The game is hosted by Kate from Books are My Favourite and Best and starts this month with the book The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I haven’t read it, had even never heard of the book or its author. I read it’s about a woman who writes letters, and it looks perfectly charming. Within 2 days I saw this title twice, so it might be a sign of the universe to add it to my TBR… or not (the universe is quite elusive these days).

1- I could try to follow with epistolary books, or books that I read with my bookish pen pal Danielle, but as I have not read the book I fear I might misunderstand or go fully off-key, so instead I’m going to connect with the humble little robins that are on the cover art. Another book with a very humble small bird is The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, which I am reading just now (although I am progressing very slowly). The book follows a young boy, 13yo Theo, who loses his mother in a terror attack on the Met in New York. Inthe book, the museum features a special exhibition of Dutch golden age masterpieces, including the (real) painting The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius, which is normally in The Hague, Netherlands.

2- The next (easy?) move is another visit to a Dutch museum, with a Woman in Blue by Douglas Bruton, set in the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam with Vermeer’s masterpiece. It was my first book (novella really) by Bruton but I was recently reminded of him in a blog post and I should explore his back catalogue. The painted woman is given a complex story that goes beyond the cliché relationship between the artist and his muse.

3- Then I pivoted to something blue, and I thought of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, that I read more than ten years ago. I remember the book as a deeply moving account of Didion losing her adopted daughter Quintana when she (Quintana) was 40 or so. I remember that it made me cry a little. But I don’t want to continue with such a blue feeling and will avoid, in this game and in my book choice for now, another book about devastating grief.

4- I know that Didion is very famous for her other grief memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, but instead I’m choosing to summon her essays Slouching towards Bethlehem. I actually read a translated collection of essays that came from different books including that one. I have never been fascinated by California, but her texts gave me some ideas about the place, and in a much deeper way than the cliché. I remember a podcast where this book was described as fundational to understand the dark turn of the late 1960s. In my mind this book is linked to the Manson murders, but I didn’t want to go there for my next move.

5- So my next pivot is staying in California with bold women and dangerous people, but in a completely different time and setting. I reconnected by chance with Jane Smiley‘s books with a Netgalley copy of A Dangerous Business, which takes place in Monterey in 1851. There is the gold Rush, some events that remind the reader of the soon-to-come Secession war, but it’s also a mystery with amateur sleuths working… in a brothel. Now I feared that I got stuck in a corner because all the books I thought of were Westerns, or books with amateur sleuths or California, but it wasn’t quite fun.

6- For my last book I’m taking a cop out, or a very far-fetched link: 1851, the year of publication of the horror novella The Evil Guest by Sheridan Le Fanu, which I read ages ago in the early days of this blog. I read it when my older son was a baby, and he’s now almost an adult! I now have some doubts if 1851 was the correct date of publication, but that’s the information I had back when I read it. Sheridan Le Fanu writes creepy stories but plausibility is not is forte. We’re in spring right now, but he makes for a good Halloween pick.

When the great game hosted by Kate from Books are my favourite and best starts with Wuthering Heights, even though I’m late by two weeks I want to play. I wasn’t quite impressed by the recent adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Victorian masterpiece by Emerald Fennel. It was so different from the book – probably a major understatement in form of a non-spoilery warning for those who might be tempted.

1- An easy link to the next book is Yorkshire, which is the main redeeming quality I found in the novel Mrs. England by Stacey Halls, that also left me with a so-so impression, a bit like the movie. The main character is a reputable nurse who gets a new job caring for the four children of the wealthy England family in an isolated manor house. When I read it, I totally missed that the nanny school, Norland, is actually a real childcare training institution.

2- I wanted to link Mrs. England to something like Miss America (the book I had at the tip of my tongue was Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife), but the name association brought me somewhere else: Nathan Englander, the writer of the memorable (to me) Ministry of Special Cases, that I read in 2009. It is set in Argentina during the dirty war where opponents are disappeared. It was so heart-wrenching that I remember some of it even 15 years later. I have not read any other book by Nathan Englander, but I have his short story collection “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” on my digital shelves. Will I get to read it this year?

3- Another grim book set in part in Argentina  is one Philip Kerr novel with Bernie Gunther called A Quiet Flame, read in 2013. In this well researched thriller, we see how former nazi officials have fled to Argentina at the end of World War 2, and although this is not the topic of this book, some of their inhumane methods were used in the Dirty war against socialists, communists and their supporters in the population.

4- Bernie Gunther’s is one of those series that I read almost fully, but haphazardly. I did regret that I wasn’t disciplined enough to read this series in order. Another such series is Karen Pirie by Val McDermid. I started with Still Life, which was #6. I caught up with almost the full series, but in totally random order, depending on chance finds.

5- Still Life is a “historic missing persons case, fake identities, and art forgery”. Now, when I look at the books I read set in the art world, the are more art heists than art forgeries. But one book set in the art scene that I read ages ago is What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt. My memory is quite vague, but it was 20 years ago at least. It was even before I started this blog!

6- Another book set in new York in the 1970s-1980s, which I read ages ago but still remember (albeit vaguely) is Jane Smiley Duplicate keys. Duplicate Keys is set in a less wealthy neighborhood and milieu than Hustvedt arty New York, but they are both vibrant. This meme is about weird connections, right?