This is the first time I’ve joined in this meme. It’s hosted by Books Are My Favourite and Best, and was inspired by Hungarian writer and poet Frigyes Karinthy. In his 1929 short story, “Chains”, Karinthy coined the phrase ‘six degrees of separation’. The phrase was popularized by a 1990 play written by John Guare, which was later made into a film starring Stockard Channing.

On the first Saturday of every month, Kate chooses a book as a starting point and links that book to six others forming a chain. Bloggers and readers are invited to join in and the beauty of this mini-challenge is that I can decide how and why I make the links in my chain.

April’s starting book is A Prayer for Owen Meany. The Vietnam War plays a large part in the adult lives of the two main characters John & Owen, and I haven’t yet read a better book to explain (from the side that wasn’t protesting for peace) the emotions and politics of that war in the USA than Altamont Augie. It’s nothing if not thought-provoking.

The Headmaster’s Wager shows the life of the South Vietnamese people during that War, particularly the headmaster of an elite school. Seeing troubles on the horizon Percival Chen, said headmaster, sends his son to live in China, from where his parents emigrated decades earlier, not realizing that China is undergoing even greater change under Mao than Vietnam.

Those changes are only alluded to at the end of Pearl S. Buck’s Pulitzer prizewinning novel, The Good Earth set in mid-twentieth century China. Peasant Wang Lung’s very life is tied up in cycles of that earth that he works so diligently to acquire.

That same question of whether a person owns the land, or vice versa, is a central theme in The Meadow set in the Rocky Mountains on the Colorado/Wyoming border. The author, James Galvin, brings home the hardship of winter, a theme addressed more comedically, in Cathie Pelletier’s The Weight of Winter. It’s the third book in her Mattagash, Maine trilogy. I’ve just finished reading the first title: The Funeral Makers. (I hate reading books out of order, but this just happened.) That finishes up my version of this month’s Six Degrees of Separation – in Maine, next door to Irving’s New Hampshire where we began our journey.

So what six connections can you make from A Prayer for Owen Meany? Visit Kate’s blog and see how she got to Fates and Furies.

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