30 June 2010

Small, but striking


These two overlaps have the flavour of coincidence, but I prefer to think that when it comes to literature there’s more, and sometimes much more, to it than that.

The first happened a couple of years ago. A character in a novel that I was reading named a specific day of a particular month (sometime in August), and it was the very day and month I was reading it.

The second happened today, once I had decided what to read next. In my pile of unread books two caught my attention: Chris Bohjalian’s The Double Bind and Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down. I picked the Bind. And what do I find as its epigraph but a quote from the Hornby.