End of Eternity (1955) by Isaac Asimov. This book is about a group of people called the Eternals, who live outside of time and either observe time at different points or make Reality Changes to make positive changes for the future. I read this over ten years ago but I remember I liked it a lot. Even though the book has very few women characters, there is definitely a romance of sorts, and it reads like a thriller.

6th degree:

There are many  different takes on time travel stories. Some are science fiction, using machines of some type to take the person back in time. Others lean more towards fantasy. In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, visitors to a tiny café in Tokyo can take advantage of a special service; they can travel back in time if they drink a cup of the special coffee made by this café. This is the first book in a series about the café and its unique brand of time travel.

My Six Degrees took me from France to England and then to the past via time travel. Have you read any of these books? If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your list take you?

The next Six Degrees will be on  March 1, 2025 and the starting book will be the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Orbital to Station Eternity

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 Orbital by Samantha Harvey. For once, I have actually read the book. It depicts one day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station, watching the sunrises and sunsets and monitoring a typhoon threatening inhabited islands. The reader is privy to their thoughts, and watches their activities and their regimen.

Reading Orbital motivated me to read more about life on the International Space Station. I want to know how astronauts are selected for this type of mission and how they train for it.  I don't even like to fly in an airplane (of any size) but I would love to know more about the lives of people who live in the space station.

1st degree:

My first book is from my husband's shelves: Lonely Planet's The Universe. This book has a wealth of information about Earth and the other planets, and other parts of the known universe. Photos on every page. There are smaller sections on the manned space flights and the International Space Station. A lovely book to dip into now and then.

2nd degree:

I am sticking with the space station theme throughout, and my next book is Endurance: My Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery, by Scott Kelly with Margaret Lazarus Dean, a memoir published in 2017. Per his website: "A veteran of four space flights, Kelly commanded the International Space Station (ISS) on three expeditions and was a member of the yearlong mission to the ISS." 

I have purchased a copy of this book to read sometime this year. 

3rd degree:

My next link is a short story, "Stranger Station" by Damon Knight, which I read in Bug-Eyed Monsters, edited by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg. The story is about a race of aliens that were so massive and repulsive to humans that the contact has been sparse and only occasionally do the aliens visit a space station that is set aside especially to enable that visit. When one of the aliens comes, it is for one purpose, to provide a substance for the humans which the humans have come to rely on. The story focuses on the one human who is on the space station to facilitate the exchange with the alien being. He is alone on Stranger Station until the alien arrives, although he can communicate with a computer AI called "Aunt Jane." 

"Stranger Station" was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1956, but has been included in a good number of anthologies since then.

4th degree:

Since reading Orbital, I have been looking for fiction set on a space station, and I found that my son has several books that fit that category. This is one he read: Diving into the Wreck by Kristine Kathlyn Rusch. The heroine of the book explores derelict space vehicles, sometimes for salvage, sometimes as a historian. The book consists of three connected novellas and at least one of them is about The Room of Lost Souls, which is an abandoned space station which most people consider a myth.  It sounds great and I will be reading this book.

5th degree:

The fifth link in my chain is to The Burning Dark by Adam Christopher. From the description on the back of the book:

Back in the day, Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland had led the Fleet into battle against an implacable machine intelligence capable of devouring entire worlds. But after saving a planet, and getting a bum robot knee in the process, he finds himself relegated to one of the most remote backwaters in Fleetspace to oversee the decommissioning of a semi-deserted space station well past its use-by date.

This one sounds good too, so I will add it to my TBR list.

6th degree:

My sixth book is a genre blend of mystery and science fiction: Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty, first published in October 2022. 

From the back of the book:

From idyllic small towns to claustrophobic urban landscapes, Mallory Viridian is constantly embroiled in murder cases that only she has the insight to solve. But outside of a classic mystery novel, being surrounded by death doesn’t make you a charming amateur detective, it makes you a suspect and a social pariah. So when Mallory gets the opportunity to take refuge on a sentient space station, she thinks she has the solution. Surely the murders will stop if her only company is alien beings. At first her new existence is peacefully quiet…and markedly devoid of homicide.

Unfortunately for Mallory, that doesn't last very long. I love mystery and science fiction mixed, so I will probably read this one too.

My Six Degrees started in space and it stayed mostly in space. It started with a novel about our International Space Station, but took me to science fiction worlds set in the future. It also added four books to my "To Read" list.

The next Six Degrees will be on February 1st, 2025 and the starting book will be a classic – Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.