6 Degrees of Separation

It’s time for another adventure in Kate’s 6 Degrees of Separation Meme from her blog, Books Are My Favourite and Best. We are given a book to start with, and from there we free associate six books.

This month’s starting point is Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run.

first degree

Another autobiographical work with a title that begins with the word born is Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant by Daniel Tammet.

second degree

Another book with the word blue in the title is Michael Dorris’s novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. 

third degree

When you think about the color yellow, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? For me, it’s bananas. Rich Cohen’s book The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King tells the story of a man who got rich by harnessing the market on bananas:

[Samuel] Zemurray lived one of the great untold stories of the last hundred years. Starting with nothing but a cart of freckled bananas, he built a sprawling empire of banana cowboys, mercenary soldiers, Honduran peasants, CIA agents, and American statesmen. From hustling on the docks of New Orleans to overthrowing Central American governments and precipitating the bloody thirty-six-year Guatemalan civil war, the Banana Man lived a monumental and sometimes dastardly life.

—Amazon

fourth degree

Bananas are a fruit that’s yellow on the outside. Pineapples are a fruit that’s yellow on the inside. Pineapples were introduced to Hawaii in the 18^th century and became a big cash crop when James Dole started a pineapple plantation there in 1900. The novel The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings is set in Hawaii:

Matthew King was once considered one of the most fortunate men in Hawaii. His missionary ancestors who came to the islands were financially and culturally progressive—one even married a Hawaiian princess, making Matt a royal descendant and one of the state’s largest landowners. But now his luck has changed.

—Goodreads

fifth degree

Hanya Yanagihara’s 2022 novel To Paradise also features the history of Hawaii. The middle section of this three-part novel is set in 1993 and presents David, a young Hawaiian man living in Manhattan with his wealthy partner. Much of the content of this section involves a letter to David from his dying father, a descendant of Hawaiian royalty who believed that the kingdom of Hawaii would be restored.

sixth degree

My favorite book featuring Hawaii is James Michener’s 1959 novel titled, simply enough, Hawaii. 

After creating a thematic chain last month, I wanted to venture farther and wider with this month’s connections. This exercise has reminded me that I still hope to visit Hawaii sometime before I get too old to travel.

© 2023 by Mary Daniels Brown