Six Degrees of Separation // ‘Never Let Me Go’

Six Degrees of Separation is hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It goes like this:

“On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.”

Then you head on over to Kate’s blog and link up. Easy.

Unsurprisingly (if you happen to have seen my last two Six Degrees posts), I haven’t read this month’s starter book, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Neither have I read the book I’m linking it to, this one another of Ishiguro’s – The Buried Giant. I do own a copy of that book though, so it’s a start.

The link to the next book is fairly obvious – it too has the word “giant” in the title. In The Giant O’Brien by Hilary Mantel, two characters are facing off: the titular giant, Charles O’Brien (based on a real life giant named Charles Byrne), and the famed surgeon and anatomist, John Hunter, whose work in real life contributed a lot to modern surgery (in some unashamed self-promotion, feel free to read this post about The Giant O’Brien, in which I write about seeing the real giant’s skeleton, along with a bunch of other delightfully horrifying things).

Now we move from one man of science and cutter up of bodies to another: Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. The opening chapters of Frankenstein take the form of a series of letters, which is just how The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society starts (and continues).

Set during and post WWII, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society has a large focus on books. If you’re like many people in the world, you will have read Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief; if you haven’t read it, then I’ll tell you that it is also set during WWII and has a large focus on books.

Probably my most favourite thing about that book is the disembodied and omniscient narrator, something it has in common with one of my favourite new books this year, Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love. But I won’t tell you who the narrator is because that’d take the fun away from it.