Six Degrees of Separation: From The Tipping Point to The Floating Theatre #6Degrees

Here’s how it works: on the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own six degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post.   You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees.

This month’s starting book is The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Find Kate’s Six Degrees of Separation here.  Read on for my version.  Click on the title to read the book description on Goodreads or my review, as appropriate.

Gladwell’s book is subtitled ‘How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference’ and, being a keen gardener, the little things that make a big difference in my garden are bees who pollinate so many of my fruit trees and vegetables.  The Bees by Laline Paull takes the reader inside a beehive to witness its complex social structure.

Thinking of bees brought me to the product of their endeavours, honey, which happens to be the name of one of the main characters in Claire Dyer’s novel The Last Day.  The book explores the dynamics of the relationship between Vita, her ex-husband, Boyd, and his new girlfriend, Honey.  The idea that there is always a ‘last day’, a last chime of the clock, permeates the book.

Of course, what can follow a last day of one life is the first day of another or maybe you can have multiple first and last days.  Kate Atkinson’s novel Life After Life, poses the question: ‘What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?’

Or perhaps you believe in the possibility of parallel lives and universes? This thought took me to Blake Crouch’s best-selling novel, Dark Matter, a mind boggling page-turner that is impossible to summarise without giving everything away.

It’s a short mind-hop from parallel lives to alternative histories and a book that is on my 20 Books of Summer Reading Challenge list, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. The book imagines a world where slavery is legal and the United States lost a war and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.

Of course, for a long time in the United States, slavery was legal and a book that has this as a major element of its plot is The Floating Theatre by Martha Conway (published under the title The Underground Railway in the United States.)  Young seamstress May Bedloe finds herself drawn into a world fraught with danger when she joins the famous floating theatre that plies its trade along the river separating the Confederate South and the ‘free’ North.

Next month’s starting book is: Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin.  Time to get your thinking caps on….