This month’s game of Six Degrees, hosted by Books are my Favourite and Best, begins with our current book club book. My book club specializes in books about race in America. Our most recent book was Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham, which is about a young man who finds himself involved in the political campaign in 2008.

The main character in Great Expectations worked for the Obama campaign. I read Barack Obama’s autobiography in 2008, also with my book club. That book was Dreams From My Father and was mostly about his attempt to discover the man who was missing in his life. Dreams From My Father was our fourth book. Now, in 2026, we have been meeting together for over 18 years and have read 170 books together!

Barack Obama is married to Michelle Obama. In 2013, we read a book that traced Michelle Obama’s ancestry back to her black and white progenitors. American Tapestry was written by investigative reporter, Rachel L. Swarns, who used the Robinson and Shields families to tell the story of the United States from an amazing number of angles.

Let’s use the name ‘Michelle’ for the next link to go to The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. This was the book that prepared the members of my book club for activism, although we didn’t know it when we read it in 2013. We knew that the US was sitting on a powder keg after reading this book. When it blew up in Ferguson, less than 20 miles from where our book club meets, in 2014, members of our group were ready to march, meet, and organize to work for a United States that lives up to the promises in its founding documents.

To make another transition with a name, let’s move from Jim in the previous title to James. That’s the same transition that the main character makes in James by Percival Everett. James is a re-imagining of The Tales of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, told by the character known as Jim. Our book group read James last year.

One of the places that Huck and James passed on their journey down the Mississippi River was East St. Louis, Illinois. East St. Louis is also less than 20 miles from where our book club meets. So, we read Never Been a Time by Harper Barnes in 2011 to learn about the 1917 massacre of black people that took place there. My entire education happened close to this location and I didn’t know about it until I read this book. The most frequent question that arises in our book club is “Why didn’t we learn this in school?”

Let’s take the word ‘Never’ in that title, which comes from a quote, and move to another book with ‘Never’ in the title, also quoting a phrase. The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist is one of the largest and densest histories that our book club ever read. We tackled this in February 2019 as our Black History Month selection. It talks about how the American economy and capitalist system was built on the institution of slavery.

That’s my chain — all built of books that I read with my book club. That feels appropriate for this month because September is our annual book selection meeting. Later this month, we’ll get together to propose and consider the books that we want to read in the coming year.