Book Serendipity, August to September 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.
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?
Summery Reading, Part I: The Greengage Summer & Sunburn by Watson
Brief thoughts on a first pair of summer-themed reads: coming-of-age stories about teenage girls who trade England for somewhere more exciting – France or Greece – for a summer and awaken to the complications of sex when let down by the adults in their lives. Both: 
The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden (1958)
We wanted to read something by Godden in my book club’s women’s classics subgroup, and decided on this almost purely for the evocative title. Cecil is the second of five children who run amok at a French hotel while their father is botanizing in Tibet and their mother in hospital with an infected horsefly bite. Hotel staff and hangers-on are engaged in all sorts of shenanigans – affairs and casual molestation of the maids, for instance – and the children, caught up in the thrill of it, attach themselves to Eliot, the English lover of Mademoiselle Zizi. The adults get Cecil and her older sister, Joss, drunk on champagne. Joss is the belle of the ball and attracts an inappropriate suitor; Cecil gets her first period and tells Eliot, of all people. It’s a familiar message in mid-century fiction, I suppose: loss of sexual innocence leads to disaster. I found this quite melodramatic, with a sudden ending; it didn’t live up to the terrific premise. I was similarly underwhelmed by Black Narcissus. (University library)
Sunburn by Andi Watson; illus. Simon Gane (2022)
We open in suburban London in what appears to be the 1950s. Sixteen-year-old Rachel is offered a lucky escape from a summer of working at the butcher shop to stay with her parents’ friends, the Warners, at their home on a Greek island. Their life is a heady mix of languorous shopping, swimming and nightly parties. There’s a big contrast between the sophisticated expats and the local peasantry. When Rachel meets Ben, a fellow English teenager, it seems like her idyllic summer is complete, but things sour between them. Over the course of the book, Rachel realizes that not all grown-ups can be trusted. The plot took a twist I wasn’t expecting, which is always refreshing, but I should probably have been ready for it based on the depictions. The graphic novel is all in shades of blue, with white and light brown accents, as befitting the Greek flag and scenery. A problem I had was that most of the characters look the same – the artist has just the one way of drawing faces, so Rachel, Mrs. Warner and Ben have pretty much identical features. I would have catalogued this in YA. (Public library)
Both at least had a steamy summer atmosphere! My next seasonal read, picked up from the library today, will be One Midsummer’s Day by Mark Cocker, which is all about swifts. We have a pair nesting in our eaves again this year – hurrah! – and have been enjoying watching their (albeit diminished) screaming parties tear down the streets on warm summer evenings.
Any “summer” or “sun” books for you this year?
20 Books of Summer, 12–13: Black Narcissus & The False Rose
I’m limping towards the finish line with my flora-themed summer reading. Expect the reviews to come fast and furious over the next week and a half. Today’s novels aren’t about flowers, per se, but the title references do play a role. Both: (Public library)
Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden (1939)
I saw the Deborah Kerr film version of this way back in my teen years but had never read anything by Rumer Godden. My interest was renewed by Laura’s post on nun books. A group of idealistic English nuns sets up a convent school and hospital in the mountains above Darjeeling. “They were going into the wilderness, to pioneer, to endure, to work; but surely not to enjoy themselves.” Much of the appeal of reading about small communities is seeing how different personalities play off each other: aloof leader Sister Clodagh, pensive Sister Philippa, impetuous Sister Ruth. The land belongs to the General, whose teenage son Dilip Rai comes for lessons (he’s a bit of a dandy and wears Black Narcissus perfume); the General’s caretaker, Mr. Dean, is a go-between between the nuns and the natives. Though cynical and often drunk, he pulls through for the sisters more than once.
There are vaguely racist attitudes here, perhaps inevitable for the time this was written, but the English characters do start to change: “[Sister Clodagh] was fond of these people. She could not remember when it was that she began to think of them as people; not as natives, persons apart, but as people like themselves, and she was beginning to see with their eyes.” An erotic undercurrent explodes into a couple of obsessive crushes that threaten the entire mission. I read the first third of this on a bus in the Highlands and when I tried to get back into it a month later, it couldn’t recapture my attention despite an enticing Indian atmosphere.
