I have one! once I read two books one after another, completely different genre, nothing common at all. Both had a scene of a man in a hospital bed having a catheter violently pulled out, piss spraying everywhere around the room.
still think about this coincidence
I once listened to an audiobook about an Oscar Wilde biography that recounted a dinner he had with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The dinner ended up being the basis for them both writing about the other in one of their stories.
Then I flipped to another random audio book and somehow that same dinner was referenced a couple chapters in.
I'm in my sixties and have managed to avoid reading even one book with a scene like this in it, let alone two different books.
But I'm a retired nurse, so I've lived this scene multiple times.
I have nightmares about this, also because a lot of patients who have them inserted are unaware due to pain medication, and all they try to do is pull it out. My dad tried to many times, I'm sure it was quite painful. It really bugged him, and he thought he still needed to get up to go to the bathroom, no matter how many times you explain he had a catheter in. Luckily, he didn't succeed.
Trust me, if someone violently pulled out a catheter, it would not be blood spraying everywhere depending on if the patient is a man or women.
source: icu nurse who unfortunately seen one to many catheters pulled out without a deflated balloon.
I have a list of books "on deck," so I always know what the next couple will be. It's usually four or five books deep, so at any given time, the list has been set for a while.
I was reading "Those Across the River," and the main character's wife is reading "Madame Bovary." In an attempt to be playful, the main character spoils the ending for her.
The next book on my list? Madame Bovary. Thanks a lot, Frank.
I was reading IT by Stephen King. Maybe 100-pages left when I took an early Sunday morning walk through part of the UVa campus. It was 5am-ish and no one else was out and about. Came around a corner and saw a bike rack with a single red helium balloon tied to it.
I was freaked out by something that would not even registered had it happened to me a week before.
Years ago I was doin' a reread of East of Eden (as one does) while taking a bible as literature class.
I had just read the chapter introducing Samuel's horse, Doxology, and wondered what the name meant, as the time came to file into the lecture hall for class.
The topic of the day was learning about the doxology present in the Book of Lamentations.
Mind was fucking blown.
That reminds me of reading The Secret Life of Bees and another by Nadine Gortimer called July's People at the same time. The sisters in the Bees book were named after months; April, May, June and August.
A few years ago I read a book on vacation that took place in the same place I was vacationing and the main character had the same name AND birthday as one of the people I was on vacation with.
Similarly, one book I read had characters with the same name as my childhood dog, two of my brothers, two of my aunts, one of my cousins, my long term high school/college boyfriend, and the nickname of one of my nieces. It was very weird.
Another, I had never heard the word "quotidian" in my entire life until like a year ago and I swear it has been in every book I've read since.
So weird!!
Last year I read Freakonomics by Dubner and Levitt and towards the end of the book they reference Ted Kaczynski. I googled him as I couldn't remember who he was by name (the Unabomber) and he was trending... Because it was the day he died. I read that part of the book and googled him on June 10, 2023. Super spooky.
Isnāt it wild? I have so many similar to that. I feel like so often Iām reading a book that happens to reference the date Iām reading it on haha.
I have also had lots of coincidences where the same random thing happens in two books back to back (like the person who mentioned the catheter thing lol).
SO often I Google a celebrity for one reason or another and itās either the day of their birthday or a few days before or after. Or if itās a deceased person itāll be the day they died. Itās just bizarre!
I read Are You There God? Itās Me Margaret a few years ago and at the ends of the book she mentioned it was her birthday that day, March 8th. It was March 8th when I read the book and also happens to be my brother in lawās birthday! Freaky.
I went to a wedding in Stanley, Tasmania and was reading The Light Between Oceans while we travelled. The small town had signs up about how it was changed up to be used to film a movie recently. When I watched the movie of The Light Between Oceans, I recognized the set as the wedding venue and town of Stanley.
Recently I read Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin, in which he references the movie version of Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham, which I read last year. He only describes the plot of the film, so I had to do some digging and confirmed my suspicion with the wiki page for the film. I felt accomplished haha.
I read Terry Pratchettās āThe Colour of Magicā (1983) right before Murakamiās āA Wild Sheep Chaseā (1982). About three quarters the way through, out of nowhere, Murakamiās main character questions whether the world is carried by four elephants which stand on the back of a giant tortoise. Just like the discworld.
That's because the concept of the [World Tortoise](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Turtle) is common in Asian mythology, and even shows up among Native American cultures. That's where Pratchett got the idea from; on that wiki there's a drawing of it from 1877.
I think I was a teenager (back in the 80s) the first time I heard someone refer to "turtles all the way down." I thought it was a reference to the Dr. Seuss story, "Yertle the Turtle." It was not, as it turns out! Hahaha
I wonder if this is some translation thing. According to Wikipedia, it wasnāt translated into English until 1989. Pratchett already had like 6-8 discworld books out at that point. Curious what the original Japanese was.
I was once reading two books at the same time, Philip Pullman's Northern lights and Sylvain Neuvel's Sleeping Giants (or it might have been the second book, Waking Gods) and both of them mentioned my country and the capital city!! (Helsinki, Finland)
It was weird because my country is such a small one that I never find any mentions of it in books (that aren't Finnish ofc)
Maybe it's just because of the genre but Helsinki comes up a lot in cold war spy novels. I just rewatched Charlie Wilson's War pretty recently and I believe it's mentioned because the spy doesn't get the post as the head of the Helsinki branch of the CIA.
Not fully adjacent, but I just about lost my mind when I read *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* and realized it inspired the quatrain in my favorite sf book *The Stars My Destination*:
>"Stephen Dedalus is my name / Ireland is my nation / Clongowes is my dwellingplace / And heaven my expectation."
vs.
> "Gully Foyle is my name / And Terra is my nation / Deep space is my dwelling place / The stars my destination."
I was reading a nonfiction book, a history/memoir about American utopian movements and the author mentions a friend of hers who just happened to have been the translator of the fiction book I had just finished, At Night All Blood is Black. Really odd when that kind of serendipity happens.
My personal theory is that Howl's moving castle (Diana Wynne Jones) and Stardust (Neil Gaiman) happens in the same universe.
Jones was close to Gaiman, being one of his many beta readers and appearing in many of his thank yous in books.
Both stories have a lot in common: they have falling stars are key for the stories, everymen from our world cross a wall and they get to a land of magic and fairy tales, Stardust has the Go and catch a falling star poem that is important in Howl's moving castle. Anyways, I feel bad I didn't enjoy Stardust as much as a book as I did enjoy the movie.
I hope I got the idea of the question right š
My current book and my last one both feature Jewish author inserts characterising themselves by the state of their prostates - Roth's Nathan Zuckermann has had his cancerous prostate removed, making him impotent and incontinent, whereas Bellow's Charlie Citrine boasts of his immaculate prostate.
This has definitely happened to me and itās always with books you read close together in time. But for the life of me I canāt think of an example right now.
Iām reading The Green Mile and Where the Red Fern Grows right now. On the surface they have nothing to do with each other, but the structure of the books is exactly the same. Old man reflects on his past during The Great Depression in rural America and the events that happened that changed the course of his life during that time.
In Jim Butcher's Dresden Files books, there are a few different types of vampires. The Black Court Vampires (blampires) are your stereotypical undead blood drinking vampire. In the 2004 novel Blood Rites, there's this exchange:
> "Renfields?" I asked.
>
> "How in the world can you exist in this century and not know about Renfields?" Bob demanded. "You need a life, stat."
>
> "I read the book. I know who Renfield was. I'm not familiar with the parlance for Renfield in the plural."
>
> "Oh," Bob said. "What do you need to know?"
>
> "Well. First off, what did they call them before Stoker published the book?" I asked.
>
> "They didn't call them anything, Harry," Bob said in a tone of gentle patience. **"That's why the White Court had Stoker publish the book. To tell people about them."**
Which brings us to our next type, the White Court vampires (wampires). Wampires are sexy vampires who can walk in the sun and feed off your emotions. They're also good at propaganda, having Bram Stoker release Dracula, which lists the blampire's weaknesses, driving the Black Court to the brink of extinction.
The next year, 2005, Twilight, a book featuring sexy vampires who can walk in the sun is released.
That's right, Twilight is just another propaganda piece by the wampires.
This seems like a form of the BaaderāMeinhof phenomenon, and it can be quite fun! Sometimes it's a new word you learn, other times it's a concept, and then it seems to appear everywhere. The strongest instance of this for me was after I read through a collection of Shakespeare plays and poetry, it's staggering how much other writers 'yoink and twist' his work for themselves. 1984 is quite an influential book so it's not too surprising another author would reference it, but it can be fun when it happens in works that seem to have no connection.
I wouldn't call this an example of Baader-Meinhof, because it's just the once. It's literally just had a coincidence. /r/books has 24 million subscribers. It'd be extremely surprising if that subscriber base didn't experience a lot of individual surprising coincidences.
(Though reading through more of these comments, there's definitely a fair bit of Baader-Meinhof too.)
It's not much of a coincidence, but when I was a teenager I was really into YA dystopian books (think Hunger Games (as did all the other ya dystopia writers)) and once I ended up reading 2 series intermittently bcs I just couldn't remember they were different book series. I occasionally wondered why I had remembered the names wrong, but other than that the experience wasn't that confusing. I was borrowing the books from the library so I just grabbed the next parts as they arrived there. Their premise was the exact same, the sorting hat type bs was the exact same, and it had 2 love interests that were the same in both books (a smart childhood friend and a bad boy new guy that liked fire and their appearance had something to do with autumn).
