Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best. The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links. I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.
The starting point this month is the book that we finished with last month. This means that my starting point is Sunflowers by Sheramy Brundrick. Sunflowers is about the life of Vincent Van Gogh.
Over the years I have read a number of books about art history, but I think for the purposes of this exercise I am going to choose Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant, which is set during the Renaissance.
I saw Sarah Dunant speak at Melbourne Writers Festival a few years ago. Someone who I saw at MWF last year was Pip Williams, so for my next book I am choosing The Book Binder of Jericho which was one of my 5/5 reads last year.
My first 5/5 read for this year was a book called The Naturalist of Amsterdam by Melissa Hamilton. This is the story of a young woman who works for her mother which is a famous naturalist. Their travels take them as far a field as Suriname.
This book reminded me a bit of A Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert.
And it also reminded me of The Botanist's Daughter by Katye Nunn which I listened to last year but apparently neglected to record it on either of my spreadsheets or Goodreads, so it took me a little while to find the title.
Part of The Botanist's Daughter was set in Chile, so my final link had to be a book that was also partially set in the same country which is Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende. I could also have linked through the word daughter as well!
The starting point next month is Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. Will you be joining us?
