I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every few months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. The following are in roughly chronological order.
- Fishing with dynamite takes place in Glowing Still by Sara Wheeler and In Memoriam by Alice Winn.
- Egg collecting (illegal!) is observed and/or discussed in Sea Bean by Sally Huband and The Jay, the Beech and the Limpetshell by Richard Smyth.
- Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know is quoted in What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma and Glowing Still by Sara Wheeler. I then bought a secondhand copy of the Levy on my recent trip to the States.
- “Piss-en-lit” and other folk names for dandelions are mentioned in The House of the Interpreter by Lisa Kelly and The Furrows by Namwali Serpell.
- Buttercups and nettles are mentioned in The House of the Interpreter by Lisa Kelly and Springtime in Britain by Edwin Way Teale (and other members of the Ranunculus family, which includes buttercups, in These Envoys of Beauty by Anna Vaught).
- The speaker’s heart is metaphorically described as green in a poem in Lo by Melissa Crowe and The House of the Interpreter by Lisa Kelly.
- Discussion of how an algorithm can know everything about you in Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang and I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel.
- A brother drowns in The Loved Ones: Essays to Bury the Dead by Madison Davis, What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, and The Furrows by Namwali Serpell.
A few cases of a book recalling a specific detail from an earlier read:
- This metaphor in The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry links it to The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, another work of historical fiction I’d read not long before: “He has further misgivings about the scalloped gilt bedside table, which wouldn’t look of place in the palazzo of an Italian poisoner.”
- This reference in The Education of Harriet Hatfield by May Sarton links it back to Chase of the Wild Goose by Mary Louisa Gordon (could it be the specific book she had in mind? I suspect it was out of print in 1989, so it’s more likely it was Elizabeth Mavor’s 1971 biography The Ladies of Llangollen): “Do you have a book about those ladies, the eighteenth-century ones, who lived together in some remote place, but everyone knew them?”
- This metaphor in Things My Mother Never Told Me by Blake Morrison links it to The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry: “Moochingly revisiting old places, I felt like Thomas Hardy in mourning for his wife.”
- A Black family is hounded out of a majority-white area by harassment in The Education of Harriet Hatfield by May Sarton and Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.
Wartime escapees from prison camps are helped to freedom, including with the help of a German typist, in My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor and In Memoriam by Alice Winn.
- A scene of eating a deceased relative’s ashes in 19 Claws and a Black Bird by Agustina Bazterrica and The Loved Ones by Madison Davis.
- A girl lives with her flibbertigibbet mother and stern grandmother in “Wife Days,” one story from How Strange a Season by Megan Mayhew Bergman, and Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery.
- Macramé is mentioned in How Strange a Season by Megan Mayhew Bergman, The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller, Floppy by Alyssa Graybeal, and Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain.
- A fascination with fractals in Floppy by Alyssa Graybeal and one story in Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain. They are also mentioned in one essay in These Envoys of Beauty by Anna Vaught.
- I found disappointed mentions of the fact that characters wear blackface in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town on the Prairie in Monsters by Claire Dederer and, the very next day, Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.
- Moon jellyfish are mentioned in the Blood and Cord anthology edited by Abi Curtis, Floppy by Alyssa Graybeal, and Sea Bean by Sally Huband.
- A Black author is grateful to their mother for preparing them for life in a white world in the memoirs-in-essays I Can’t Date Jesus by Michael Arceneaux and Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.
- The children’s book The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark by Jill Tomlinson is mentioned in The Jay, the Beech and the Limpetshell by Richard Smyth and These Envoys of Beauty by Anna Vaught.
- The protagonist’s father brings home a tiger as a pet/object of display in The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell and The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller.
- Bloor Street, Toronto is mentioned in Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery and Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thinking about the stars is quoted in Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery and These Envoys of Beauty by Anna Vaught.
- Wondering whether a marine animal would be better off in captivity, where it could live much longer, in The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller (an octopus) and Sea Bean by Sally Huband (porpoises).
Martha Gellhorn is mentioned in The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer and Monsters by Claire Dederer.
- Characters named June in “Indigo Run,” the novella-length story in How Strange a Season by Megan Mayhew Bergman, and The Cats We Meet Along the Way by Nadia Mikail.
