Rolling

Booking through Thursday this week asks us: Do you get on a roll when you read, so that one book leads to the next, which leads to the next, and so on and so on? I don’t so much mean something like reading a series from beginning to end, but, say, a string of books that all take place in Paris. Or that have anthropologists as the main character. Or were written in the same year. Something like that… Something that strings them together in your head, and yet, otherwise could be different genres, different authors…

Although I don't like to get into a rut and am more likely to avoid reading back to back several books set in Spain say, I will often read books because there is a small connection between them, I'm too lazy to do research on this at the minute and name books but I once read two books back to back because they both had the same quote from Dante in the introduction, though they had nothing else in common. Over the past year I've read several books that have been partly set at sea, as is the current book I'm reading 'Do White Whales Sing at the End of the World' by Paul Wilson. This novel has nothing in common with the previous book I read which was the wonderful short novel set in a dying village in the Spanish Pyrenees - The Yellow Rain by Julio Llamazares. Yet on page 4 in Do White Whales Sing we find this passage:

From the village, the colony rises abruptly from its shoulder of land. At night it has the look of a castle - it is all dark stone and narrow lights and seems set to repel invaders. In daylight it seems more like a small medieval village, the kind you might stumble across unexpectedly in the Pyrenees of Spain.

These are the connections I most love to find between books, the unexpected serendipitious links that prove that everything is connected!