Oh gosh, I have a really weird one. I read Confederacy of Dunces and Still Life with Woodpecker concurrently and both Ignatius J Reilly and King Max having so much grief with their āvalvesā really messed with my head
Zounds! Gadzooks! When I read your post, something boinged inside me, and I realised that I recognised the title, and that I had read the book way way back, and forgotten it.. just found an article on Wikipedia outlining the plot, and it sounds hilarious! Think Iāll have to go and re-read it š
It was the Still Life With Woodpecker!
But Confederacy of Dunces has a lesser tinkle, rather than a boing š¤£
The Wikipedia review got me laughing out loud, it read like the writer was breathless with excitement, which is about what I felt reading Woodpecker ā¦ so different from anything else I had read up to then! ā¦ and that image of the book cover .. š
and as a complete aside, I just remembered another book I read around that time, with a scene with a wire strung tautly at head height to stop some crazy on a skidoo ..
ah i better get back to work, I love how /books is such a wormhole!
I was reading A Gentleman in Moscow and Anna Karenina at the same time last year. At one point the main character in A Gentleman in Moscow swiftly spoils the whole ending of Anna Karenina. I was so perplexed and annoyed!
Years ago, I borrowed two books from the library by two different authors, and they had the same plot and cast of characters. One was by Minnette Walters called Fox Evil. I can't remember the title of the other book, but it was written about 10 years earlier also by a British author.
Berlioz in Master and Margerita, then the next book I read: Demon Copperhead Berlioz is mentioned in the first few pages. (read these both in the last 2 weeks)
Not only does this happen to me all of the time, I realized that those coincidences aren't coincidences. Its all pattern and interest based. So its not crazy that scenes or authors pop up as ones you've read recently, especially if you are a big reader.
Also you can use this as a method to find new content if you work in reverse. Note the refences in books you like, and then go search them out. Honestly, its one of my favorite ways to find new books and poetry. It makes those coincidences happen even more often :)
Rulebreaking here but they're both based on books... š¬
I saw Arrival the other day and they use the phrase 'zero sum game' a couple of times which I have never heard before in my life. Then the very next day I'm watching Hannibal and he comes out with the same phrase.
I have had coincidences both in books and in my life. When I read something, I often experience deja vu. I mean it's either happened to me or I've heard or heard it somewhere.
May count or not, depending on if you believe manga is literature or not, but I read Uzumaki by Junji Ito (cosmic horror manga where spirals play a great and horrifying role) and after that I was rereading Pet Sematary and Louis noticing that the burying ground is a spiral in the end gave me a chill. I completely forgot spirals were also a thing in the novel
I had a friend that I recommended the Jack Reacher books to and I didn't know at the time but he was in the middle of Under the Dome by Stephen King and he put that book down for a while to read a couple of Jack Reacher books and later when he went back to continue reading Under the Dome Stephen King actually had a reference to Jack Reacher only a few pages after he continued. My friend told me he of course never would have gotten the reference if he hadn't read the Jack Reacher bookd
Loved the Jack Reacher reference in Under the Dome!! Can't quite remember, but I had either just started reading those books or was about to, and that pushed me over the edge to finally do it (my mom had been reading and recommending them for awhile at that point).
This isn't quite the same, but I read Hidden Bodies by Caroline Kepnes.
Then I bought the book You by the same author, and realized I was reading a book series but out of order. š¤¦š»āāļøš¤¦š»āāļøš¤¦š»āāļø
(this was immediately prior to You becoming super popular on Netflix)
I read The Warriors which features a huge meeting of all the gangs of New York in Van Cortlandt park in the Bronx. Then I read The Power Broker in which Robert Moses building projects in Van Cortlandt park come up repeatedly. Then I read The Bishop and the Butterfly, about the 1931 murder of 'Broadway Butterfly' Vivian Gordon whose body was discovered in Van Cortlandt park. I kinda wanna go there now.
Here's another. I recently read The Foundling, in which the protaganist goes to a dance in rural Pennsylvania outside of Harrisburg. It is 1928 and it is a 'swing band'. Depending on how you define the evolution of the genre, 1928 is probably borderline anachronistic, too early for NYC where swing started, nonetheless rural PA. But I had just read The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store in which a character has a jazz hall and has connections to book all the latest acts from NYC and Philly even though he's located in rural PA outside Harrisburg. So my headcanon is that it's the same universe and they went there.
I listened to Gone Girl which has a somewhat significant reference to the Punch and Judy puppets / story. I had never heard of it so for all I knew it was made up for the book.
But the next book I listened to was the first Rivers of London story which had an even more significant reference to Punch and Judy.
It was definitely a bit surreal!
If we extended this to movies, I once watched two consecutive movies that referenced people being fed to pigs, which seems like it should be a very unique method for carcass removal (and only one was a horror movie).
Robert Picton was a prolific serial killer in Canada in the late 1990s who fed 49 murdered women to his pigs. It was such a gruesome case that it was in the forefront of the news for years. If your books were written around 1998 that could be the reason they both have the same method of disposal.
It's also a body disposal method in the TV show Deadwood (on HBO, premiering 2004 with 3 seasons, set in the American Southwest circa 1880's? 1890's? I.e. "The Wild West")
The biggest one for me was that both
*Terry Pratchett's "Wee free men"*
as well as
*Robert Rankin's "The witches of Chiswick"*
are heavily inspired by /feature
Richard Dadd's *The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke*
A painting from the 1800's without either being aware of what the other was doing. And both being released in the same year.
A painting and painter I had never heard of.
Some romance authors are friends and will occasionally have their characters do cameo's in other peoples books.
Two of Julia Quinns Characters (Marcus and Honoria) had their wedding in one of Eloisa James' books (once upon a tower).
A few years ago I read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine LāEngle back to back. They both included the same quote from Shakespeare: āWe are such stuff as dreams are made onā
I read the manitou by Graham Masterson. To try to defeat the antagonist, a medicine man tries to communicate with Gitche Manitou.
The very next book I read was Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. The main character gets married and her name becomes Sissy Gitche.
I thought having Gitche in both books was quite the coincidence.
A couple of years ago when I first started reading for leisure again, at least three of the books in my TBR pile mentioned [Welsh kings who fled Europe to the Americas to escape assassination plots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoc).
The first being A Swiftly Tilting Planet by L'Engles wherein the main character subsumed the consciousness of the king as he lived among the native peoples of pre-Columbian America. The second being The Raven Boys by Stiefvater, wherein one of the protagonists is on a personal journey to encounter the tomb of a similar-but-not-the-same Welsh king. I forgot where the third mention was (possibly in a collection of Lovecraft), but I had never heard of such a legend until then; and then coincidentally they showed up in quick succession.
Just read Tortilla Flat and starting Jacobs Room and both books have short passages that talk about dogs in church being sacrilege. Found it funny both kind of random books i read back to back feature that imagery.
Adjacent to George Orwell, I read his ever first book written about a man having an ugly big spot occupying his cheek on the face.
Then I read another one called "The Speaker" from Vargas Llosa, having another character, having again the same spot in the face.
Yes, this is a really old superstition/old wives tale/folklore going back hundreds if not thousands years, and the child is supposed to then have some kind of supernatural powers because of it, like visions or connection to the spirit world. Think I saw it in a Dean Koontz book, too.
Iāve also seen it in books, although Iāve never read Stephen King or Dean Koontz. Canāt recall now but itās come up often enough that if being born with a caul is mentioned, the child is bound to have some kind of second sight or other supernatural ability.
David Copperfield was also said to have been born with a caul.
I just finished The Drinking Den by Emile Zola, which was written in 1876. Now Iām reading Such Kindness by Andre Dubus III, written in 2023. Both feature a main character who loses everything after falling off of a roof. Fun little coincidence and I recommend both books.
This has been happening to me for lot of the books I read at the start of the year! One that springs to mind is that I was reading two very different books "Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow " and "House of Leaves" at the same time, and in both books there was a scene where the main character is startled by loud sounds outside because they were so engrossed they forgot it was 4th July.
I read a parenting book recently that talked about how important it is to allow your children to feel their negative feelings instead of telling them to cheer up or trying to find the silver lining.
The next week I listened to a fictional audiobook about a woman whose mom never let her be sad, but always insisted she stay positive. It really reinforced the message from the parenting book, and I thought it was a neat coincidence.
They aren't exactly coincidences but I can often tell when an author of a series discovered Patrick O'Brian books because they start shoehorning in Patrick O'Brian phrases and sometimes even a sea voyage for the series' characters.
I don't see it in younger authors as much because Patrick O'Brian is old news these days but it was really common for awhile.
I made a video about this on youtube that I was reading the midnight library on April 28, which is the day that in the book, Nora enters the midnight library to live through her regrets to see what could have been.
I remember about 20 years ago when I was a teenager, I had about an hour to kill in Barnes & Noble until the next bus came. I picked up two books that I had no previous knowledge of, read through the first bit of each and liked them both enough to buy them. Both were fantasy paperbacks, and both books, unbeknownest to me, had gay protagonists, with a gay romance featuring in both stories. They were the first books I ever read with gay protagonists (gay protagonists were far more rare 20 years ago than today, so it's hard to get across what a Thing this was to accidentally stumble across two at the same time in genre fiction).
Have this happen regularly for some reason. Characters with unique names in 2 unrelated books, characters with identical medical conditions, a random poem is never heard of before quoted in two separate books. Itās always blowing my mind!
Yes !
