Book Serendipity, April‒Early July
I call it serendipitous when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something pretty bizarre in common. Because I have so many books on the go at once (usually around 20), I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents than some. I also list these occasional reading coincidences on Twitter. The following are in rough chronological order. (January to March appeared in this post.)
- Characters named Sonny in Pew by Catherine Lacey, My Father’s Wake by Kevin Toolis, and Sacred Country by Rose Tremain.
- A double dose via Greenery via Tim Dee – while reading it I was also reading Other People’s Countries by Patrick McGuinness, whom he visits in Belgium; and A Cold Spring by Elizabeth Bishop, referenced in a footnote.
- A red thread is worn as a bracelet for its emotional or spiritual significance in The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd and Plan B by Anne Lamott.
- The Library of Alexandria features in Footprints by David Farrier and The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd.
- The Artist’s Way is mentioned in At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison and Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott.
- Characters sleep in a church in Pew by Catherine Lacey and Abide With Me by Elizabeth Strout. (And both novels have characters named Hilda.)
- Coins being flung away among some trees in In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill and The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd (literally the biblical 30 pieces of silver in the Kidd, which is then used as a metaphor in the Hill).
- Rabbit-breeding projects in When the Lights Go Out by Carys Bray and Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler.
- Mentions of the Great Barrier Reef in When the Lights Go Out by Carys Bray and Footprints by David Farrier.
- The same very specific fact – that Seamus Heaney’s last words, in a text to his wife, were “Noli timere” – was mentioned in Curlew Moon by Mary Colwell and Greenery by Tim Dee.
- Klondike ice cream bars appeared in both Small Victories by Anne Lamott and The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg.
- The metaphor of a rising flood only the parent or the child will survive is used in both Exit West by Mohsin Hamid and What We Carry by Maya Lang.
- The necessity of turning right to save oneself in a concentration camp setting is mentioned in both Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels.
- An English child is raised in North Africa in Oleander, Jacaranda by Penelope Lively and The Child in Time by Ian McEwan.
- The Bristol Stool Chart appeared in both Gulp by Mary Roach and The Bad Doctor by Ian Williams.
- A Greek island setting in both Exit West by Mohsin Hamid and Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels (plus, earlier, in A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson).
- Both Writers & Lovers by Lily King and Mother: A Memoir by Nicholas Royle mention Talking Heads within the first 20 pages.
- A trip to North Berwick in the early pages of Mother: A Memoir by Nicholas Royle, and hunting for cowrie shells on the beach – so familiar from Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock, read the previous month. (Later, more collecting of cowrie shells in Oleander, Jacaranda by Penelope Lively.)
- Children’s authors are main characters in The Crow Road by Iain Banks and The Child in Time by Ian McEwan.
- A character is killed by a lightning strike in The Crow Road by Iain Banks and Writers & Lovers by Lily King.
- Characters named Ash in The Crow Road by Iain Banks and The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg.
A brother steals the main character’s object of affection in The Crow Road by Iain Banks and Sacred Country by Rose Tremain.
- A minor character in Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler is called Richard Rohr … meanwhile, I was reading a book by Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ.
- A maternity ward setting in The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue and The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting.
- A love triangle is a central element in Writers & Lovers by Lily King and The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting.
- Reading a book by a Galloway (The Trick Is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway) and a book about Galloway (Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape by Patrick Laurie) simultaneously.
- Attending college in L.A. in The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama.
- Two books that reference the same Darwin quote: Into the Tangled Bank by Lev Parikian, and “The Entangled Bank” is the title of the final poem in Red Gloves by Rebecca Watts.
- Characters with the surname Savage in The Box Garden by Carol Shields and Islands of Mercy by Rose Tremain.
- A character is taught how to eat oysters in The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.
- A Louisiana setting in The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Property by Valerie Martin.
- Characters named Stella in The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and The Group by Lara Feigel.
- The last line of the book has a character saying “Come in” in Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ankomst by Gøhril Gabrielsen.
- Currently reading four books with mixed-race narrators: (Black/white) The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow, Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey; and (Japanese/white) My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki.
- Currently reading two novels in which a pair of orphaned sisters are taken in by relatives (Deerbrook by Harriet Martineau and Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen). Plus two more novels with orphan characters: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky and My Year of Meats.
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- In two of these four (not telling which, though you can safely assume it’s not the Victorian novel!), they are orphans because both parents were killed in a car accident. I feel like this is a fictional setup that I encounter all the time (cf. All the Beautiful Girls, The Monsters of Templeton, Saint Maybe) that can’t be that common in real life?
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- Vassar as an alma mater in Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain and The Group by Mary McCarthy.
