This month we’re starting with Emily Henry’s Beach Read which I’ve not read but I gather it’s about two blocked writers, polar opposites who meet at a summer writing camp and fall for each other.
Which put me in mind of literary couples leading me to Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt whose What I Love is a favourite of mine.
Hustvedt’s novel is set in New York so it seems only fair to include Auster’s slice of noir metafiction, The New York Trilogy.
Auster wrote the story on which the film ‘Smoke’ is based plus the script for its sequel ‘Blue in the Face’ in which Lou Reed made an appearance. Reed is an unlikely father figure to a sixteen-year-old lost boy in Michael Imperioli’s The Perfume Burnt His Eyes.
Rock stars in fiction takes me to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s hugely enjoyable Daisy Jones and the Six about a ‘70s band who split at the height of their fame.
Leading me to Daniel Kehlmann’s Fame which takes some entertaining swipes at being famous.
Kehlmann’s book is subtitled ‘A Novel in Nine Episodes’ reminding me of Julian Barnes’ entertaining, episodic A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, the only Barnes I remember enjoying.
This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from a romance about two very different writers to an idiosyncratic fictional history of the world. Part of the fun of this meme is comparing the very different routes other bloggers take from each month’s starting point. If you’re interested, you can follow it on Twitter with the hashtag #6Degrees, check out the links over at Kate’s blog or perhaps even join in.
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