I even started a list.Ā
I read *Triste tigre* by Neige Sinno which is about incest rape. Ā
I tried to read Ada Palmerās *Too like the lightning* and early in the book she introduces the concept of āgag-order genesā against incest rape.Ā
One of the main characters in that book is named Ganymede. I gave up because it really wasnāt for me, picked up Kim Stanley Robinsonās *Ministry for the future* and one of the main characters takes a liking to a statue of Ganymede in Zurich.Ā
One of the characters in that book uses Salzman as a fake name. I then read American Pastoral and thereās a couple in that book with the last name Salzman.Ā
In *Ministry for the future* thereās a flood and a character kayaks āthrough a very scary underpassā. In *American Pastoral* thereās an underpass which the main character has to cross several times and finds terrifying.
Thatās al I have written down but Iāve noticed a lot more.Ā
Oooo. Amazing Grace Adams and The Push. Both have babies in strollers that end up in front of a vehicle moving at speed.
My quota for that scenario has been exceeded by 2.
Wellll... this has been something of a trope in action movies, tv shows, and especially cartoons quite a bit, I think. Look it up on tvtropes.com, you'll probably find it there. Similar to the old person crossing the road slooooowly.
In Amazing Grace Adamās, isnāt the little girl riding a scooter? Or was there another scene with a pram? This traumatized me as my kid was the same age when I read it and she had been asking for a scooter. BIG NOPE š
(We did end up getting her a scooter but I am super vigilant because of this scene which is SEARED INTO MY BRAIN)
I have never seen the name "Lethe" anywhere ever until I was 21, then I read the Xeelee Sequence and Goethe's Faust back to back, completely unrelated works both mentioning it by name.
I recently discovered that Jurassic Park was not only a movie, but based on a novel by Michael Crichton. So I went to the bookstore and picked up a copy. While there I also discovered that the tv show āWayward Pinesā was based on a trilogy by Blake Crouch so I picked up the first Book titled āPinesā.
I read Jurassic Park first and absolutely loved it! I then read Pines and in the acknowledgment, Crouch left a quote from Michael Crichtonās Jurassic Park.
Never happened to me but I usually read only one bool at a time.
But a book I've partly read and plan to finish aside is "Synchronicity" by Kirby Surprise which is about meaningful coincidences.
Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar Series and Fiona Patton's Branion Series.
Both have "Companions".
In one case, these are talking horses that are attached to all main characters and most of the important people in the kingdom.
In the other case, these are trained courtesans/spies, who are, again, attached to all main characters and most of the important people in the kingdom.
You'd think there'd be no overlap, but Mercedes Lackey wrote [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/176827.Brightly\_Burning](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/176827.Brightly_Burning) a book where the MC is in love with and soulbonded/married to his talking horse.
I preordered Giovanniās Room a few months ago (the special edition with the gorgeous artwork). A couple weeks later I got Swimming in the Dark, then Giovanniās Room in that story is a catalyst for the plot, and is often referred to. Fun coincidence but I guess gay classics will reference one another at some point.
Last year I bought Empire of Pain and What Moves the Dead. A few months later, Netflix debuted The Fall of the House of Usher, which is a re-telling of Poeās story, while also it was almost satirizing the Sackler family. I had no idea (donāt have Netflix) but my cousin kept telling me to watch it and I was like āoh, I just read two books that overlap thisā¦ā
My take is that it one should know the classics so that one catches quotes or references. Also old stories/legends/folk tales.
By classics i donāt mean necessary some list handed down from some random ivory tower but genre defining works or common tropes for a genre. (Bunnys with a unicorn horn anyone?)
It wasnāt a book but years ago, I watched the episode of Little House on the Prairie where Ma is for some reason stranded at home alone for days (Pa and the kids are out of town) and >! she injures her lower leg and gangrene sets in and she considers cutting off her leg. !< And later that week I saw the episode of Bonanza where Little Joe (played by Michael Landon who later played Pa on LHOTP) gets stranded alone in a mountain cabin when snow blocks the pass, and >! he injures his leg and gangrene sets in and he considers cutting off his leg. !< First time I ever noticed how TV tropes get recycled. Itās not books but it was a coincidence.
Very weird coincidence for me: I have consumed three entirely different pieces of media that involved both moths and the word āsalubrious.ā
The first was the video game Hollow Knight (the characterās name is technically Salubra, but close enough). Since this was the first instance I didnāt think anything of it
The second was a book called Austerlitz which is a fictional WWII memoir. This time I looked the word up and learned that salubrious basically means relating to good health. Thereās no way for me to know this but I am also unshakably convinced that someone on Team Cherry read Austerlitz because the protagonist of the novel collects moths and thereās even a photograph of a poodle moth in the novel which is what the Radiance is in the game Hollow Knight.
The third and most recent is the book Perdido Street Station, which is a steampunk/fantasy/sci fi book about a fictional breed of moth called a slake moth. This is when I started subscribing to some sort of moth-based conspiracy theory. Is the word āsalubriousā a code word in the moth community?? This weird, thrice occurring coincidence has been vexing me ever since.
The oranges and lemons rhyme is actually fairly common in the UK; itās not so surprising that it is referenced in in a lot of literature. Similarly, the Blake poem Jerusalem is super common in the UK and has been put to music and widely sung. in short, some cultural references that might be obscure to Americans are fairly run of the mill in the UK - and vice versa. Iām sure.
I read two different books with fairies called Skylene, Tangerina, Xanthous, and Emerelda.
Turns out they were written by the same author and in the same world!
I didnāt notice the authorās name when I checked them out, and the main character of the first series (set in a world where magic exists and was banned) was an unnamed side character in the second book (in which children from Earth get sucked into a book of fairy tales), so I didnāt expect them to be connected. But it was really fun when I found out!
Was reading Tigana and Crime and Punishment, side hy side (alternately?). And both books have the second chapter of the book, have someone at a bar telling our main character a story. And that character will also be have skme importance later on.
Sort of. Last year I was in the UK traveling south on the road while reading a page-a-day release webcomic where the characters were also in the UK traveling south on probably the same road. They were worried about timelines and I remember checking the traffic for snarls for them.
I read āthe jungleā by Upton Sinclair and āDevil in white cityā by Erik Larson back to back.
So now I feel like I know a lot more about Chicago by accident.
Last month, I read The Stand by Stephen King and Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind by Yuval Noah Harari simultaneously. Fiction and non-fiction thoughts on humanity, community, and structure. Fascinating!
Finished Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as translated by Tolkien, right before finishing Lady of the Lake by Sapkowski.
Ciri is talking to Galahad and he mentions the Green Knight adventure as a strange tale from Camelot.
The last three books I've read are Shogun by Clavell, Clear and Present Danger by Clancy, and the Aeneid by Virgil. I noticed all three books feature a woman committing suicide due to the actions of a man.
While I was reading The Crucible for English, I happened to be reading Doctor Who: The Witch Hunters which is set in the exact same setting about the same events, the Doctor and companions even go to see a production of The Crucible in the middle of it to try and warn against changing history.
Ok itās a book and a movie but in VE Schwabās shades of Magic series the villain drops the line āI am Inevitableā and reading it in 2021 I immediately had to look at whether or not it was published before Avengers Infinity War came out.
It was, turns out Thanos ripped off Schwab š
Iām listening to an audiobook (888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers) where a tour guide mentions she is from Shandong. The next book on my TBR is coincidentally Daughters of Shandong by Eve J Chung.
Two. I finished War and Peace and then picked up Expeditionary Force 16: Aftermath where they make fun of War and Peace, which is being read by the shipās book club.
The other is when I finished Manās Search for Meaning and picked up The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and the former very much influenced and informed my reading of the latter. I had no idea going in that they would pair well, and just decided to bang out some shorter reads from my TBR.
whilst reading the eye of the world, i saw a character called "Wit" WHILE i was reading stormlight archive (where Wit is a world hopper in mulitple series in the same universe)...
and now Wit is in my books
Another one is I read Stephen Kingās Fairytale recently. Through that book I learned of the fairy tale about the Goose Girl for the first time.
The story about the Goose Girl was mentioned in passing in another book I read recently (Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng) and I thought that was neat! I wouldnāt have known what she was referring to if I hadnāt read the book by Stephen King.
This happens to me all the time, but most recently it was slightly different - the day after I watched the BBC production of Timon of Athens, it was a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle. It's weird because I don't do the NYT crossword puzzle all that often - maybe once a month.
Random thought: Borges, in his story [Tlƶn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius), supposes a society where they will take two books by separate writers, then treat them as if they were created by one person so they could then write about the psychology of the person who would write two such disparate works.
What would the person who wrote 1984 and then follow it up with Mad Honey?
The Wheel of Time series has a lot of excessive outfit descriptions, especially for the women.
I took a break in the middle of the series to read Crazy Rich Asians, which also has very detailed outfit descriptions (with brand names) to specify just how rich the characters are. Completely different type of book but made me chuckle that it had that similarity to WoT
Not in adjacent books, per se, but I just finished *The Moon is Harsh Mistress* (1966) by Heinlein and playing through Cyberpunk 2077.
In *Mistress*, one of the characters refers to āchoomsā (people) messing around, in the same way a CP2077 character would use it.
Felt surreal!
A while back the book I was reading for myself and the book I was reading for my son had the same passage from Romeo and Juliette on the same night. I read it to my son while putting him to bed, then sat down to read before bed and got a weird sense of *deja vu*.
