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.
In Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop, Alba Donati remarks on this phenomenon: “Jung called these coincidences ‘synchronicities’, postulating that the universe possessed its own form of intelligence, which generated harmonies. A universe that detects and brings together the elements it feels are seeking each other in the endless swirl of life. Chance be damned.”
This is a regular feature of mine every couple of 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.
- A memoir that opens with a little girl being injured in a bicycle accident: Some of Us Just Fall by Polly Atkin and Pharmakon by Almudena Sánchez.
- Telling stories through embroidery in Cross-Stitch by Jazmina Barrera and The Farmer’s Wife by Helen Rebanks.
- A small boy nicknamed “Willmouse” (real name: William) in Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout and The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden.
- An account of a routine sonogram that ends with the technician leaving the doctor to deliver bad news in Reproduction by Louisa Hall and The Unfamiliar by Kirsty Logan.
- Black dreadlocks/braid/ponytail being cut off in When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright, and Rebecca, Not Becky by Christine Platt and Catherine Wigginton Greene.
- Wondering how to arm a Black daughter against racist microaggressions in Rebecca, Not Becky by Christine Platt and Catherine Wigginton Greene and Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.
- Countering the commodification or romanticization of Black suffering in The Book of Delights by Ross Gay and Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.
- An account of how the foot and mouth disease outbreak of 2001 affected the UK, especially northwest England, in Making the Beds for the Dead by Gillian Clarke and The Farmer’s Wife by Helen Rebanks.
- I encountered the quote from Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain about pain being inexpressible in Reproduction by Louisa Hall and The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O’Rourke on the same day. It’s also referenced in Mary Jean Chan’s Bright Fear.
- A mention of eating frogs’ legs in The Book of Delights by Ross Gay and La Vie by John Lewis-Stempel.
- I read about the effects of heavy metal pollution on the body in The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O’Rourke and Windswept by Annie Worsley in the same evening.
- Composer Erik Satie is mentioned in Making the Beds for the Dead by Gillian Clarke and August Blue by Deborah Levy.
- Stendhal syndrome and Florence are mentioned in The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright and Pharmakon by Almudena Sánchez.
- Swallows nesting in an old Continental building in Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop by Alba Donati and La Vie by John Lewis-Stempel.
- France being all about the rules and a “Putain de merde” exclamation to bad news in Dirt by Bill Buford and La Vie by John Lewis-Stempel.
- A character named Nomi in Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan and one called Noemi in Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop by Alba Donati.
- Epigenetics (trauma literally determining the genetic traits that are passed on) is discussed in The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O’Rourke and Pharmakon by Almudena Sánchez.
- Women of a certain age in Tuscany in The Three Graces by Amanda Craig and Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop by Alba Donati.
- Audre Lorde is quoted in Tremor by Teju Cole, Bibliomaniac by Robin Ince, The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O’Rourke, Alone by Daniel Schreiber, and Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.
- A Galway Kinnell poem is mentioned/quoted in The Dead Peasant’s Handbook by Brian Turner and Otherwise by Julie Marie Wade.
- The Bamiyan Buddhas are mentioned in Tremor by Teju Cole and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook by Brian Turner.
- Both The Three Graces by Amanda Craig and The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor open with a man shooting someone from his bedroom window.
- Linked short story collections about two children’s relationship with their Jamaican father, and mention of a devastating hurricane, in If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery and The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer. (Dual review coming up tomorrow!)
- Characters named Ben and Mara in The Whispers by Ashley Audrain and one story in Kate Doyle’s I Meant It Once.
- Occasional uncut pages in my copies of I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle and The Unfamiliar by Kirsty Logan.
- A Florida setting and mention of the Publix supermarket chain in If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery and Arms and Legs by Chloe Lane.
- A down-at-heel English seaside town near Scarborough features in The Seaside by Madeleine Bunting and Penance by Eliza Clark.
- A fictional northern town with “Crow” in the name: Crow-on-Sea in Penance by Eliza Clark and Crows Bank in Weyward by Emilia Hart.
- Claw-machine toys are mentioned in Penance by Eliza Clark and Directions to Myself by Heidi Julavits.
- Reading books by two Nobel Prize winners at the same time: Abdulrazak Gurnah (By the Sea) and Alice Munro (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage).
