Just a short post this time. I call it serendipitous when two or more books that I’m reading 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 between 10 and 20 – I guess I’m more prone to such incidents. I post these occasional reading coincidences on Twitter. What’s the weirdest one you’ve had lately? (The following are in rough chronological order.)

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[Previous 2019 Book Serendipity posts covered April, July and October.]

 

• Characters sit for a portrait in The Confession by Jessie Burton and The Hoarder by Jess Kidd.

 

• An obsession with saints in Fifth Business by Robertson Davies and The Hoarder by Jess Kidd.

• A mention of the urban myth regarding why our fingertips prune in water (something about an outdated evolutionary strategy for gripping underwater) in The Body by Bill Bryson and Humiliation: Stories by Paulina Flores.

 

• Memories of childhood trips to Martha’s Vineyard in Chances Are by Richard Russo and The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall.

 

• The River Thames is the setting for Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem and Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield.

• Mentions of pelicans being clubbed to death in God Unbound: Theology in the Wild by Brian McLaren and Autumn Across America by Edwin Way Teale.

 

• A character who speaks and writes backwards words in The Poisonwood Bible and The Robber Bride.

 

• Epigraphs containing folk names for the hare, and soon enough a dead hare, in Ring the Hill by Tom Cox and Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley.

• An unexpected THIRD set of conjoined twins encountered this year (after Cutting for Stone and The Girls) in Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie Macdonald.

 

• The song “Oh My Darling, Clementine” is quoted in The Robber Bride and Fall on Your Knees.

 

• Warming an orphaned lamb in a low oven in Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood and The Dig by Cynan Jones.

 

• A character is presumed incapable of laughter in Agatha by Anne Cathrine Bomann and Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken.

• Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping is mentioned in The River Capture by Mary Costello and Surrender by Joanna Pocock.