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.

Short Story Wednesday: Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

I read My Name is Lucy Barton in March of 2024. That book inspired me to read more about Lucy Barton, so this month I read Anything is Possible, the second book in the Amgash series.

Anything is Possible is a series of linked short stories, similar to Olive Kitteridge, but not quite so depressing. I have seen it described as a novel in short stories, but it did not seem like a novel to me. 

Some of the stories give more information about Lucy Barton and her family in Amgash, Illinois. Other stories are about other residents of Amgash, who are in some way connected to Lucy Barton. 

The first story, "The Sign," is about Tommy Guptill, who had owned a dairy farm, situated about two miles outside of Amgash. When the dairy burned down, he was unable to continue the business, and ended up working as a janitor in a school in Amgash. Now he and his wife are in their eighties and retired. As he drives around town, he reminisces about his life, before and after the fire. Years before, while doing his janitorial work at the school, Tommy would encounter Lucy Barton sleeping in a classroom to avoid going home. Before going home, he visits Pete Barton, Lucy's brother, who still lives in the house the Barton family lived in when they were children. Pete is sort of a recluse and Tommy likes to check on him now and then. This wasn't a favorite story but it has stuck in my mind and provides some background for a later story, "Sister."

The second story, "Windmills," is about Patty Nicely, who was growing up in Amgash about the same time Lucy Barton was. She is a school counselor and counsels Lucy's niece, who is in high school. She sees Lucy Barton's memoir in a bookstore and reads it and is much affected by it. This was an emotional story. The next story, "Cracked," featured Patty's sister, Linda, who had a very unusual relationship with her husband. At this point I was wondering if there was anyone happy, or even just close to "normal," in Amgash.

"Mississippi Mary" and "Sister" were my favorite stories. 

"Mississippi Mary" is about two members of another family in Amgash. In her 70s, after many years of a mostly unhappy marriage, Mary Mumford left her husband and five daughters and moved to Italy to live with her new Italian husband. She has now been in Italy with her second husband for four years; her youngest daughter, Angelina, is visiting her for the first time. Angelina was very hurt when her mother left to marry her lover in Italy and she does not understand how her mother can be happy in a cheap flat on the coast of Italy with not much money to live on.

"Sister" tells about Lucy Barton's brief visit to see her brother, Pete, in Amgash. She is going to be in Chicago for a stop on her paperback book tour and will be close enough to drive to Amgash. They have not seen each other for years. Lucy's sister, Vicky, has declined to come over and see Lucy while she is there, because she is hurt by Lucy's absence for so many years. But Vicky does show up at Pete's house while Lucy is still there, and they all have quite a discussion.

There are a total of nine stories in the book. I enjoyed all the stories, even though some were shocking or sad. I think I got more out of the stories as a whole than each story alone, so in some ways that does make the book like a novel.

I would recommend reading My Name is Lucy Barton before reading this book, but it is not necessary.

Top Ten New-to-Me Authors Discovered in 2024

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's topic is New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2024. Last year, I read books by a total of 29 new-to-me authors, which accounts for about a third of the books I read. I suppose that number should not surprise me, but it does.

And here's my list of my 10 favorite new-to-me authors. The authors are not listed in any order.

Kate Wilhelm

I read The Hamlet Trap, the first book in the Constance Leidl and Charlie Meiklejohn mystery series, first published in 1987. Kate Wilhelm has written two mystery series and many standalone novels in the mystery and science fiction genres. She was married to Damon Knight, a very well-known author of science fiction. Kate Wilhelm's fiction was first recommended to me by Todd Mason at Sweet Freedom.

Willa Cather

My Ántonia is the first book I have read by Willa Cather and I now understand why other readers are so effusive in their praise for this book and its author. There are so many interesting aspects to this book: life on the prairies and in the small towns; the descriptions of backbreaking work on a farm; the difficulties of the immigrants who move to the Nebraska prairies, most of which cannot speak much English.

Gabrielle Zevin

I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Zevin in early 2024. That book was about two young people who worked together to create video games. The story does focus on video games and the process of creating them, but it is about many other things: relationships, families, judgement and misunderstandings, and ambition. Later in 2024 I read The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry and enjoyed it too.

Catherine O'Flynn 

I read What Was Lost, the author's debut novel, which was published in 2007. A ten-year-old girl, Kate, lives with her grandmother; her goal is to be a detective, and run her own detective agency. She has few friends, hates school, and entertains herself with investigating cases that she has made up. One day she disappears and most of the story focuses on how this event affects other people in her neighborhood, over the following years.

Fredrik Backman

A Man Called Ove was Backman's first novel, published in 2012, but I did not read any of his books until 2024. Ove is an older man, nearing sixty, whose wife has recently died. He has decided that he does not want to go on living without her. This story is alternately humorous and sad, and I loved it. I will be reading more books by this author.

