It is the first Saturday of the month and time for 6 degrees of separation as hosted by Kate at Books Are My Best and Favourite. A book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to make a chain.
This month starts with Murmur by Will Eaves. I have never heard of this book. However, I see it is about chemical castration and when I explore on Goodreads I see there are a number of reviews from men. So, I have decided it is a ‘man’ book.
Is that a thing? If there is a genre called chick lit then I hereby invent man books. Unfortunately, that does not sound as derogatory or demeaning as chick lit.
I digress. The book that comes to mind is The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides because of all the boys watching the girls. I love this book. The narrator says ‘we watched’ and ‘we thought’ but the narrator is never named. It is like the global we – all of us watching the destruction of society. On Goodreads, there are a lot of one-star reviews and a lot of 5-star reviews which is interesting.
Destruction leads me to one of my favourite genres, dystopian. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is great, right? The sparseness of his language. The sparseness of the dead landscape around them.
The opposite of simple language is Patrick White. The Vivisector was the last Patrick I read and possibly the last I will ever read. Vivisector is a cool word. Especially when you say it. I need to find more reasons to use it in my day to day life.
Day to day life in the form of a diary is, of course, a type of book. The first one I remember reading was Go Ask Alice by Anonymous (Beatrice Sparks). As a naive teenager in the 1980s, I thought it was a real diary. Looking at Goodreads, I see some people really really hate this book. I think I still have my copy somewhere. I stole it from my school library. Oops, did I just say that?
A book about stealing books, The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. Did Liesel say she was saving those books? I maintain I was saving not stealing books. All those books are still on my bookshelf. Books shelves. There is more than one shelf!
Conversely, can a book save a life? Has a book saved your life? People claim The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger saved their life. I don’t understand how. I have a First Aid book. It could save my life.
Now, I am going to go and dissect something/someone and be a vivisector.
Man books? Oh, do we really need those (joking)? But… maybe we should call it… Fellows Fiction?
I like it!
I suspect we’re about the same age – Go Ask Alice was such thing, wasn’t it? The book that was passed around… the book that was stolen from the library…! I read an article a while ago (and I wish I had bookmarked it because I can’t find it now) about how damaging and frightening Go Ask Alice was – the article was a commentary on teens and drugs now but there were many damning references to Alice, so much so that I bought the ebook for a reread (which I haven’t done yet).
I like your choices here. I’ve also heard about a genre called LadLit the men’s answer to ChickLit.
LadLit is catchy. More catchy than man books.
I thought Go Ask Alice was real when I first read it, I was barely twelve at the time though. I may, or may not have saved it from a friends big sister 🙂
I was 13 and consumed it in one day. It does seem to have made an impression on people.
Great chain, I enjoyed your digressions!
And it is perfectly in order to “save” books from an unknown and potentially fatal destiny 🙂
I’m glad your comment worked! I do tend to digress.