#6Degrees Archives - Page 2 of 2

Six Degrees: Turn of the Screw & Other Spooky Things

It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up. Inspired by the Six Degrees of Separation Meme hosted every month at Books are my Favorite and Best.

October 2020’s book is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

^{A very young woman’s first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate…An estate haunted by a beckoning evil. Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls… But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.}

What better book than Turn of the Screw for this Halloween month? Incidentally, since I am also participating in the 2020 Readers Imbibing Peril (R.I.P.) XV challenge this month, here are six spooky reads, all following up from Turn of the Screw.

It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up. Inspired by the 6 Degrees of Separation Meme hosted every month at Books are my Favorite and Best.

September 2020’s book is Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld. Blurb below:

“He proposed. She said no. And it changed her life forever.

In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise: Life magazine has covered her Wellesley commencement speech, she’s attending Yale Law School, and she’s on the forefront of student activism and the women’s rights movement. And then she meets Bill Clinton. A handsome, charismatic southerner and fellow law student, Bill is already planning his political career. In each other, the two find a profound intellectual, emotional, and physical connection that neither has previously experienced.

In the real world, Hillary followed Bill back to Arkansas, and he proposed several times; although she said no more than once, as we all know, she eventually accepted and became Hillary Clinton.

But in Curtis Sittenfeld’s powerfully imagined tour-de-force of fiction, Hillary takes a different road. Feeling doubt about the prospective marriage, she endures their devastating breakup and leaves Arkansas. Over the next four decades, she blazes her own trail—one that unfolds in public as well as in private, that involves crossing paths again (and again) with Bill Clinton, that raises questions about the tradeoffs all of us must make in building a life.

Brilliantly weaving a riveting fictional tale into actual historical events, Curtis Sittenfeld delivers an uncannily astute and witty story for our times. In exploring the loneliness, moral ambivalence, and iron determination that characterize the quest for political power, as well as both the exhilaration and painful compromises demanded of female ambition in a world still run mostly by men, Rodham is a singular and unforgettable novel. “