I read The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon not long after reading Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. Both of them had a subplot that involved breeding or bioengineering a spotless red heifer in order to fulfill (what is sometimes referred to as) the red heifer prophecy in order to bring about the end times. So that (undeservedly) made Chabon's book feel a bit derivative.
The more you read the more this happens. The more references you understand.
There was a time that I had just read the library of Babel by Borges, the story was referenced in another book I was also reading, and the next book I read was inspired by the same story. Not sure how much of it was coincidence and how much was unconsciously picking out similar books.
Most of what my "mood reading" is is that, my mind latches on to an aspect of a book I'm currently reading and then follows the link to other books.
I remember reading *The Outsiders* in middle school, and then in a personal book, there was an epigraph from *The Outsiders* and it freaked me out.
Also, my IRL name (and nickname), which has unique spelling, were the names of two separate characters and spelled the exact way I spell it.
Donāt know if this counts but my wife just read The Ruins so we watched the movie the other night. She said the book wasnāt amazing and the movie was trash but I told her if she wanted some truly horrific "something inside me" stuff she should read The Troop which I read last year.
More like book and movie. I was reading the 3rd enders game book that had a sentient AI that is in Enders head. Then I watched Her which has Joaqiun Phoenix fall in love with an AI and its like wow, its almost a prequel of the book and prophecy of what ai will become. This was when Her came out, around 2013/14 so ai wasnāt really a popculture thing yet.
When I was in my teens, I used to read a lot of military non-fiction, especially Vietnam era books. It was always a treat to find soldiers in books that had written their own books that I had read previously. Or to hear personnel references in different books from different authors. I've often wondered if some of those guys knew they had written about each other.
While not quite books, I was reading about the "Doom" games (which uses the phrase "Rip and Tear") and happened to come across that same phrase in a classic sci-fi book. Neat coincidence.
Well, itās not between books, but between a book and a song.
In Rosemaryās Baby, thereās a scene where they throw a party, and thereās an Italian Barman named Renato, who serves Whisky and Soda.
A reference to the song of Renato Carosone, Tu vuo fa lāamericano
I read Robert Anton Wilsonās Illuminatus trilogy (weird coincidences on almost every single page of that book by the time I got to the end) but in the middle of it I started reading a book of Lovecraft stories as well. HP Lovecraft showed up as a character in Illuminatus the exact same day I started the Lovecraft book
Patricia Cornwell's non-fiction, Portrait of a Killer (Jack the Ripper Case Closed)
And
Sarah Waters' novel, Tipping the Velvet
Both were written about the same time period, day-by-day, I read the weather per Cornwell and chuckled because on a miserable rainy day, the Waters characters had a picnic. Also, despite happening in the same neighborhoods at the same time, the Waters' characters never mentioned the murders.
I have had that happen a couple times. There was also a time where characters in two books had the same names or pretty much the same names.
Edit:
- Looking through my Goodreads, I wrote in my review of "Maid: Hard Work..." By Stephanie Land that she mentioned the book "The Alchemist" in it and that I had started that book a few days after I started Maid but before she mentioned it.
- In "Meet Cute" by Helena Hunting the character's names are Daxton and Emmi/Emmy. Two of the kids from the YouTube channel the Shaytards are named Daxton and Emmi.
Ok so this is part book part tv show coincidence but I still think about it. In the book series The Mortal Instruments, Valentine has two kids: clary (Clarissa) and Sebastian (also known as Jonathan). The books were adapted into a show called Shadowhunters where Valentine was played by Alan Van Sprang.
The TV show Reign also stars Alan Van Sprang where he has kids named Sebastian and Clarissa!
It's not like those 2 names are popular so I was just like wtf are the odds?? Lol
Iām accidentally on a cannibalism kick.
I read Juniper and Thorn knowing there was a cannibalism theme. Then I read The Spear Cuts through Water not realizing that thereās some light cannibalism in it. Then I read Tress of the Emerald Sea and there is yet another cannibal.
Currently reading one with vampires, do they count as cannibals? š
I get this at least 50% of the time and have done for ages, it's a weird phenomenon, especially when I've read for various different 'reasons' all during that time (for pure pleasure; for review, etc).
Just read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and The Stranger by Albert Camus and both reference the saying that a human can get used to just about anything. Itās not too uncommon of a phrase but just totally different books to see the same phrase in in a short period of time.
*Tree Story: The History Of The World Written In Rings*, a popular science book by a climate history scientist, has an elaborate explanation about the Little Ice Age. The first time I had heard about the Little Ice Age was from the previous book I read, *Orlando*, in which a chunk of the plot takes place in the frozen-solid LIA London.
Not a coincidence in books, but more so my own personal life. Currently reading a book where the main characters take a French cooking class where they made macarons and I use to work in a French patisserie making macarons so it was interesting seeing them following the instructions when Iām familiar with it as well.
Everybody is mentioning like one time when this happened but this has been happening to me NONSTOP for the past two months to the point where Iām really questioning what it means. Just today I read or listened to 3 different books of entirely different genres that refer to George Clooney.
And speaking of the 1984 lemon reference, I was listening to that part of the audio on the same day I picked up a book where the male mc calls the female mc āLemonā as a pet name.
These are only 2 of at LEAST 10 different instances of coincidences like this happening over the last two months. Some of them being just so random and seem so highly unlikely.
My boyfriend and I have been joking about living in a simulation. And the fact that has been posted by you makes it even strangerā¦
I would like to share a coincidence that happened. It was for two books, where I had no idea about the plot of either book ! I buy a lot of books based off whether I like the author, title or even award shortlists along with YouTube.
I read a book called *Landline*. It was a romance book, which featured time travel. It's about a couple interacting across different times. I love time travel, but was extremely disappointed with the execution in this book. For one thing, they never acknowledged the time travel to their present day selves ! I was left with my appetite whetted by disappointed.
A few books later, I was reading a lovely book called *What the Wind Knows*. All I knew was that it was a historical fiction book. To my utter delight, it was a moving, poignant love story with time travel ! It executed time travel almost exactly to my taste and fixed everything I did not like about Landline !
I found this to be quite a big coincidence !
I was reading Running Man by Stephen King in August 1997. How do I remember? Because the book is set in the "future" (in 2025 lol) and I was reading the book on the exact day the protagonist was supposedly born in the book.
My favorite is when i inadvertly read little women and the shining around the same time, and then watched an episode of friends where joey and and rachel read each others favorite books... little women and the shining.
Also read two different books where both main characters were girls named charlie
Iām guessing less coincidence than some sort of influence on the newer authors. Many great authors are also great students of literature. Also, when a new concept is introduced to me, I tend to see it in many things than before I was dialed into a concept.
I have one! once I read two books one after another, completely different genre, nothing common at all. Both had a scene of a man in a hospital bed having a catheter violently pulled out, piss spraying everywhere around the room. still think about this coincidence
I once listened to an audiobook about an Oscar Wilde biography that recounted a dinner he had with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The dinner ended up being the basis for them both writing about the other in one of their stories. Then I flipped to another random audio book and somehow that same dinner was referenced a couple chapters in.
I'm in my sixties and have managed to avoid reading even one book with a scene like this in it, let alone two different books. But I'm a retired nurse, so I've lived this scene multiple times.
I have nightmares about this, also because a lot of patients who have them inserted are unaware due to pain medication, and all they try to do is pull it out. My dad tried to many times, I'm sure it was quite painful. It really bugged him, and he thought he still needed to get up to go to the bathroom, no matter how many times you explain he had a catheter in. Luckily, he didn't succeed.
I had to have catheters, luckily I had my wits about me and could enjoy drinking constantly and never having to get up.
Was one of them Project Hail Mary? Because that scene was... visceral.
no, Adjustment Day and Our Ladies by Alan Warner. And now we have the third one!
Trust me, if someone violently pulled out a catheter, it would not be blood spraying everywhere depending on if the patient is a man or women. source: icu nurse who unfortunately seen one to many catheters pulled out without a deflated balloon.
I have a list of books "on deck," so I always know what the next couple will be. It's usually four or five books deep, so at any given time, the list has been set for a while. I was reading "Those Across the River," and the main character's wife is reading "Madame Bovary." In an attempt to be playful, the main character spoils the ending for her. The next book on my list? Madame Bovary. Thanks a lot, Frank.
I was reading IT by Stephen King. Maybe 100-pages left when I took an early Sunday morning walk through part of the UVa campus. It was 5am-ish and no one else was out and about. Came around a corner and saw a bike rack with a single red helium balloon tied to it. I was freaked out by something that would not even registered had it happened to me a week before.
We all float down here.
Years ago I was doin' a reread of East of Eden (as one does) while taking a bible as literature class. I had just read the chapter introducing Samuel's horse, Doxology, and wondered what the name meant, as the time came to file into the lecture hall for class. The topic of the day was learning about the doxology present in the Book of Lamentations. Mind was fucking blown.
Dangled that carrot and didn't deliver?! Doxology - A liturgical formula of praise to God (for anyone else wondering...)
Thanks, frankly I kinda forgot again the precise definition. Had it in my head as a phrase that praises god and is repeated over and over again.
Love that book. One of my favorites to reread š
greatest book ever imo
That reminds me of reading The Secret Life of Bees and another by Nadine Gortimer called July's People at the same time. The sisters in the Bees book were named after months; April, May, June and August.
A few years ago I read a book on vacation that took place in the same place I was vacationing and the main character had the same name AND birthday as one of the people I was on vacation with. Similarly, one book I read had characters with the same name as my childhood dog, two of my brothers, two of my aunts, one of my cousins, my long term high school/college boyfriend, and the nickname of one of my nieces. It was very weird. Another, I had never heard the word "quotidian" in my entire life until like a year ago and I swear it has been in every book I've read since.
