You know the drill by now: start with the same book and end up wherever you like in just six jumps! One of my favourite bookish links, as hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. This month we start with Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility – and it’s always a problem when I’ve read neither the book nor anything else by that author.
However, I do think his name is rather strange (sounds like ‘Someone who loves towels’, right?), and it appears to be his real name rather than a pseudonym. So I will start with another American author with a strange name, although this one is decidedly a pseudonym. I discovered Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events when I was looking to buy something funny and a bit different for the daughter of a friend about 18-20 years ago. The books were a big hit with her (and she has recently qualified as a doctor, not that I believe this was as a direct consequence of my thoughtful present). I read them later on with my children as well, and we loved them, shame that any TV/film adaptations haven’t quite lived up to them.
The second link is rather obvious: from the Baudelaire orphans to Charles Baudelaire, but not his most famous work The Flowers of Evil. Instead, I opt to go for another cranky later work, Paris Spleen, a collection of prose poems which are little vignettes of daily life in Paris, foreshadowing so much modern writing, including flash fiction, micro-memoirs and more.
This volume was published posthumously, so for my next link I chose another posthumously published novel. I could have gone for the obvious, Kafka, or the most famous, A Confederacy of Dunces, but instead I will go for E. M. Forster’s Maurice, a gay love story that he could not publish during his lifetime because homosexuality was illegal at the time.
A simple jump via the name Maurice, straight into the imaginative world of Maurice B. Sendak: Where the Wild Things Are, which was another firm favourite of my own childhood and that of my children. I even recreated a wild song and dance when reading it out loud. The best children’s books transcend generations, don’t they?
The hero of Sendak’s book is called Max, and for a while that was going to be my younger son’s second name. So once again, somewhat unimaginatively, I choose an author called Max. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was one of the first books I read when I embarked upon my anthropology studies and I still agree with many of the points he raised.
I will finish this series with another Max that I had to study, but earlier, in school, namely Max Frisch and his play Biedermann und die Brandstifter (translated into English as either Firebugs or The Fire Raisers). This play was written as a response to those saying that they would never have been taken in by the Nazis or the Communists, but it remains topical to this day, showing how ‘normal’ citizens can be taken in by evil and contribute to their own downfall.
So my literary travels at the start of this New Year took me from America to Paris, from Cambridge to the Land of the Wild Things, from a founding father of sociology to a Swiss playwright and novelist. I hope to travel even further this year, at least via books. Where will you be travelling?
findingtimetowrite 