The first Saturday of the month means Six Degrees of Separation day. This meme is hosted by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest. The idea is she gives a starting title, then associates six other books with it- and invites her readers to do the same. The starting book is Anna Funder’s Wifedom, which I haven’t read, and only heard of thanks to Janine at The Resident Judge and Lisa at AnzLit.com . I know that it’s about George Orwell’s wife and I’m just going to go from there to:

• THE PARIS WIFE  because Hemingway (not Orwell this time) lived in Paris hotels for awhile and based some of his writings there. And that  leads to (I’ll only add photos to the books I’ve read): 
• I HOTEL by Karen Yamashita, a WONDERFUl book, about a community of immigrant residents at a somewhat run-down San Francisco hotel  which could lead to many California immigrant stories but in this one a husband/wife couple are Russian revolutionaries, (I Hotel is short for International Hotel which was a kind of sad landmark until it was torn down.)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Hotel_(San_Francisco)

• A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW by Amor Towles which is about a man confined by the courts to the Metropol Hotel in Moscow just after the Bolshevik Revolution.

This leads to many books but I’ll pick

• HOUSE OF GOVERNMENT by Yuri Slezkine which features an elaborate and upscale apartment complex for highly placed Russian comrades.  This is nonfiction so…

we’ll follow it to a Russian novel;

• DOCTOR ZHIVAGO by Boris Pasternak which I’ve read 3 times and loathe the movie: (My last review was done prior to 2014)

but the book leads to:

THE BEGINNING OF SPRING by Penelope Fitzgerald which deals with Russia prior to the Bolsheviks, and where the English wife of a print-shop owner gets swept up in the romance of it all.  

So then, of course, comes that classic MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT by Elizabeth Taylor which has an aging and very lonely English widow living in a London residential hotel waiting for someone to visit.  (reviewed in 2013)

Yup – I did notice that 3 (three!) of these books are set in or near Moscow.   

Well, that was kind of fun – remembering these books was the best of it.