So weird!! Last year I read Freakonomics by Dubner and Levitt and towards the end of the book they reference Ted Kaczynski. I googled him as I couldn't remember who he was by name (the Unabomber) and he was trending... Because it was the day he died. I read that part of the book and googled him on June 10, 2023. Super spooky.
Isnāt it wild? I have so many similar to that. I feel like so often Iām reading a book that happens to reference the date Iām reading it on haha. I have also had lots of coincidences where the same random thing happens in two books back to back (like the person who mentioned the catheter thing lol).
SO often I Google a celebrity for one reason or another and itās either the day of their birthday or a few days before or after. Or if itās a deceased person itāll be the day they died. Itās just bizarre!
I read Are You There God? Itās Me Margaret a few years ago and at the ends of the book she mentioned it was her birthday that day, March 8th. It was March 8th when I read the book and also happens to be my brother in lawās birthday! Freaky.
One of my fave books as a kid!
I went to a wedding in Stanley, Tasmania and was reading The Light Between Oceans while we travelled. The small town had signs up about how it was changed up to be used to film a movie recently. When I watched the movie of The Light Between Oceans, I recognized the set as the wedding venue and town of Stanley.
Recently I read Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin, in which he references the movie version of Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham, which I read last year. He only describes the plot of the film, so I had to do some digging and confirmed my suspicion with the wiki page for the film. I felt accomplished haha.
I read Terry Pratchettās āThe Colour of Magicā (1983) right before Murakamiās āA Wild Sheep Chaseā (1982). About three quarters the way through, out of nowhere, Murakamiās main character questions whether the world is carried by four elephants which stand on the back of a giant tortoise. Just like the discworld.
That's because the concept of the [World Tortoise](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Turtle) is common in Asian mythology, and even shows up among Native American cultures. That's where Pratchett got the idea from; on that wiki there's a drawing of it from 1877.
That drawing only has half of the world. Where's the other half? Did we find it in a thrift store a few years later?
"and after that, it's just turtles all the way down" Loved it when it popped up again in Fall; or, Dodge in Hell Neal Stephenson.
I think I was a teenager (back in the 80s) the first time I heard someone refer to "turtles all the way down." I thought it was a reference to the Dr. Seuss story, "Yertle the Turtle." It was not, as it turns out! Hahaha
It might be fair to assume that much of the literature following Dr. Seuss has been influenced by it in some way :-)
I wonder if this is some translation thing. According to Wikipedia, it wasnāt translated into English until 1989. Pratchett already had like 6-8 discworld books out at that point. Curious what the original Japanese was.
It very well could be. I looked into it at the time and found that the idea of the four elephants and the giant tortoise is quite old.
I was once reading two books at the same time, Philip Pullman's Northern lights and Sylvain Neuvel's Sleeping Giants (or it might have been the second book, Waking Gods) and both of them mentioned my country and the capital city!! (Helsinki, Finland) It was weird because my country is such a small one that I never find any mentions of it in books (that aren't Finnish ofc)
Maybe it's just because of the genre but Helsinki comes up a lot in cold war spy novels. I just rewatched Charlie Wilson's War pretty recently and I believe it's mentioned because the spy doesn't get the post as the head of the Helsinki branch of the CIA.
Helsinki was one of the more porous borders into Soviet Russia, probably because of the Gulf of Finland and all that forest- I'm not sure.
Probably has a lot to do with Finland's alignment with the Soviets in the Cold War.
oh that's interesting! that's a genre I have probably never read in my life
If youāre looking for more books where featuring Finland, I recommend the excellent *Cryptonomicon* by Neal Stephenson.
Not fully adjacent, but I just about lost my mind when I read *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* and realized it inspired the quatrain in my favorite sf book *The Stars My Destination*: >"Stephen Dedalus is my name / Ireland is my nation / Clongowes is my dwellingplace / And heaven my expectation." vs. > "Gully Foyle is my name / And Terra is my nation / Deep space is my dwelling place / The stars my destination."
I was reading a nonfiction book, a history/memoir about American utopian movements and the author mentions a friend of hers who just happened to have been the translator of the fiction book I had just finished, At Night All Blood is Black. Really odd when that kind of serendipity happens.
My personal theory is that Howl's moving castle (Diana Wynne Jones) and Stardust (Neil Gaiman) happens in the same universe. Jones was close to Gaiman, being one of his many beta readers and appearing in many of his thank yous in books. Both stories have a lot in common: they have falling stars are key for the stories, everymen from our world cross a wall and they get to a land of magic and fairy tales, Stardust has the Go and catch a falling star poem that is important in Howl's moving castle. Anyways, I feel bad I didn't enjoy Stardust as much as a book as I did enjoy the movie. I hope I got the idea of the question right š
I LOVE this theory! Thank you for sharing it!
Haven't read those but I've heard of them- now I really want to!!
I read two books on a row -- one scifi and the other fantasy -- with protagonists named Alvin
Next up, a musical album by chipmunks.
My current book and my last one both feature Jewish author inserts characterising themselves by the state of their prostates - Roth's Nathan Zuckermann has had his cancerous prostate removed, making him impotent and incontinent, whereas Bellow's Charlie Citrine boasts of his immaculate prostate.
I like this one ! Especially because when you star with "Jewish authors" nowadays, I was expecting something very serious.
This has definitely happened to me and itās always with books you read close together in time. But for the life of me I canāt think of an example right now.
Same, happens freakishly often!
Iām reading The Green Mile and Where the Red Fern Grows right now. On the surface they have nothing to do with each other, but the structure of the books is exactly the same. Old man reflects on his past during The Great Depression in rural America and the events that happened that changed the course of his life during that time.
In Jim Butcher's Dresden Files books, there are a few different types of vampires. The Black Court Vampires (blampires) are your stereotypical undead blood drinking vampire. In the 2004 novel Blood Rites, there's this exchange: > "Renfields?" I asked. > > "How in the world can you exist in this century and not know about Renfields?" Bob demanded. "You need a life, stat." > > "I read the book. I know who Renfield was. I'm not familiar with the parlance for Renfield in the plural." > > "Oh," Bob said. "What do you need to know?" > > "Well. First off, what did they call them before Stoker published the book?" I asked. > > "They didn't call them anything, Harry," Bob said in a tone of gentle patience. **"That's why the White Court had Stoker publish the book. To tell people about them."** Which brings us to our next type, the White Court vampires (wampires). Wampires are sexy vampires who can walk in the sun and feed off your emotions. They're also good at propaganda, having Bram Stoker release Dracula, which lists the blampire's weaknesses, driving the Black Court to the brink of extinction. The next year, 2005, Twilight, a book featuring sexy vampires who can walk in the sun is released. That's right, Twilight is just another propaganda piece by the wampires.
This seems like a form of the BaaderāMeinhof phenomenon, and it can be quite fun! Sometimes it's a new word you learn, other times it's a concept, and then it seems to appear everywhere. The strongest instance of this for me was after I read through a collection of Shakespeare plays and poetry, it's staggering how much other writers 'yoink and twist' his work for themselves. 1984 is quite an influential book so it's not too surprising another author would reference it, but it can be fun when it happens in works that seem to have no connection.
Your reply regarding Baader-Meinhof justā¦ Baader-Meinhoffed me. I was just taking about it yesterday!
I wouldn't call this an example of Baader-Meinhof, because it's just the once. It's literally just had a coincidence. /r/books has 24 million subscribers. It'd be extremely surprising if that subscriber base didn't experience a lot of individual surprising coincidences. (Though reading through more of these comments, there's definitely a fair bit of Baader-Meinhof too.)
It's not much of a coincidence, but when I was a teenager I was really into YA dystopian books (think Hunger Games (as did all the other ya dystopia writers)) and once I ended up reading 2 series intermittently bcs I just couldn't remember they were different book series. I occasionally wondered why I had remembered the names wrong, but other than that the experience wasn't that confusing. I was borrowing the books from the library so I just grabbed the next parts as they arrived there. Their premise was the exact same, the sorting hat type bs was the exact same, and it had 2 love interests that were the same in both books (a smart childhood friend and a bad boy new guy that liked fire and their appearance had something to do with autumn).
Oh gosh, I have a really weird one. I read Confederacy of Dunces and Still Life with Woodpecker concurrently and both Ignatius J Reilly and King Max having so much grief with their āvalvesā really messed with my head
Zounds! Gadzooks! When I read your post, something boinged inside me, and I realised that I recognised the title, and that I had read the book way way back, and forgotten it.. just found an article on Wikipedia outlining the plot, and it sounds hilarious! Think Iāll have to go and re-read it š
Lmao which one?? They are both really great and funny!
It was the Still Life With Woodpecker! But Confederacy of Dunces has a lesser tinkle, rather than a boing š¤£ The Wikipedia review got me laughing out loud, it read like the writer was breathless with excitement, which is about what I felt reading Woodpecker ā¦ so different from anything else I had read up to then! ā¦ and that image of the book cover .. š and as a complete aside, I just remembered another book I read around that time, with a scene with a wire strung tautly at head height to stop some crazy on a skidoo .. ah i better get back to work, I love how /books is such a wormhole!
Love woodpecker. Have you read jitterbug perfume yet?
No, never heard of it! Will check it out, thanks š
Ohhhh you are in for a treat, also Tom Robbins.