Joseph Kanon

Defectors was the first book I have read by Joseph Kanon, and it definitely won't be my last. The story focuses on a group of American and British spies living in and around Moscow during the Cold War, after defecting. Frank is a US spy who defected to Russia in 1949. Simon, his younger brother, had to leave his job in intelligence to work in publishing after Frank's defection. In 1961, Simon is in publishing and 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. I have six more of Kanon's books on my shelves.

Young-ha Kim 

I read Your Republic is Calling You. Published in 2006, the setting is South Korea. It was a different kind of spy fiction and I liked it very much. The story takes place over the course of one day in the life of Ki-Yong, a South Korean with a wife and teenage daughter. Except that he is really a North Korean spy who has been in Seoul, working as a film importer for over 20 years, and has now been recalled to North Korea. 

Karen Joy Fowler

The Jane Austen Book Club was not what I expected but I liked it very much. The book was less about the Austen books than I would have liked, but I enjoyed the individual stories about the members of the book club. I liked the different way the story was told and how the back stories were worked into the story gradually. It made me want to go out and find more books by Fowler.

Anthony Trollope 

Until this year I had not read anything by Trollope. I chose The Warden, the first book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series. I had gotten the impression that Trollope's writing was humorous but I failed to see the humor in this story at first. It seemed that all would end very sadly. As the story continued, it lightened up and I became immersed in it and did enjoy the humor of the situation. And I was happy with the ending.

Samantha Harvey

I read Harvey's Booker Prize winning book, Orbital, which depicts one day in the life of six astronauts on the space station, watching the sunrises and sunsets and monitoring a typhoon threatening inhabited islands. It is short, about 200 pages, and very meditative. The difference between Harvey and the other authors on this list is that I don't know if I want to read anything else she has written. I will certainly try other books by her and be interested to see what she writes in the future.

Parting Breath: Catherine Aird

Parting Breath is an academic mystery set in Catherine Aird's fictional county of Calleshire, England; it features Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan of the Berebury CID, and his assistant, Detective Constable Crosby.

The first sentence of the book is:

“The trouble with universities,” pronounced Professor Tomlin, “is the undergraduates.”

A protest by students is threatened because a student has been sent down (suspended or expelled?). The protesters plan to take over the Almstone Administration building for their sit-in.  After the sit-in begins, a dead body on the Quad of Tarsus College is reported. Inspector Sloan is assigned the case and DC Crosby accompanies him to the scene. The dead man is a student and his last words before dying were cryptic: "twenty six minutes". 

Soon after that, the porter locks down the administration building, so that the college and the police know where the students taking part in the sit-in are. This limits the suspects to students who ignored the strike or faculty or staff who were not locked into the building. But there are still a lot of suspects to sift through, and the investigation is very complex.

My thoughts:

• I enjoy the subtle humor in Catherine Aird's writing. There are jokes and sly comments about education and teaching undergraduates and getting along with the professors. 
• There is not a lot abut the personal lives of the policemen in the Sloan and Crosby series. But in this case, Inspector Sloan's wife is pregnant with their first child. Sloan assumes the child will be a boy, and mulls about which rugby position the child will play while he investigates. He also worries how it will be for a child to grow up as the child of a policeman. This shows the reader another side of Sloan. 
• The only negative element of this one is the complexity with so many characters it is hard to keep track. Other reviewers pointed out that the reader does not have enough information to solve the mystery; too many important clues show up too late. That did not matter to me. I enjoyed the academic setting and the characters very much.
• I have now read eight of the Sloan and Crosby series by Catherine Aird, and I can say that she is one of my favorite mystery writers. The first book of the series was published in 1966 and the 28th book in 2023. Some of the books in this series are more serious, although they all have elements of humor. I would put Henrietta Who? and A Late Phoenix in that category. The Stately Home Murder, on the other hand, is lighter and has some very funny moments.

I finished reading this book on January 1st. After I finished the book, I was doing some research and saw at Martin Edward's blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name?, that Catherine Aird died on December 21, 2024 at age 94. See his remembrance post about her and his review of Parting Breath.

Curtis Evans of The Passing Tramp blog has also written a RIP post for Catherine Aird, with much information about her life and her writing.

 -----------------------------

Publisher:   Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1978 (orig. pub. 1977)
Length:      186 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Series:       Inspector Sloan #7
Setting:      UK
Genre:       Police procedural
Source:      On my TBR shelves since 2010.

Short Story Wednesday: My Husband's Books of Strange Stories

In December of 2024, my husband discovered Swan River Press, which describes itself as "an independent press based in Dublin, Ireland dedicated exclusively to the literature of the fantastic." 

