Happy June! I did one of these Six Degrees of Separation posts two months ago and it was a lot of fun, so I wanted to do it again! Basically you make a list of six books, with each one connecting to the next in some way. It can be any kind of connection! I love this because I love seeing the different ways people think and make connections. This meme (actually called #6Degrees) is hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favorite and Best.

Today’s starting point is Murmur by Will Eaves. This was the winner of the 2019 Wellcome Prize, which celebrates topics of health and medicine in literature. I haven’t read it, but the Goodreads synopsis sounds really intriguing:

“Taking its cue from the arrest and legally enforced chemical castration of the mathematician Alan Turing, Murmur is the account of a man who responds to intolerable physical and mental stress with love, honour and a rigorous, unsentimental curiosity about the ways in which we perceive ourselves and the world. Formally audacious, daring in its intellectual inquiry and unwaveringly humane, Will Eaves’s new novel is a rare achievement.”

Well apparently I’m not very good at doing this more than once a month haha. The past few books that I’ve read have been amazing and fun and it feels good to be on this streak of great books. I’m gonna include a selection from the past month or so. Maybe you’ll find something to add to your list!

I loooove heist stories, so I went into this book with pretty high expectations. It turned out to be not exactly what I was expecting, but I enjoyed it very much nonetheless. The actual heist is kind of a backdrop to the political machinations going on – which were well done in my opinion. I can get very overwhelmed with political elements in books, I usually find them hard to follow. That was not the case in this book, happily!

The best thing here was the relationships – between Romy and Neri (brother/sister), and between both of them and Placidio and Dumond (and later his wife). I wish there had been more female characters! It was a bit of a guys club. It was nice that the romance was basically non-existent in the book. I feel that there were hints of it coming back in later novels, but I hope it just goes away tbh haha I thought it was pretty boring.

I also thought the characters were mostly well fleshed out, and in particular I loved how Romy and Neri’s characters grew, and how their relationship grew as a result (or maybe it’s the other way around). The other characters were interesting and have enough secrets to warrant more interest in them, and makes me want to read future novels to find out more about them. With the exception of the Shadow Lord though. I thought he was pretty dull, and as I said earlier, I really didn’t enjoy his relationship with Romy. He seemed really flat and it never actually felt like they had chemistry.

The different magical skills the characters had was really fun to read about. I only wish there had been more magical characters, so we could dive in deeper to the magic. Hopefully in later books!

The pace was mostly good. It was a bit slow in the beginning, and honestly did slow down even more in the middle but the end picked up and I never felt like it dragged too much.

All in all, a very fun and good read! Recommended for fans of fantasy, political drama, and fans of sibling relationships.

Okay just to start this off, let me show you what I wrote on Goodreads for my review right after I finished this book:

“i don’t have words. oh my god. oh my GOD. help. i haven’t read a book this good in….i don’t know how long. I DON’T HAVE WORDS I JUST WANT TO SCREAM”

This month I managed to read 12 books!! 4867 pages!! I have no idea how that happened. Probably me trying to procrastinate on work or something haha. Did you know that Goodreads has a stats tracking feature where you can see how many books you read over time? It turns out April of last year was also a huge month for me! Maybe there’s just something about April that makes me read more – not sure what that would be though. Let me know if you have theories haha.