Book Serendipity, October to December 2023
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 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 woman turns into a spider in Edith Holler by Edward Carey and The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer.
- Expulsion from Eden scenes (one literal, after the Masaccio painting; another more figurative by association) in Conversation Among Stones by Willie Lin and North Woods by Daniel Mason.
- Reading my second 2023 release featuring a theatre fire (after The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland, which I actually read last year): Edith Holler by Edward Carey.
- The protagonist cuts their foot in The Rituals by Rebecca Roberts and The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward.
- On the same evening, I started two novels where the protagonist’s parents both died in a car crash: The Witches by Roald Dahl and Family Meal by Bryan Washington. This is something I encounter ALL THE TIME in fiction (versus extremely rarely in life) and it’s one of my major pet peeves. I can excuse it more in the children’s book as the orphan trope allows for adventures, but for the most part it just seems lazy to me. The author has decided they don’t want to delve into a relationship with parents at all, so they cut it out in the quickest and easiest possible way.
- A presumed honour killing in Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj and The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps by Michel Faber.
- A Houston, Texas setting in The Only Way Through Is Out by Suzette Mullen and Family Meal by Bryan Washington.
- Daniel Clowes, whose graphic novel Monica I was also in the middle of at the time, was mentioned in Robin Ince’s Bibliomaniac.
- The author/speaker warns the squeamish reader to look away for a paragraph in Robin Ince’s Bibliomaniac (recounting details of a gross-out horror plot) and one chapter of Daniel Mason’s North Woods.
- A mentally ill man who lives at the end of a lane in Daniel Mason’s North Woods and The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward.
- Reading Last House before the Mountain by Monika Helfer and The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward at the same time.
- The Daedalus myth (via Aeschylus or Brueghel, or just in general) is mentioned in Last House before the Mountain by Monika Helfer, The Ghost Orchid by Michael Longley, and Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain.
- A character goes to live with their aunt and uncle in Western Lane by Chetna Maroo and The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (both Booker-longlisted), but also The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, and The Story Girl by L.M. Montgomery. I came across all five instances within a few days! Later I also encountered a brief mention of this in Ferdinand by Irmgard Keun. How can this situation be so uncommon in life but so common in fiction?!
- The outdated terms “Chinaman” and “coolie” appear frequently in Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng.
- A 15-year-old declares true love in The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir and Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain.
- A French character named Pascal in The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir and The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble.
- A minor character called Mrs Biggs in Harriet Said… by Beryl Bainbridge and The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng.
- The Chinese zither (guzheng) is mentioned in Dear Chrysanthemums by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, which I read earlier in the year, and The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng.
- Oscar Wilde’s trial is mentioned in The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng, as it was in The New Life by Tom Crewe, which I read earlier in the year – in both it was a cautionary case for older homosexual characters (based on real people: W. Somerset Maugham vs. John Addington Symonds) who were married to women but had a live-in male secretary generally known to be their lover. At the same time as I was reading The House of Doors, I was rereading Wilde’s De Profundis, which was written from prison.
- In Fifty Days of Solitude Doris Grumbach mentions reading Bear by Marian Engel. I read both during Novellas in November.
- Living funerals are mentioned in Ferdinand by Irmgard Keun and The Ritual Effect by Michael Norton.
- A character insists that lilac not be included in a bouquet in In the Sweep of the Bay by Cath Barton and Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll.
- A woman has a lover named Frances in Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll and The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde.
- The final word of the Fanny Howe poem in Raised by Wolves (the forthcoming 50th anniversary poetry anthology from Graywolf Press) is “theophanies.” At the same time, I was reading the upcoming poetry collection Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali.
- The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde, which I’d read the month before, was a major influence on the cancer memoir All In by Caitlin Breedlove.
- Two foodie memoirs I read during our city break, A Waiter in Paris by Edward Chisholm and The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz, both likened a group of young men to a Dolce & Gabbana ad. (Chisholm initially lived at Porte des Lilas, the next Metro stop up from where we stayed in Mairie des Lilas.)
- A French slang term for penis, “verge,” is mentioned in both The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz and Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
Ladders to Heaven: The Secret History of Fig Trees
A whole book about fig trees? That’s right! If you’re a voracious nonfiction reader like me, you’ll find freelance journalist Mike Shanahan’s history of fig trees unexpectedly fascinating. It opens with him atop a series of ladders in a national park in Borneo, reaching past a venomous snake to pick some figs. He did many such exciting things in his research towards a PhD in rainforest ecology, but that 1998 encounter was significantly more intrepid than his earliest experience with the genus: he remembers a potted weeping fig in the hallway of his childhood home.
From that little tree to the largest banyans, Ficus encompasses 750+ species and has had a major place in human culture for millennia. Fig trees turn up in Greek origin myths and are sacred to Hindus. Romulus and Remus were rescued from drowning in the Tiber by fig tree roots. The tree the Buddha sat under to meditate? A fig. The fruit Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden? More likely a fig than an apple given the Middle Eastern climate and the fact that they then sew fig leaves together to cover their nakedness. (The confusion may have come about because in Latin malum means either “apple” or “evil”.)
Figs offer some biological surprises. For one thing, the plants have no apparent flowers. That’s because the flowers are internal: a fig is not technically a fruit but a hollow ball lined with tiny flowers that must be pollinated by two-millimeter-long fig-wasps. Strangler figs colonize a host tree, starting as a seed in the canopy and enveloping it in long tangled roots. Many tropical birds and mammals rely on figs, including monkeys and hornbills. Figs were, Shanahan writes, the “original superfood” for our primate ancestors.
The habitats where fig trees thrive face severe challenges, including drought, forest fires and poaching. However, history offers encouraging examples of how fig species can be key to tropical forest restoration. After a volcano erupted on Papua New Guinea in 1660, for example, the razed land was fairly quickly recolonized by Ficus species from seeds dropped by birds and bats – a prerequisite for wildlife returning. Similarly, fig trees were all that remained of the forest on Krakatoa after its famous volcanic eruption in 1883.
Building on this precedent, the Forest Restoration Research Unit, based in Thailand, now uses fig species to kickstart the restitution of tropical landscapes; one in every five of their plantings is a fig. Likewise, figs can be used to restore post-mining landscapes and lock up carbon. Researchers are looking into using drones to collect and deposit the seeds.
I’d never realized how often figs show up in the historical record, or how dependent on them we and other creatures have been. “Look after fig trees and they will look after you. It’s a lesson we have all but forgotten, but one we could learn again,” Shanahan concludes. Have a look at the bibliography and you’ll see just how much information is synthesized into this short, engaging book. It’s another gorgeous design from Unbound, too: the colorful cover was what first attracted me, and the author’s black-and-white pointillist illustrations adorn the text.
Nowadays I tend to think of figs as an exotic, luxury food. Every year we add some dried figs to our Christmas cake, creating caramel bursts of crunchy seeds. When my husband and I lived in Reading, we briefly had a LandShare arrangement to look after an established garden. Hidden behind a suburban fence, it was a secret paradise overflowing with fruit: plum, greengage and apple trees plus a fruit cage containing berries, currants, and – in one corner – a small fig. I remember one glorious late summer when we were inundated with more ripe figs than I’d ever seen before. We would heat them in the oven and serve them split open and oozing with goat’s cheese and runny honey. Our very own taste of Eden.
My rating: 
Ladders to Heaven was first published by Unbound in 2016 and releases in paperback today, September 6th. My thanks to the publisher for the free copy for review.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 