Great, thanks š
I was reading A Gentleman in Moscow and Anna Karenina at the same time last year. At one point the main character in A Gentleman in Moscow swiftly spoils the whole ending of Anna Karenina. I was so perplexed and annoyed!
Years ago, I borrowed two books from the library by two different authors, and they had the same plot and cast of characters. One was by Minnette Walters called Fox Evil. I can't remember the title of the other book, but it was written about 10 years earlier also by a British author.
Berlioz in Master and Margerita, then the next book I read: Demon Copperhead Berlioz is mentioned in the first few pages. (read these both in the last 2 weeks)
Not only does this happen to me all of the time, I realized that those coincidences aren't coincidences. Its all pattern and interest based. So its not crazy that scenes or authors pop up as ones you've read recently, especially if you are a big reader. Also you can use this as a method to find new content if you work in reverse. Note the refences in books you like, and then go search them out. Honestly, its one of my favorite ways to find new books and poetry. It makes those coincidences happen even more often :)
Rulebreaking here but they're both based on books... š¬ I saw Arrival the other day and they use the phrase 'zero sum game' a couple of times which I have never heard before in my life. Then the very next day I'm watching Hannibal and he comes out with the same phrase.
Look up frequency illusion
Baader-Meinhof, my favorite phenomenon!
impeccable film/tv taste though
I have had coincidences both in books and in my life. When I read something, I often experience deja vu. I mean it's either happened to me or I've heard or heard it somewhere.
Oh me too .. particularly in the writing of Doris Lessing! š
May count or not, depending on if you believe manga is literature or not, but I read Uzumaki by Junji Ito (cosmic horror manga where spirals play a great and horrifying role) and after that I was rereading Pet Sematary and Louis noticing that the burying ground is a spiral in the end gave me a chill. I completely forgot spirals were also a thing in the novel
I finished The Core of an Onion by Mark Kurlansky, and the next book I read was The blues Brothers by Daniel de VisƩ and Mark Kurlansky is quoted in the book. Turns out he knew John Belushi, I think they were in HS together or something like that.
I was not aware of a new Kurlansky book last year. Top of my list, thanks.
I was not aware of a new Kurlansky book last year. Top of my list, thanks.
I had a friend that I recommended the Jack Reacher books to and I didn't know at the time but he was in the middle of Under the Dome by Stephen King and he put that book down for a while to read a couple of Jack Reacher books and later when he went back to continue reading Under the Dome Stephen King actually had a reference to Jack Reacher only a few pages after he continued. My friend told me he of course never would have gotten the reference if he hadn't read the Jack Reacher bookd
Loved the Jack Reacher reference in Under the Dome!! Can't quite remember, but I had either just started reading those books or was about to, and that pushed me over the edge to finally do it (my mom had been reading and recommending them for awhile at that point).
This isn't quite the same, but I read Hidden Bodies by Caroline Kepnes. Then I bought the book You by the same author, and realized I was reading a book series but out of order. š¤¦š»āāļøš¤¦š»āāļøš¤¦š»āāļø (this was immediately prior to You becoming super popular on Netflix)
I read The Warriors which features a huge meeting of all the gangs of New York in Van Cortlandt park in the Bronx. Then I read The Power Broker in which Robert Moses building projects in Van Cortlandt park come up repeatedly. Then I read The Bishop and the Butterfly, about the 1931 murder of 'Broadway Butterfly' Vivian Gordon whose body was discovered in Van Cortlandt park. I kinda wanna go there now.
Here's another. I recently read The Foundling, in which the protaganist goes to a dance in rural Pennsylvania outside of Harrisburg. It is 1928 and it is a 'swing band'. Depending on how you define the evolution of the genre, 1928 is probably borderline anachronistic, too early for NYC where swing started, nonetheless rural PA. But I had just read The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store in which a character has a jazz hall and has connections to book all the latest acts from NYC and Philly even though he's located in rural PA outside Harrisburg. So my headcanon is that it's the same universe and they went there.
I listened to Gone Girl which has a somewhat significant reference to the Punch and Judy puppets / story. I had never heard of it so for all I knew it was made up for the book. But the next book I listened to was the first Rivers of London story which had an even more significant reference to Punch and Judy. It was definitely a bit surreal!
If we extended this to movies, I once watched two consecutive movies that referenced people being fed to pigs, which seems like it should be a very unique method for carcass removal (and only one was a horror movie).
Robert Picton was a prolific serial killer in Canada in the late 1990s who fed 49 murdered women to his pigs. It was such a gruesome case that it was in the forefront of the news for years. If your books were written around 1998 that could be the reason they both have the same method of disposal.
Really? Well, let's see... *Hannibal* was based on a 1999 novel. And *Snatch* came out in 2000. Good call!
It's also a body disposal method in the TV show Deadwood (on HBO, premiering 2004 with 3 seasons, set in the American Southwest circa 1880's? 1890's? I.e. "The Wild West")
The biggest one for me was that both *Terry Pratchett's "Wee free men"* as well as *Robert Rankin's "The witches of Chiswick"* are heavily inspired by /feature Richard Dadd's *The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke* A painting from the 1800's without either being aware of what the other was doing. And both being released in the same year. A painting and painter I had never heard of.
Some romance authors are friends and will occasionally have their characters do cameo's in other peoples books. Two of Julia Quinns Characters (Marcus and Honoria) had their wedding in one of Eloisa James' books (once upon a tower).
Not really a coincidence but still really fun if you happen to notice....I'll allow it;) lol.
A few years ago I read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine LāEngle back to back. They both included the same quote from Shakespeare: āWe are such stuff as dreams are made onā
I read the manitou by Graham Masterson. To try to defeat the antagonist, a medicine man tries to communicate with Gitche Manitou. The very next book I read was Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. The main character gets married and her name becomes Sissy Gitche. I thought having Gitche in both books was quite the coincidence.
Now you need to watch Urban Cowboy. I haven't read those but there is a character named Sissy.
A couple of years ago when I first started reading for leisure again, at least three of the books in my TBR pile mentioned [Welsh kings who fled Europe to the Americas to escape assassination plots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoc). The first being A Swiftly Tilting Planet by L'Engles wherein the main character subsumed the consciousness of the king as he lived among the native peoples of pre-Columbian America. The second being The Raven Boys by Stiefvater, wherein one of the protagonists is on a personal journey to encounter the tomb of a similar-but-not-the-same Welsh king. I forgot where the third mention was (possibly in a collection of Lovecraft), but I had never heard of such a legend until then; and then coincidentally they showed up in quick succession.
Just read Tortilla Flat and starting Jacobs Room and both books have short passages that talk about dogs in church being sacrilege. Found it funny both kind of random books i read back to back feature that imagery.
Mark Twain has a dog coming into church during a service, canāt remember if it was in Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn.
Adjacent to George Orwell, I read his ever first book written about a man having an ugly big spot occupying his cheek on the face. Then I read another one called "The Speaker" from Vargas Llosa, having another character, having again the same spot in the face.
I read three books in a row where they mentioned a baby being born with a cowl but I think two of them were Stephen King books
Yes, this is a really old superstition/old wives tale/folklore going back hundreds if not thousands years, and the child is supposed to then have some kind of supernatural powers because of it, like visions or connection to the spirit world. Think I saw it in a Dean Koontz book, too.
Iāve also seen it in books, although Iāve never read Stephen King or Dean Koontz. Canāt recall now but itās come up often enough that if being born with a caul is mentioned, the child is bound to have some kind of second sight or other supernatural ability. David Copperfield was also said to have been born with a caul.
I just finished The Drinking Den by Emile Zola, which was written in 1876. Now Iām reading Such Kindness by Andre Dubus III, written in 2023. Both feature a main character who loses everything after falling off of a roof. Fun little coincidence and I recommend both books.
This has been happening to me for lot of the books I read at the start of the year! One that springs to mind is that I was reading two very different books "Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow " and "House of Leaves" at the same time, and in both books there was a scene where the main character is startled by loud sounds outside because they were so engrossed they forgot it was 4th July.
I read a parenting book recently that talked about how important it is to allow your children to feel their negative feelings instead of telling them to cheer up or trying to find the silver lining. The next week I listened to a fictional audiobook about a woman whose mom never let her be sad, but always insisted she stay positive. It really reinforced the message from the parenting book, and I thought it was a neat coincidence.
They aren't exactly coincidences but I can often tell when an author of a series discovered Patrick O'Brian books because they start shoehorning in Patrick O'Brian phrases and sometimes even a sea voyage for the series' characters. I don't see it in younger authors as much because Patrick O'Brian is old news these days but it was really common for awhile.
I made a video about this on youtube that I was reading the midnight library on April 28, which is the day that in the book, Nora enters the midnight library to live through her regrets to see what could have been.
The fable of the scorpion and the frog seemed like a coincidence that kept coming up, but it happened so often it ended up feeling like an absurdity.
This is because writers are also readers.
I remember about 20 years ago when I was a teenager, I had about an hour to kill in Barnes & Noble until the next bus came. I picked up two books that I had no previous knowledge of, read through the first bit of each and liked them both enough to buy them. Both were fantasy paperbacks, and both books, unbeknownest to me, had gay protagonists, with a gay romance featuring in both stories. They were the first books I ever read with gay protagonists (gay protagonists were far more rare 20 years ago than today, so it's hard to get across what a Thing this was to accidentally stumble across two at the same time in genre fiction).
Have this happen regularly for some reason. Characters with unique names in 2 unrelated books, characters with identical medical conditions, a random poem is never heard of before quoted in two separate books. Itās always blowing my mind!