Following are three of the books he purchased. The descriptions are from the Swan River Press website.

Not to Be Taken at Bed-Time and Other Strange Stories by Rosa Mulholland

In the late-nineteenth century Rosa Mulholland (1841-1921) achieved great popularity and acclaim for her many novels, written for both an adult audience and younger readers. Several of these novels chronicled the lives of the poor, often incorporating rural Irish settings and folklore. Earlier in her career, Mulholland became one of the select band of authors employed by Charles Dickens to write stories for his popular magazine All the Year Round, together with Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Amelia B. Edwards. Mulholland’s best supernatural and weird short stories have been gathered together in the present collection, edited and introduced by Richard Dalby, to celebrate this gifted late Victorian “Mistress of the Macabre”.

Bending to Earth: Strange Stories by Irish Women, edited by Maria Giakaniki and Brian J. Showers 

Irish women have long produced literature of the gothic, uncanny, and supernatural. Bending to Earth draws together twelve such tales. While none of the authors herein were considered primarily writers of fantastical fiction during their lifetimes, they each wandered at some point in their careers into more speculative realms—some only briefly, others for lengthier stays.

Names such as Charlotte Riddell and Rosa Mulholland will already be familiar to aficionados of the eerie, while Katharine Tynan and Clotilde Graves are sure to gain new admirers. From a ghost story in the Swiss Alps to a premonition of death in the West of Ireland to strange rites in a South Pacific jungle, Bending to Earth showcases a diverse range of imaginative writing which spans the better part of a century.

Ghosts of the Chit-Chat, edited by Robert Lloyd Parry 

On the evening of Saturday, 28 October 1893, Cambridge University’s Chit-Chat Club convened its 601st meeting. Ten members and one guest gathered in the rooms of Montague Rhodes James, the Junior Dean of King’s College, and listened—with increasing absorption one suspects—as their host read “Two Ghost Stories”.

Ghosts of the Chit-Chat celebrates this momentous event in the history of supernatural literature, the earliest dated record we have of M. R. James reading his ghost stories out loud. And it revives the contributions that other members made to the genre; men of imagination who invoked the ghostly in their work, and who are now themselves shades. In a series of essays, stories, and poems Robert Lloyd Parry looks at the history and culture of the Club.

In addition to tales and poems never before reprinted, Ghosts of the Chit-Chat features earlier, slightly different versions of two of M. R. James’s best-known ghost stories; Robert Lloyd Parry’s profiles and commentaries on each featured Chit-Chat member sheds new light on this supernatural tradition, making Ghosts of the Chit-Chat a valuable resource for casual readers and long-time Jamesians alike.

Short Story Wednesday: "Die Like a Dog" by Rex Stout

I am continuing my reread of Rex Stout's novellas. "Die Like a Dog" is a 66-page novella in the Nero Wolfe series. It is one of three stories in Three Witnesses, published in 1957. 

I have featured some of my favorite novellas by Stout in previous posts in the last year. However, this story might be my absolute favorite of Nero Wolfe stories in shorter format.

It is unusual because it has a dog as a prominent character. Archie walks in the rain to a man's apartment to return a raincoat that the man had left at Wolfe's brownstone. What had happened is that the man had an argument with Wolfe, stormed out of Wolfe's office, and grabbed Archie's raincoat instead of his own. Archie wants his raincoat back.

When Archie gets to the apartment building, he sees a crowd around the building and some police cars in front of the building. He also sees Sgt. Purley Stebbins walking into the building. Stebbins is in the homicide department, working under Captain Cramer. Both Stebbins and Cramer are suspicious whenever Archie shows up near a murder. Archie knows that if Stebbins sees him, he will assume that Nero Wolfe is somehow mixed up in whatever crime has taken place, so he turns around and leaves. There is a dog outside the building, wandering around, looking lost. The dog follows Archie back to Nero Wolfe's brownstone, where Archie lives with Wolfe, Fritz the cook, and Theodore the horticulture expert. Archie takes the dog into the house, planning to call the ASPCA to come and get him. However, it turns out that there was dead body in the building and the police want to use the dog as a sort of witness.

In the rest of the story, Captain Cramer and Nero Wolfe spar about how involved Wolfe is in the case, and whether Wolfe has to turn the dog over to the police. Wolfe and Fritz have developed a definite affection for the dog.

Archie does some legwork investigating leads for Wolfe, even though the dog and Archie's missing raincoat is truly their only connection to the murder. It is a fun story, especially for a fan of the Nero Wolfe series. 

As usual, Archie Goodwin narrates the story. This story has a very good depiction of Archie's relationship with Wolfe.

The other two novellas in Three Witnesses are "When a Man Murders..." and "The Next Witness."