- Punahou School (Honolulu, Hawaii) is the author’s alma mater in The Noonday Demon by Kathleen Norris and Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
20 Books of Summer, #3–4: Ella Minnow Pea & Eating for England
June hasn’t seen much progress on this project – though I’m currently on my fifth read, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, and enjoying it a lot – so July and August will need to include eight food- and drink-themed books each.
Today I have a reread of a funny (yet more serious than I remembered) favorite and a light collection of mini-essays on the English love affair with particular foodstuffs.
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn (2001)
From my original Bookkaholic review from 2013:
Dunn’s debut is a book of letters – in more senses than one. It is a fairly traditional epistolary novel, but also toys with the letters of the alphabet: the wordy citizens of the island nation of Nollop are zealously engaged in creating pangrams (pithy sentences that contain each letter of the alphabet) in tribute to their founder, Nevin Nollop, who authored “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” the original pangram displayed in ceramic tiles on his statue in the public square. But things go awry when particular letters start falling off the monument.
A superstitious lot, the Nollop Council decide that the fallen letters can no longer be used, and the characters’ missives become increasingly constrained as they have to avoid certain vowels and consonants. Their writing grows exponentially avant-garde and hilarious as they resort to circumlocutions and phonetic spellings. Before long only L, M, N, O, and P can be used – which, handily, still allows for an approximation of the title character’s name. A madcap journey through the English language and its use in literature: enjoy the ride.
On this rereading…
I engaged more with the individual characters: Ella and her parents, aunt and cousin; other members of the community; and a few off-island visitors who lead the research into what’s happening with the letters. I was also struck much more by the political satire: freedom of speech is endangered in a repressive society slavishly devoted to a sacred text. Those who continue to use forbidden letters are turned in by their neighbors or enemies and get 1) a warning, 2) a flogging or time in the headstocks, and 3) banishment. The council members see themselves as interpreting the will of Nollop, and believe the pangram to be a miraculous sentence that can never be bettered – but the citizens prove them wrong by creating a superior example (using only 32 letters, versus the fox’s 35) purely by accident.
A remembered favorite line that my husband and I often quote to each other – “No mo Nollop poop!” – doesn’t exist (it’s actually “No mo Nollop pomp! No mo Nollop poo poo!”). My favorite alternative phrase is “terminal-cot” for deathbed once D is disallowed. I also love the new days of the week: Sunshine, Monty, Toes, Wetty, Thurby, Fribs and Satto-Gatto.
Laugh-out-loud silliness plus a sly message about science and reason over superstition: a rare combination that makes this an enduring favorite. I also recommend Dunn’s Ibid: A Life (2004), which is told entirely through the footnotes of a biography, taking “reading between the lines” to a whole new level. I haven’t enjoyed his other novels as much as these two.
Source: Salvation Army store, Cambridge (September 2016)
My original rating (Borrowed from a friend – in 2007?): 
My rating now: 
Eating for England by Nigel Slater (2007)
Nigel Slater is a foodie known in the UK for his television programs and newspaper columns. Not as edgy as Gordon Ramsay, as matey as Jamie Oliver, or as ethically clued-in as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, he doesn’t have a particular shtick. A middle-of-the road, middle-class type, he’s all about simple comfort food. We have a few of his cookbooks.
As in his memoir, Toast (2004), food links in to nostalgia for childhood. In 200 or so essays that range from a paragraph to a few pages in length, Slater extols everything from marmalade to Brussels sprouts. He devotes by far the most time to the sweet stuff, though, considering the respective merits of every type of biscuit, candy, chocolate bar and pudding. There’s a clear love here for teatime treats (“Afternoon tea may be the only meal we take that is purely and utterly for pleasure”) and for stodge (“Is there something in our demeanour, our national psyche, which makes heavy, rather bland food sit so comfortably with us?”).
This was all pleasant, if inconsequential. I enjoy ‘observing the English’-type books because I’m familiar enough to recognize everything but still foreign enough to enjoy the quaintness and contradictions. What rubbed me the wrong way, though, were the arch portraits of kinds of cooks. I don’t often write in my books, but I found myself leaving corrective comments in the margins in a few places, especially on “The Slightly Grubby Wholemeal Cook,” an unhelpful stereotype of the “dirty hippie.” His ideas about hygiene and political correctness are a little off in this one. I also objected to his annoyance at people who won’t simply split the bill after a meal out (I’ll pay for what I ordered, thank you), and his defense of the gollywog used in Robertson’s advertising seems particularly ill judged at the current moment.
Source: Charity shop in Newton Stewart (Wigtown trip, April 2018)
My rating: 
Six from My Shelves
My resolution to read just my own books for the summer largely fell by the wayside, but I did manage to get through another handful of print books from the shelves. Below I give brief write-ups of what I’ve finished lately and recall how these books came to be in my collection.