- “Explicate!” is a catchphrase uttered by a particular character in Girls They Write Songs About by Carlene Bauer and The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller.
- It’s mentioned that people used to get dressed up for going on airplanes in Fly Girl by Ann Hood and The Lights by Ben Lerner.
- Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn is a setting in The Lights by Ben Lerner and Grave by Allison C. Meier.
- Last year I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, in which Oregon Trail re-enactors (in a video game) die of dysentery; this is also a live-action plot point in “Pioneers,” one story in Lydia Conklin’s Rainbow Rainbow.
- A bunch (4 or 5) of Italian American sisters in Circling My Mother by Mary Gordon and Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
Goodness. As ever, I can’t join in the serendipity. And I’ve only read three of these books. As you already know, I wish I hadn’t bothered with one of them.
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Do you tend to deliberately read around themes, or just pick things up at random as they catch your interest? Maybe sometimes you get a run of books all set in the same place or time period?
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No, I rarely do thematic. On the contrary, if I’ve read something of one ‘type’, I’ll deliberately avoid something that seems in any way similar for my next read. I’m usually following up on recommendations (bloggers or otherwise), or library serendipity.
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I do love these posts, some are so strange it’s hard to believe!
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I get a lot of deja vu moments while reading!
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I had a really odd one this month and remember thinking ‘I must tell Rebecca about this’ but I’ve completely forgotten it! If it comes back to me I’ll let you know 😊
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I’ve also just come across a “pissenlit” reference! I’m trying to maintain/expand my French by reading Stephen King in that language (on the basis that his storytelling tends to be straightforward, so I’m less likely to be confused by stylistic quirks). Currently on Salem’s Lot (published simply as “Salem”, en francais) and a casual description of an overgrown yard has “pissenlit” (for dandelions, natch) and “chiendents” (literally “dog-teeth”, tho the dictionary says it’s “couchgrass” which I assume is also a weed).
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That’s a clever idea, to try reading an author whose voice and style you already know. I haven’t done any dedicated reading in French since uni, though I can still feel smug when I understand all the reported dialogue in, e.g. The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden.
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I’ve been putting it off because I know I read slower in French, although it’s been gratifying to note that I’ve gotten faster even in the last day or so!
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I’m sure you’re absorbing lots of vocabulary.
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Nice ones! I try to mention mine as I go along and link to your latest serendipity post, otherwise I forget them. I just had mention of the “safe” space between the two tides in my current read, which reminded me of the Adam Nicolson book, “The Sea is not Made of Water” which I finished fairly recently.
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That’s a good way to make sure you remember them! I have to keep an ongoing file on my desktop; otherwise, they’d be lost.
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A terrible one to write about – in two books I’ve read recently a big plot point is that the person the central character thinks is their father isn’t their father, but I can’t put that in the reviews so I’m putting it out into the world here to record it!
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Ha, yes, sometimes a coincidence would be a spoiler, in which case I do tend to mention them anonymously.
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I always enjoy these posts even if I never capture any of my own bookish serendipity moments!
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I’d always love to hear them if you think of any.
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Dysentery! I actually had a book coincidence this month, though it wasn’t very exciting: protagonists admit that they use their time during church services to think about jobs they need to do on the farm in both du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel and Geraldine Brooks’ Horse.
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Good job noticing such a little one. (I spend my time in church services reading my Kindle hidden inside the hymn book 😉 ) How are you enjoying Horse? I read the first 40 pages and set it aside, but intend to get back to it.
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Hmmmm I’m not sure about it. I think the way she deals with her black protagonists and race is general is quite problematic (I’m about two-thirds of the way through but have spoiled myself for the ending). It reminds me of some of the issues I had with March. It’s very readable, though, and I always like the way she links different periods of history in her novels through an object/artefact etc.
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Hmm, maybe not worth the 400-page investment then…
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What a lot of serendipitous connections! I just had one: when I had to stop reading The Count of Monte Cristo to return it to the library (I’ll get it back when my hold comes in again), and picked up The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, written by a man with locked-in syndrome, which I discovered had a chapter concerning the character with the same condition in The Count of Monte Cristo – according to him, the only such instance in literature.
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Wow, that’s a good one!
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This is quite a collection and so many links that you find.
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For this regular feature, I keep a file on my desktop and add to it over the course of a few months 🙂
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