- Reading my second 2023 release featuring North Carolina ghost lights (after All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer, which I actually read last year): The Caretaker by Ron Rash.
- Reading my second 2023 release featuring a cat named Virginia Woolf (after Tell the Rest by Lucy Jane Bledsoe, which I actually read last year): one of the short stories in I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle.
- A character named Shay in Everyone but Myself by Julie Chavez, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer and The Caretaker by Ron Rash.
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 
I need to start making a note of my own serendipitous reading. I often think ‘that would be one for Rebecca’ then promptly forget it!
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Liz notes them in her reviews as she goes along. I have to keep an ongoing file on my desktop, otherwise I know they’re all too easy to forget!
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Two cats named Virginia Woolf? Well, that is a weird coincidence! With my firm belief that cats need to have an ‘s/z’ sound in their name, I am considering now: Jean Rhys, Shirley Jackson, Jane Austen and Tove Jansson (but maybe I should choose ones with S in their first name, so Sylvia)
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I had to go back to the book I’d read last year as I could hardly believe such a specific detail was recurring! I guess people like the absurdity of ‘wolf’ = cat (a book club friend has dogs named Badger and Sparrow and just named their newly adopted kitten Squirrel).
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I love weird pet names (I’m now thinking “Cat-rine of Aragon”, although I also think “Anne of Cleves” is a good one for a cat, without even needing the pun.) A few months ago I met a dog named Cabbage on a train, and thought that Bacon and Sprout would be a good set of names for a pair of puppies!
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Ha, those are great! I always find edible names amusing. (Many of our cat’s nicknames are food related.) We’ve been toying with the idea of naming future cats Bart and Benny, short for Bartleby (‘I would prefer not to’) and Benedi-cat.
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Epigenetics is everywhere at the moment. Love the foot and mouth outbreak suddenly popping up!
Once again, I have failed to have any book serendipities but I had a great real life/book serendipity. I was at the beach reading Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women and eating, and asked the friend I was with if it was actually true that you shouldn’t go swimming after eating because of cramps, as I wanted to swim in the sea. Lo and behold, a few pages further on Knoll firmly debunks the cramps myth!
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I can’t count the number of times that spurious prohibition was quoted to me when I was a child at swimming pools!
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I always suspected it was rubbish but now I know!
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She’s at it again, our Rebecca! How do you keep on producing these rabbits out of hats, month after month?
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I write them down instantly, on scraps of paper to be transferred into a file on my PC desktop, else they’d be gone forever!
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And Noemi in The Postcard? I bet you’ve read it.
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Nope! It’s an unusual name. I might have just thought it was an alternative spelling of (or typo for) Naomi.
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I think it is. I never came across it before The Postcard.
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Two books by Jewish millennial women, featuring main characters who are the black sheep of their families, and younger sisters to golden-child brothers, and the grandchildren of holocaust survivors, who flee the city for rural settings, take up manual labour, and encounter animals acting in strange and disturbing ways (Revenge of the Scapegoat and Study for Obedience)
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Awesome! (I only got 10 pages into Study for Obedience so wouldn’t have recognized many of those details.)
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I may have to write a whole blog about this lol
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Do it!
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I had a bookish coincidence a few weeks ago. I recently read and loved Matrix by Lauren Groff and a few days later I was listening to the newest episode of Glennon Doyle’s podcast We Can Do Hard Things and she mentioned recently reading Matrix and wondering if she was like the main character Marie de France. That was a fun bit of serendipity, considering the book is a couple of years old.
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That’s cool! I love it when public figures mention a book I’ve enjoyed.
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[…] two debut linked short story collections had enough in common to get a mention in yesterday’s Book Serendipity post, including a 2023 publication date, a central sibling pair, Jamaican heritage, and memories of a […]
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Hooray! There are some great ones here. And you’ve seen all mine (nearly all). I just had two older men chasing ne’er-do-wells out of a Chinese takeaway with a meat cleaver but it was in two books set in Chinese takeaways …
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Ha ha! That’s pretty specific, though…
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Not book serendipity, but I watched two movies last week which both featured a main character singing the same R.E.M. song at karaoke 🙂
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Excellent!
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[…] create the book, which creation can of course take many forms and change through time. In a great Serendipity moment, as celebrated by fellow-book-blogger Bookish Beck, this was my second book in a row to feature […]
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