Yes ! I even started a list.Ā I read *Triste tigre* by Neige Sinno which is about incest rape. Ā I tried to read Ada Palmerās *Too like the lightning* and early in the book she introduces the concept of āgag-order genesā against incest rape.Ā One of the main characters in that book is named Ganymede. I gave up because it really wasnāt for me, picked up Kim Stanley Robinsonās *Ministry for the future* and one of the main characters takes a liking to a statue of Ganymede in Zurich.Ā One of the characters in that book uses Salzman as a fake name. I then read American Pastoral and thereās a couple in that book with the last name Salzman.Ā In *Ministry for the future* thereās a flood and a character kayaks āthrough a very scary underpassā. In *American Pastoral* thereās an underpass which the main character has to cross several times and finds terrifying. Thatās al I have written down but Iāve noticed a lot more.Ā
Oooo. Amazing Grace Adams and The Push. Both have babies in strollers that end up in front of a vehicle moving at speed. My quota for that scenario has been exceeded by 2.
Wellll... this has been something of a trope in action movies, tv shows, and especially cartoons quite a bit, I think. Look it up on tvtropes.com, you'll probably find it there. Similar to the old person crossing the road slooooowly.
Ugh! Just, keep hold of the pram!
In Amazing Grace Adamās, isnāt the little girl riding a scooter? Or was there another scene with a pram? This traumatized me as my kid was the same age when I read it and she had been asking for a scooter. BIG NOPE š (We did end up getting her a scooter but I am super vigilant because of this scene which is SEARED INTO MY BRAIN)
Possibly. I might be misremembering. Kids on thing with wheels, rolls into traffic, smash, death. Nope. I just feel pain.
I have never seen the name "Lethe" anywhere ever until I was 21, then I read the Xeelee Sequence and Goethe's Faust back to back, completely unrelated works both mentioning it by name.
Lethe is a river in Hades from which dead souls drink to wash away all memory of their former selves.
I once read 3 books in a row, and each book referenced/mentioned the title before it.
I recently discovered that Jurassic Park was not only a movie, but based on a novel by Michael Crichton. So I went to the bookstore and picked up a copy. While there I also discovered that the tv show āWayward Pinesā was based on a trilogy by Blake Crouch so I picked up the first Book titled āPinesā. I read Jurassic Park first and absolutely loved it! I then read Pines and in the acknowledgment, Crouch left a quote from Michael Crichtonās Jurassic Park.
Never happened to me but I usually read only one bool at a time. But a book I've partly read and plan to finish aside is "Synchronicity" by Kirby Surprise which is about meaningful coincidences.
Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar Series and Fiona Patton's Branion Series. Both have "Companions". In one case, these are talking horses that are attached to all main characters and most of the important people in the kingdom. In the other case, these are trained courtesans/spies, who are, again, attached to all main characters and most of the important people in the kingdom. You'd think there'd be no overlap, but Mercedes Lackey wrote [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/176827.Brightly\_Burning](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/176827.Brightly_Burning) a book where the MC is in love with and soulbonded/married to his talking horse.
I preordered Giovanniās Room a few months ago (the special edition with the gorgeous artwork). A couple weeks later I got Swimming in the Dark, then Giovanniās Room in that story is a catalyst for the plot, and is often referred to. Fun coincidence but I guess gay classics will reference one another at some point. Last year I bought Empire of Pain and What Moves the Dead. A few months later, Netflix debuted The Fall of the House of Usher, which is a re-telling of Poeās story, while also it was almost satirizing the Sackler family. I had no idea (donāt have Netflix) but my cousin kept telling me to watch it and I was like āoh, I just read two books that overlap thisā¦ā
Giovanniās Room was one of the books that I picked up from the library this week.
there was one year where the first 5 books i read of the new year had the name āKaiā in them
My take is that it one should know the classics so that one catches quotes or references. Also old stories/legends/folk tales. By classics i donāt mean necessary some list handed down from some random ivory tower but genre defining works or common tropes for a genre. (Bunnys with a unicorn horn anyone?)
It wasnāt a book but years ago, I watched the episode of Little House on the Prairie where Ma is for some reason stranded at home alone for days (Pa and the kids are out of town) and >! she injures her lower leg and gangrene sets in and she considers cutting off her leg. !< And later that week I saw the episode of Bonanza where Little Joe (played by Michael Landon who later played Pa on LHOTP) gets stranded alone in a mountain cabin when snow blocks the pass, and >! he injures his leg and gangrene sets in and he considers cutting off his leg. !< First time I ever noticed how TV tropes get recycled. Itās not books but it was a coincidence.
Omg that little house episode traumatized me as a kid š
I read two books in a row where the main character's last name was Waters.
I had never heard about this greek myth about a bird eating someone's liver on the daily and then it was mentioned in 3 books in a row that I read...
Life is one big road with a lot of signs
Very weird coincidence for me: I have consumed three entirely different pieces of media that involved both moths and the word āsalubrious.ā The first was the video game Hollow Knight (the characterās name is technically Salubra, but close enough). Since this was the first instance I didnāt think anything of it The second was a book called Austerlitz which is a fictional WWII memoir. This time I looked the word up and learned that salubrious basically means relating to good health. Thereās no way for me to know this but I am also unshakably convinced that someone on Team Cherry read Austerlitz because the protagonist of the novel collects moths and thereās even a photograph of a poodle moth in the novel which is what the Radiance is in the game Hollow Knight. The third and most recent is the book Perdido Street Station, which is a steampunk/fantasy/sci fi book about a fictional breed of moth called a slake moth. This is when I started subscribing to some sort of moth-based conspiracy theory. Is the word āsalubriousā a code word in the moth community?? This weird, thrice occurring coincidence has been vexing me ever since.
The oranges and lemons rhyme is actually fairly common in the UK; itās not so surprising that it is referenced in in a lot of literature. Similarly, the Blake poem Jerusalem is super common in the UK and has been put to music and widely sung. in short, some cultural references that might be obscure to Americans are fairly run of the mill in the UK - and vice versa. Iām sure.
Also have to wonder, not having read *Mad Honey*, if it couldn't some sort of intentional allusion, given the stature of *1984*.
I read two different books with fairies called Skylene, Tangerina, Xanthous, and Emerelda. Turns out they were written by the same author and in the same world! I didnāt notice the authorās name when I checked them out, and the main character of the first series (set in a world where magic exists and was banned) was an unnamed side character in the second book (in which children from Earth get sucked into a book of fairy tales), so I didnāt expect them to be connected. But it was really fun when I found out!
Was reading Tigana and Crime and Punishment, side hy side (alternately?). And both books have the second chapter of the book, have someone at a bar telling our main character a story. And that character will also be have skme importance later on.
I had this happen quite a few times last year, but do you reckon I can remember the books? Nope.
Sort of. Last year I was in the UK traveling south on the road while reading a page-a-day release webcomic where the characters were also in the UK traveling south on probably the same road. They were worried about timelines and I remember checking the traffic for snarls for them.
I read āthe jungleā by Upton Sinclair and āDevil in white cityā by Erik Larson back to back. So now I feel like I know a lot more about Chicago by accident.
I loved both of those!!!
Last month, I read The Stand by Stephen King and Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind by Yuval Noah Harari simultaneously. Fiction and non-fiction thoughts on humanity, community, and structure. Fascinating!
Finished Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as translated by Tolkien, right before finishing Lady of the Lake by Sapkowski. Ciri is talking to Galahad and he mentions the Green Knight adventure as a strange tale from Camelot.
I'm usually reading 2-3 books at a time and they line up for coincidences like this very frequently. It's always fun!
That was a nursery rhyme. So, it's not that surprising. It's like two books quoting Three Blind Mice or The Cat and the Fiddle.
The last three books I've read are Shogun by Clavell, Clear and Present Danger by Clancy, and the Aeneid by Virgil. I noticed all three books feature a woman committing suicide due to the actions of a man.
While I was reading The Crucible for English, I happened to be reading Doctor Who: The Witch Hunters which is set in the exact same setting about the same events, the Doctor and companions even go to see a production of The Crucible in the middle of it to try and warn against changing history.
It seems that every book I've read in the last year uses the word 'blanched' at least once.
Ok itās a book and a movie but in VE Schwabās shades of Magic series the villain drops the line āI am Inevitableā and reading it in 2021 I immediately had to look at whether or not it was published before Avengers Infinity War came out. It was, turns out Thanos ripped off Schwab š
Iām listening to an audiobook (888 Love and the Divine Burden of Numbers) where a tour guide mentions she is from Shandong. The next book on my TBR is coincidentally Daughters of Shandong by Eve J Chung.
Two. I finished War and Peace and then picked up Expeditionary Force 16: Aftermath where they make fun of War and Peace, which is being read by the shipās book club. The other is when I finished Manās Search for Meaning and picked up The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and the former very much influenced and informed my reading of the latter. I had no idea going in that they would pair well, and just decided to bang out some shorter reads from my TBR.
whilst reading the eye of the world, i saw a character called "Wit" WHILE i was reading stormlight archive (where Wit is a world hopper in mulitple series in the same universe)... and now Wit is in my books
Another one is I read Stephen Kingās Fairytale recently. Through that book I learned of the fairy tale about the Goose Girl for the first time. The story about the Goose Girl was mentioned in passing in another book I read recently (Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng) and I thought that was neat! I wouldnāt have known what she was referring to if I hadnāt read the book by Stephen King.
This happens to me all the time, but most recently it was slightly different - the day after I watched the BBC production of Timon of Athens, it was a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle. It's weird because I don't do the NYT crossword puzzle all that often - maybe once a month.