The False Rose by Jakob Wegelius (2020; 2021)
[Translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves]
This is why I shouldn’t read sequels. The Murderer’s Ape was a pure delight and perfect companion on my long sea voyage to Spain back in May. Its every character and plot twist twinkle and the pages flew by. By contrast, this was … fine, but unnecessary. The plot turns on a pearl necklace Sally Jones the gorilla and Captain Koskela find hidden on their boat. Its centerpiece is a carved mother-of-pearl and silver rose and it belongs to Rose Henderson, the estranged daughter of Shetland Jack. They decide to return it to the rightful owner, but before they can track Rose down the necklace is stolen and a whole spiral is set underway. Once again, Sally Jones is separated from her captain and has to survive by her wits. Held prisoner by Glasgow bootleggers, she has to let them think her deaf and dumb, but makes friends with a former boxer named Bernie, who’s in thrall to his sister, harsh gang boss Moira. The final 100 pages or so, as everything finally unwinds, is satisfying, but it took me forever to make it there. I missed the supporting characters of the first book and gangster stories aren’t my jam.
Book Serendipity, May to Mid-August 2022
This is a regular feature of mine every few months. 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. 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.
- Not only did the opening scene of All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt share with Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier a graveyard setting, but more specifically an angel statue whose head falls off.
- SPOILER: {The protagonist has a backstory of a mother who drowned, presumably by suicide, in Secrets of the Sea House by Elisabeth Gifford and The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.}
- I started reading two e-books on the same day that had Taylor Swift lyrics as an epigraph: Bad Vibes Only by Nora McInerny and Tracy Flick Can’t Win by Tom Perrotta. I have never knowingly heard a Taylor Swift song.
- Rescuing insects from a swimming pool in Fledgling by Hannah Bourne-Taylor and In the Quaker Hotel by Helen Tookey.
- Reading two feminist works of historical fiction in which the protagonist refuses to marry (even though it’s true love) at the same time: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and Madwoman by Louisa Treger (about Nellie Bly).
- Two London-set books featuring a daughter named Mabel, one right after the other: This Is Not a Pity Memoir by Abi Morgan and Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy by Helen Fielding.
- In Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers I came across the fact that McCullers married the same man twice. Just a few days before, I’d seen that same odd fact about Hilary Mantel in her Wikipedia bio.
- A character named Clodagh in Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden and “Rainbows” by Joseph O’Neill, one of the entries in The Best Short Stories 2022: The O. Henry Prize Winners.
- Reading two books about an English author who died young of TB at the same time: Tenderness by Alison MacLeod (about D.H. Lawrence) and Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit.
- Reading two novels that mention the shipwreck of the Batavia at the same time: The Night Ship by Jess Kidd (where it’s a major element) and Cloudstreet by Tim Winton (just a tiny reference that nonetheless took me aback). According to Wikipedia, “Batavia was a ship of the Dutch East India Company. Built in Amsterdam in 1628 as the company’s new flagship, she sailed that year on her maiden voyage for Batavia, capital of the Dutch East Indies. On 4 June 1629, Batavia was wrecked on the Houtman Abrolhos, a chain of small islands off the western coast of Australia.”
- David Lack’s Swifts in a Tower is mentioned in Swifts and Us by Sarah Gibson (no surprise there) but also in From the Hedgerows by Lew Lewis.
- There’s a child nicknamed Chub in Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson and Cloudstreet by Tim Winton (which both also at least started off being buddy reads with Marcie of Buried in Print!).
- Two novels in quick succession in which the discovery of a horse skeleton sparks the action in one story line: The Last Wild Horses by Maja Lunde and (coming up soon – I have a library reservation placed) Horse by Geraldine Brooks.
- Unst, Shetland as a setting in Orchid Summer by Jon Dunn, Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie, Julia and the Shark by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and Where the Wildflowers Grow by Leif Bersweden.
- “Quiet as it’s kept” (a quote from the opening line of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye) is borrowed in a poem in No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies by Julian Aguon and one in the anthology American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide, ed. Susan Barba (“A Siren Patch of Indigo” by Cyrus Cassells).
- I didn’t recognize the word “swingeing” in The Reindeer Hunters by Lars Mytting and encountered it again the same day in Brief Lives by Anita Brookner before I had a chance to look it up (it means extreme or severe).
- A 1950s setting and a main character who is a man with missing fingers/arm in Cloudstreet by Tim Winton and The Young Accomplice by Benjamin Wood.
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 