Six Degrees of Kool Books

So yesterday I talked about the upcoming nightstand book series which will be happening monthly and today I’ve got another new series or meme or column or whatever you’d like to call it. This one will be a weekly affair. And, in case you missed the big gigantic title at the top of this post or that big gigantic image, the series will be called, “Six Degrees of Kool Books”.

How does it go? Glad you asked. Basically it’s based (very loosely and obtusely) off the board game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” (which itself is based off the concept of “six degrees of separation“). If you don’t know how that game works, basically you have six steps to link Kevin Bacon to some other actor by naming another actor he or she has worked with who worked in some other film. In the new film you can pick a new actor and jump to another film until you get to a film featuring Kevin Bacon.

Now instead of movies and actors, we (and by we, I mean my authorial partner in crime Jenelle Schmidt and any other authors who’d like to hop on board) will be using books and characters. So for books, it doesn’t work exactly the same way as the Kevin Bacon game. You see I’m pretty sure Aragorn never made an appearance in anything beyond Lord of the Rings, though Viggo Mortensen has popped up in quite a few flicks over the years. So instead of picking the same character, you get to pick a characters in two different books who remind you of each other. So for Aragorn, we might link him to say King Arthur from Le Morte d’Arthur. Both were kings, great leaders, etc.

Each time you pick a new character from a new book you also talk about the rest of the book and the other characters in the story. Then the next person in the chain picks one of those other characters (not the one you picked, otherwise we’d just end up with all characters who remind us of Aragorn) and talk about a character from another book that reminds you of them. So I could pick Merlin and talk about Allanon from The Elfstones of Shannara. Capisce?

All the fun starts next Tuesday when I’ll kick off the series with a book whose name is shrouded in mystery in the great vagaries of obfuscation. If you’d like to be included in the chain, be sure to let us know in the comments or via social media.

I’m almost certain this trail will take those who follow it to some very unexpected books. And we’ll be able to look back and see this strange, serendipitous “six-degree” chain of “Kool Books” that we’ve created into our own virtual online library.

Sound like fun? If so, write a post and then share the link below to join in the literary shenanigans!