The Content Reader

Six Degrees of Separation , is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best . Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain. This month start with  Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2017. I have not read it. It is about Abraham Lincoln's son William who died at a young age, and deals with loss. "Bardo" seems to mean an intermediate space between life and rebirth. That thought leads me to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It has a magical realism, and it seems to take place in a, not entirely, human world. It follows a family through a hundred years, a family with a supernatural aura around it. It is a real world, but still not. I imagine that Lincoln in the Bardo, could be something similar. Staying on in a world...

To celebrate the bicentenary of Jane Austen's death, host to 6 Degrees of Separation, Books are My Favourite and Best starts this month with one of her most popular books; Pride and Prejudice . It also happens to be my favourite book by Austen. My chain starts with my second favourite book of hers which is Northanger Abbey . It has a Gothic theme, which reminded me of The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, who was, more or less, contemporary with Jane Austen. This is a Gothic tale in all its glory. I somehow liked it, although it is rather long and could have been shortened.

26 May 1897 Bram Stoker's novel Dracula  goes on sale in London. Dracula, as we all know today, is a vampire from Transylvania who comes to London. The story tells about his life there and his victims. Stoker had been publishing horror stories for around 20 years. I think that today this is the only novel that is remembered. I read it a couple of years ago and although in those day, I did not like these vampire tales, I quite liked the book. Today, we are used to vampires through all new fantasy books and television series. Stoker was born in Dublin and worked in the civil service and writing at the same time. In 1878 he became the manager of actor Sir Henry Irving, which he admired. He managed him for 27 years. Stoker died in London in 1912. Numerous films have been made about Dracula, latest might be the television series with Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Dracula.