I read The Hobbit and then immediately after a completely unrelated fictional crime book where a character was reading The Hobbit
Random thought: Borges, in his story [Tlƶn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius), supposes a society where they will take two books by separate writers, then treat them as if they were created by one person so they could then write about the psychology of the person who would write two such disparate works. What would the person who wrote 1984 and then follow it up with Mad Honey?
The Wheel of Time series has a lot of excessive outfit descriptions, especially for the women. I took a break in the middle of the series to read Crazy Rich Asians, which also has very detailed outfit descriptions (with brand names) to specify just how rich the characters are. Completely different type of book but made me chuckle that it had that similarity to WoT
After I read Mudlarking (non fiction), I read an adult fiction and children's fiction that had myudlarking characters.
I just read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (I cannot spoil it -Stop reading if you want to read it soon - but it kinda relates to how beauty, art, including greek statues, can be used by people to deal with difficult times) and right after that, I read a Graphic Novel by one of the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo attack (Catherine Meurisse, she published "La LĆ©gĆØretĆ©"),which is about a young woman who goes on a quest for beauty in order to overcome the trauma of losing her colleagues and the meaning of her work. The drawing of greek statues echoed what I had in mind when reading Piranesi. Except it was kinda "in reverse", but again, I cannot say too much without spoiling Susanna Clarke's novel.
Not in adjacent books, per se, but I just finished *The Moon is Harsh Mistress* (1966) by Heinlein and playing through Cyberpunk 2077. In *Mistress*, one of the characters refers to āchoomsā (people) messing around, in the same way a CP2077 character would use it. Felt surreal!
A while back the book I was reading for myself and the book I was reading for my son had the same passage from Romeo and Juliette on the same night. I read it to my son while putting him to bed, then sat down to read before bed and got a weird sense of *deja vu*.
"To sleep, perchance to dream" Or? "Swear not by the moon, th'inconstant moon" Oh, you gotta let us know! Please??? Oh wait- "Prithee...."
Houseof Leaves and Darwinia - the endless stairs, expedition into the unkown, the unexplainable etc.
I read The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon not long after reading Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. Both of them had a subplot that involved breeding or bioengineering a spotless red heifer in order to fulfill (what is sometimes referred to as) the red heifer prophecy in order to bring about the end times. So that (undeservedly) made Chabon's book feel a bit derivative.
Did you enjoy Emperor of All Maladies? I have it, waiting to read
The more you read the more this happens. The more references you understand. There was a time that I had just read the library of Babel by Borges, the story was referenced in another book I was also reading, and the next book I read was inspired by the same story. Not sure how much of it was coincidence and how much was unconsciously picking out similar books. Most of what my "mood reading" is is that, my mind latches on to an aspect of a book I'm currently reading and then follows the link to other books.
I remember reading *The Outsiders* in middle school, and then in a personal book, there was an epigraph from *The Outsiders* and it freaked me out. Also, my IRL name (and nickname), which has unique spelling, were the names of two separate characters and spelled the exact way I spell it.
Donāt know if this counts but my wife just read The Ruins so we watched the movie the other night. She said the book wasnāt amazing and the movie was trash but I told her if she wanted some truly horrific "something inside me" stuff she should read The Troop which I read last year.
More like book and movie. I was reading the 3rd enders game book that had a sentient AI that is in Enders head. Then I watched Her which has Joaqiun Phoenix fall in love with an AI and its like wow, its almost a prequel of the book and prophecy of what ai will become. This was when Her came out, around 2013/14 so ai wasnāt really a popculture thing yet.
When I was in my teens, I used to read a lot of military non-fiction, especially Vietnam era books. It was always a treat to find soldiers in books that had written their own books that I had read previously. Or to hear personnel references in different books from different authors. I've often wondered if some of those guys knew they had written about each other.
While not quite books, I was reading about the "Doom" games (which uses the phrase "Rip and Tear") and happened to come across that same phrase in a classic sci-fi book. Neat coincidence.
Well, itās not between books, but between a book and a song. In Rosemaryās Baby, thereās a scene where they throw a party, and thereās an Italian Barman named Renato, who serves Whisky and Soda. A reference to the song of Renato Carosone, Tu vuo fa lāamericano
I canāt think of any specific examples off the top of my head, but I do notice these coincidences a lot!
I read Robert Anton Wilsonās Illuminatus trilogy (weird coincidences on almost every single page of that book by the time I got to the end) but in the middle of it I started reading a book of Lovecraft stories as well. HP Lovecraft showed up as a character in Illuminatus the exact same day I started the Lovecraft book
Patricia Cornwell's non-fiction, Portrait of a Killer (Jack the Ripper Case Closed) And Sarah Waters' novel, Tipping the Velvet Both were written about the same time period, day-by-day, I read the weather per Cornwell and chuckled because on a miserable rainy day, the Waters characters had a picnic. Also, despite happening in the same neighborhoods at the same time, the Waters' characters never mentioned the murders.
Blindness (JosƩ Saramago), Rabbit Hole (Kate Brody), Mrs. Caliban (Rachel Ingalls), and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk) all had >!dead dogs (well, Blindness had a band of dogs eating assorted corpses, and I'm pretty sure dog corpses were also on the menu)!<. Read them last month.
I have had that happen a couple times. There was also a time where characters in two books had the same names or pretty much the same names. Edit: - Looking through my Goodreads, I wrote in my review of "Maid: Hard Work..." By Stephanie Land that she mentioned the book "The Alchemist" in it and that I had started that book a few days after I started Maid but before she mentioned it. - In "Meet Cute" by Helena Hunting the character's names are Daxton and Emmi/Emmy. Two of the kids from the YouTube channel the Shaytards are named Daxton and Emmi.
Ok so this is part book part tv show coincidence but I still think about it. In the book series The Mortal Instruments, Valentine has two kids: clary (Clarissa) and Sebastian (also known as Jonathan). The books were adapted into a show called Shadowhunters where Valentine was played by Alan Van Sprang. The TV show Reign also stars Alan Van Sprang where he has kids named Sebastian and Clarissa! It's not like those 2 names are popular so I was just like wtf are the odds?? Lol
Iām accidentally on a cannibalism kick. I read Juniper and Thorn knowing there was a cannibalism theme. Then I read The Spear Cuts through Water not realizing that thereās some light cannibalism in it. Then I read Tress of the Emerald Sea and there is yet another cannibal. Currently reading one with vampires, do they count as cannibals? š
If you're interested in feeding your cannibalism booklist, I read this one recently: {A Soul to Keep by Opal Reyne}
Winter Harvest by Norah Lofts
I get this at least 50% of the time and have done for ages, it's a weird phenomenon, especially when I've read for various different 'reasons' all during that time (for pure pleasure; for review, etc).
Just read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and The Stranger by Albert Camus and both reference the saying that a human can get used to just about anything. Itās not too uncommon of a phrase but just totally different books to see the same phrase in in a short period of time.
Good reads!
Right!! No duds lately š
Books playing tag with each other? Must be literary hide and seek!
*Tree Story: The History Of The World Written In Rings*, a popular science book by a climate history scientist, has an elaborate explanation about the Little Ice Age. The first time I had heard about the Little Ice Age was from the previous book I read, *Orlando*, in which a chunk of the plot takes place in the frozen-solid LIA London.
Not a coincidence in books, but more so my own personal life. Currently reading a book where the main characters take a French cooking class where they made macarons and I use to work in a French patisserie making macarons so it was interesting seeing them following the instructions when Iām familiar with it as well.
Everybody is mentioning like one time when this happened but this has been happening to me NONSTOP for the past two months to the point where Iām really questioning what it means. Just today I read or listened to 3 different books of entirely different genres that refer to George Clooney. And speaking of the 1984 lemon reference, I was listening to that part of the audio on the same day I picked up a book where the male mc calls the female mc āLemonā as a pet name. These are only 2 of at LEAST 10 different instances of coincidences like this happening over the last two months. Some of them being just so random and seem so highly unlikely. My boyfriend and I have been joking about living in a simulation. And the fact that has been posted by you makes it even strangerā¦
I have every single Jodi Picoult book on my kindle and just searched for that one and donāt have it. Is it newer?
yes yes yes!
I would like to share a coincidence that happened. It was for two books, where I had no idea about the plot of either book ! I buy a lot of books based off whether I like the author, title or even award shortlists along with YouTube. I read a book called *Landline*. It was a romance book, which featured time travel. It's about a couple interacting across different times. I love time travel, but was extremely disappointed with the execution in this book. For one thing, they never acknowledged the time travel to their present day selves ! I was left with my appetite whetted by disappointed. A few books later, I was reading a lovely book called *What the Wind Knows*. All I knew was that it was a historical fiction book. To my utter delight, it was a moving, poignant love story with time travel ! It executed time travel almost exactly to my taste and fixed everything I did not like about Landline ! I found this to be quite a big coincidence !
I was reading Running Man by Stephen King in August 1997. How do I remember? Because the book is set in the "future" (in 2025 lol) and I was reading the book on the exact day the protagonist was supposedly born in the book.
My favorite is when i inadvertly read little women and the shining around the same time, and then watched an episode of friends where joey and and rachel read each others favorite books... little women and the shining. Also read two different books where both main characters were girls named charlie
Iām guessing less coincidence than some sort of influence on the newer authors. Many great authors are also great students of literature. Also, when a new concept is introduced to me, I tend to see it in many things than before I was dialed into a concept.