Six Degrees of Separation - From Picnic at Hanging Rock to The Hate Race

The edition in my TBR pile

This month's 6 Degrees of Separation begins with Picnic at Hanging Rock, which celebrates 50 years of publication this year. I suspect it has been continuously in print since it was 'launched' by Sir Robert Menzies in Melbourne in October 1967. It's been years since I read it but it's on my reading calendar this year (I know, the reading calendar is struggling because I'm tempted by other books).

Annabel Smith and Emma Chapman began the 6 Degrees of Separation meme in 2014 and now it is managed (is that the right word?) by Kate at Books are my favourite and best. The idea is that Kate nominates a book and, on the first Saturday of the month, participants reveal chains of six books that all connect in some way. 

Back to Picnic at Hanging Rock - as Whispering Gums says, there are just so many ways you could go. Lost girls, girls named Miranda, rural Victoria, Australian Gothic. I'm choosing to follow the author, Joan Lindsay. Joan was married to Daryl who, as well as running the National Gallery of Victoria for many years, was the brother of Norman.

Norman Lindsay leads me to The Magic Pudding. I managed to avoid The Magic Pudding when I was a child but I did read it to my boy when he was little. It turned out to do a good job of putting us both to sleep. But who can understand Australian politics without understanding the frequent references to 'magic puddings'?

Magic leads me to Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by JK Rowling. Well, where else could I go since Harry has just turned 20. I nearly missed the whole Harry Potter thing - being 30 when the first book appeared. But Harry has been a big part of my shared reading and viewing life with my boy so I won't hear any words against him.

I've enjoyed reading JK Rowling post-Harry, especially her Cormoran Strike series which she publishes under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. So my next choice is the first Strike novel, The Cuckoo's Calling. If you enjoy Rebus - and love London - I recommend it.

So I could run with pseudonyms (curiously, Joan Lindsay published her first novel under a pseudonym) or London but I'm going to continue with the crime theme, this time set in Paris. This week (at 4am in the morning) I finished reading Cara Black's new novel in her Aimee Leduc series, Murder in Saint-Germain. Black's heroine is a private investigator, with a penchant for second-hand designer clothes, a dog named Miles Davis, and a pink Vespa. Each mystery is set in a different part of Paris. They are also very political.

Politics - and crime too - leads me to another recent read: Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railway. The story of Cora's journey from slavery to freedom is a confronting read. There were times when I really wanted to look away but Cora's journey across America is compelling and Whitehead's imaginative telling helped me to understand why race continues to be so contentious in the United States.

The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke is the last book on the list today. It's about growing up black, but non-Indigenous, in Australia in the 1980s. It's about the way racism is embedded in our communities, in our schools, the way we don't often see it or the damage that it does. If you haven't read it, do. It made me think deeply about the ways in which my own behaviour is racist - as Oscar Hammerstein wrote, 'you have to be carefully taught'.

From an elite Australian girls school to the western suburbs of Sydney, from an elite Australian artistic family to the cotton fields of the American south, we've been on quite a journey, with a little magic thrown in for good measure.

Next month: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Six Degrees of Separation - Where will Shopgirl lead me?

Last month, a tweet from Whispering Gums introduced me to the 6 Degrees of Separation meme.

Annabel Smith and Emma Chapman began the 6 Degrees of Separation meme in 2014 and now it is managed (is that the right word?) by Kate at Books are my favourite and best. The idea is that Kate nominates a book and, on the first Saturday of the month, participants reveal chains of six books that all connect in some way. 

This month's book is Shopgirl by Steve Martin. Damn, haven't read it. Thank goodness for Google! Steve Martin's heroine is an artist making a living selling gloves at Neimann Marcus in Beverley Hills. Already I'm stumped. I'm working with a book by a comic, set in California, featuring a heroine who is both artist and shop assistant. 

My first stop is Shopaholic Abroad by Sophie Kinsella. This is the only book in the 'Shopaholic' series I've read. It's a frothy confection of romance and fashion and dazzling New York. At the risk of spoiling the end, the book's heroine Rebecca finds her calling working in Saks Fifth Avenue. So my first link is based on the occupations of the heroines.

Now I'm in New York I feel like I'm on slightly firmer ground and the city is my next link. It seems impossible to go past Anita Heiss' Manhattan Dreaming. Her heroine Lauren, a curator at the National Aboriginal Gallery in Canberra, receives a fellowship at the Smithsonian. It's been years since I read it and loved it. Heiss is a genre-hopper. She has done some outstanding work, not least being The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. Her most recent book is Our Race to Reconciliation, for younger readers. I always learn from her work so it's on my to-be-read list.  

Another Indigenous writer I admire is Kim Scott, which brings me to his third novel That Deadman Dance (2o10). This book won so many awards, including the Miles Franklin in 2011. Set on the south coast of Western Australia, it tells a story of the early encounters between black and white.

There are many strands to That Deadman Dance: epic coastal journeys, whaling sequences that will make you gasp in wonder, injustice, understanding and loss. But it is the characters - flawed, credible human beings, embodying their history but never mere ciphers - who stay with you: Menak, the tribal elder, both wise and cantankerous; Jak Tar, the escaped sailor, who takes (and is given) Binyan as his resourceful wife; Bobby Wabalanginy, the dancer, the go-between, who has to grow old to know fear; Chaine, the entrepreneur, who gives and then takes and whose cosseted daughter Christine reads The Last of the Mohicans and wonders at the shining manhood of her childhood companion, Bobby; and Cross, who "encourages ideas of entitlement" in his Noongar friends: his bones are exhumed and ceremonially reinterred on higher ground while Wunyeran's are dishonoured and scattered.

SMH review by Morag Fraser, 13/1/2011 

I almost didn't finish it. I remember putting it aside over Christmas and wondering if I'd return to it. When I did, early in 2011, I galloped to the end - and what an ending it was! Have you ever felt a book punch you in the guts? That's how I felt at the end of That Deadman Dance and six years later I'm still recalling that feeling. 

Now I'm in Western Australia, I'm going to link to Dorothy Hewett. Perhaps best known as a poet and playwright, Hewett wrote three novels: Bobbin' Up, The Toucher and Neap Tide. I read the last two when they were first published but that was some 20 years ago. Maybe I should have gone with Rudyard Kipling's Kim? Although I haven't read that.

Dorothy Hewett used to live in the Blue Mountains and that provides a link to Delia Falconer's The Service of Clouds, which was set in Katoomba in the period 1907-1926. (I'm a bit horrified to discover it was also published nearly 20 years ago!) I remember this as a very lyrical first novel about photography and clouds and love and the effects of World War 1. The experience of reading it remains imprinted in my memory. Perhaps its because I spent a year living in Katoomba when I was 6, a year that is also imprinted on my memory. The Service of Clouds, though, is also a novel about that moment in the early 20th century when life changed irrevocably for small communities such as those in the Blue Mountains and it talks about the war without ever taking you to the front.

So my last link is to another novel which reveals the impact of World War 1 without ever taking you to the frontline. It is, of course, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Another book about a woman wanting to be an artist, about the effects of war, about a coastal journey. I've read it many times since being 'forced' to read it a uni. It improves with each reading - as Margaret Atwood discovered. 

Well, that was harder than it looked. I'm looking forward to seeing where Picnic at Hanging Rock leads me in July. I might begin thinking about my chain tomorrow.