6 Degrees of Separation

Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best, hosting this interesting meme. This month we start with Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. I read it many years ago and really loved it. A man's passion to work as a missionary in Africa and how it effects his family and the people around him. A marvellous story.

The story takes place in Congo and that takes me to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. A dark tale on the exploration of Africa. A short book, but a gruesome story of how the colonialists treated the local people.

Staying on with explorers, I come to think about Tim Jeal's biography of Stanley - The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer. A totally intriguing biography of a very famous person, of whom we think we know a lot. That is not the case, at least not for me. His somewhat bad reputation is just a tiny part of what this man achieved in this lifetime. Not to talk about all the hardship he went through on his explorations.

When you talk about explorers you just have to mention Sir Richard Burton. Another man to admire for his life's work. So talented in so many areas. I read Mary S. Lovell's A Rage to Live about him. It still makes an impression of me although it is more than 15 years since I read it. The title is really fitting because this man had a quest for life that very few people have.

Let's stay with explorations but go to another part of the world, name America. While visiting Iceland last summer I bought the book The Last Kings of Norse America by Robert G. Johnson and Janey Westin. A story of the vikings and their explorations of America. Fascinating read on how they managed these long trips over the sea with, what we consider today, simple boat. But it was much more than that.

Let's move over to fiction, but still on the theme of travelling. I am thinking of Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. A book worthy to read still 200 years after it was written. We follow Frankenstein and the monster up to the northern hemisphere.

That leads me to the last book in the chain. Mythos by Stephen Fry. Talk about conquering the world. Here we get personal details of Zeus and all other gods and half gods and how they arranged their own part of the world. Excellent read or listen to as audio book, which I did.

That was it for this month. We start in Africa go on to America and the Northern hemisphere to end up at the high council at Mount Olympus!