In Fond Remembrance of Me by Howard Norman: A strange, short book that blends memoir and Inuit legends. In 1977 Norman travelled to Churchill, Manitoba to transcribe an oral storyteller’s folktales. Most of these were about Noah coming into contact with the peoples of the far north and displeasing them by refusing to give over the exotic animals of his ark as food. Helen Tanizaki, a scholar in her late thirties who tried half-heartedly to hide the fact that she was dying of stomach cancer, was also there to translate stories into Japanese. It’s easy to see why she impressed Norman with her mystical stoicism. She was a keen birdwatcher, and declared she wanted to be reincarnated as a seabird. The portrait of Helen is compelling, but the book doesn’t hang together well, especially because the interspersed legends are so repetitive. [From my Amazon wish list last Christmas.] 
An Anthology of Animal Poetry, ed. Kenneth A. Mason: This was assembled in 1940 by a 19-year-old, and it shows. The choices are obvious and old-fashioned; too many of the poems are long and insist on rhyming. However, I discovered some real gems. Three poems in a row are about skylarks – by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wordsworth and Shelley – and they’re all brilliant, using the bird as an emblem of freedom. Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” in particular, I can’t believe I’ve never encountered before. Its 21 stanzas praise the bird’s pure joy and wonder how careworn humans might emulate it: “We look before and after, / And pine for what is not … Teach me half the gladness / That thy brain must know.” My vintage Pelican copy has ads for chocolate and cigarettes that made me laugh. [Bought from a secondhand bookstore in Tunbridge Wells for 10 pence.] 
The Mistress’s Daughter by A.M. Homes: This grew out of a New Yorker article Homes published about meeting her biological parents in her early 30s. Her mother carried on an affair with her married boss, starting when she was just a teenager – Homes learned that she was the mistress’s daughter. This is the story of how her birth mother tried to get involved in her life, in a really rather stalker-ish way, and the occasional contact she had from her birth father. The blow-by-blow gets a little boring, especially when it’s Homes and her father only communicating via lawyers. Homes doesn’t really make much of a contribution to the literature of adoption, though this is a pleasant enough read. “I am an amalgam. I will always be something glued together, something slightly broken.” [Bought from a library book sale in America for $1.]
Summertime by Vanessa Lafaye: An enjoyable historical novel based on several true-life elements: a work camp of army veterans based at the Florida Keys, segregation and lynching, and a massive hurricane that hit in 1935. Main characters Missy and Henry are well drawn, but beyond them I thought Lafaye splits the perspective too far: I didn’t need to see through the eyes of lots of the veterans, the shopkeeper, or the policeman investigating the brutal beating of a local white woman. As for this crime, I knew whodunit pretty much right away, so there wasn’t any suspense regarding that plot point. However, Lafaye does do a great job of building tension in the novel’s final third as the storm approaches. The U.S. title (Under a Dark Summer Sky) is much better; “Summertime” evokes strangely rosy images and so is inappropriate. [I won a copy in a Goodreads giveaway.]
So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading by Sara Nelson: Nelson is forthright about what she likes and doesn’t like; she also ruefully reflects on the gap between what she meant to read and what she actually read in 2002. Her reading diary tells a lot about her personal life too: having a non-reading spouse and a novelist sister; memories of her late father; and the struggle to instill a love of reading into her young son. Inevitably a little dated as it engages with ‘It’ books of the time like A Million Little Pieces and Kitchen Confidential, the book has staying power because in each chapter Nelson broadens out from her discussion of one or more books to craft a thematic essay. This was meant to be my bedside book for the second half of the year, but I devoured it in less than seven weeks. It’s full of lines bibliophiles can relate to. [Free from The Book Thing of Baltimore.] 
The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester: Tarquin Winot, the snobby Francophile who narrates Lanchester’s debut novel, has a voice reminiscent of Oliver in Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over and Love etc. His opinionated, verbose speech provides much of the book’s wit. “This is not a conventional cookbook,” the first line warns, but a foodie’s tribute to traditional English and French dishes that compose the best seasonal menus. As we travel with Tarquin from Portsmouth to Provence we learn more about this peculiar character through the memories dishes elicit: about his Irish nanny, his sculptor brother’s boarding school years, etc. Lanchester subtly introduces notes of doubt about the narrator’s reliability, until we have to wonder how much his tale resembles Perfume or The Talented Mr. Ripley. Deliciously clever and sinuous. [Bought from a London charity shop for 20 pence.] 
I spent much of the summer bogged down in several very good but not particularly page-turning works of nonfiction. I’ll review those in due course.
Up next, though, are a few Booker Prize longlist mini-reviews in advance of the shortlist announcement on Tuesday.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 