Two great tastes that taste great together
April 28, 2022 6:54 PM Subscribe
Can you recommend two books that complement each other in striking ways when read at the same time, or one right after the other? I'm not so much thinking of books that refer or respond to each other explicitly, but rather books that have thematic or structural connections, such that your understanding of each is enriched by having read the other around the same time.
By serendipity, I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest immediately after having read William Styron's Darkness Visible.
In Darkness Visible, Styron discusses deep depression and suicide, and the difficulty (impossibility) of describing the pain of depression to someone who hasn't experienced it. He discusses psychiatrists trivializing and misunderstanding the pain of depression. He discusses the inadequacy of the word "depression".
In Infinite Jest, Wallace has his character Kate Gompert express and act out all these same painful ideas in her session with a clueless psychiatric resident. It's a brilliant enactment of what Styron wrote about in his book. And layered over it all is the knowledge of Wallace's own depression and how his life ended.
I don't know whether Wallace read Darkness Visible and whether these passages were inspired by it. It feels like he must have read the book, but some quick googling doesn't reveal anything.
But that's not the point and doesn't really matter for the purposes of this question, which is simply whether you can recommend two books that enrich each other when read at the same time, or in close proximity. They don't have to agree; one could completely change what you thought you understood after reading the first. But they should have an impact that is more than you would have gotten if you'd just read one of the books, or had read them years apart. Genre is unimportant. I'm open to both fiction and nonfiction recommendations.
By serendipity, I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest immediately after having read William Styron's Darkness Visible.
In Darkness Visible, Styron discusses deep depression and suicide, and the difficulty (impossibility) of describing the pain of depression to someone who hasn't experienced it. He discusses psychiatrists trivializing and misunderstanding the pain of depression. He discusses the inadequacy of the word "depression".
In Infinite Jest, Wallace has his character Kate Gompert express and act out all these same painful ideas in her session with a clueless psychiatric resident. It's a brilliant enactment of what Styron wrote about in his book. And layered over it all is the knowledge of Wallace's own depression and how his life ended.
I don't know whether Wallace read Darkness Visible and whether these passages were inspired by it. It feels like he must have read the book, but some quick googling doesn't reveal anything.
But that's not the point and doesn't really matter for the purposes of this question, which is simply whether you can recommend two books that enrich each other when read at the same time, or in close proximity. They don't have to agree; one could completely change what you thought you understood after reading the first. But they should have an impact that is more than you would have gotten if you'd just read one of the books, or had read them years apart. Genre is unimportant. I'm open to both fiction and nonfiction recommendations.
You could add M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart to PussKillian's suggestions - college friends haunted by an occult ritual they performed as students - also about the cost of becoming a grown-up and how misunderstandings can ramify and become terrible over time.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:21 PM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:21 PM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
I read both Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Elizabeth Rush) and The Water Will Come (Jeff Goodell) around the same time a few years ago. Both are non-fiction books about the front lines of climate change in America. Both visit communities that are already being affected by things like sea-level rise and hurricanes. Rush is very gentle, Goodell is borderline gonzo. But I really liked reading both around the same time to see how brilliant writers can cover the same topic so differently.
posted by mostly vowels at 7:44 PM on April 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by mostly vowels at 7:44 PM on April 28, 2022 [3 favorites]
Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 by Andy Horowitz
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom is a memoir in much of the same time and place
posted by sepviva at 8:07 PM on April 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom is a memoir in much of the same time and place
posted by sepviva at 8:07 PM on April 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty Four.
posted by pompomtom at 8:15 PM on April 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by pompomtom at 8:15 PM on April 28, 2022 [5 favorites]
I must be thinking quite a bit about getting old... but the two books that I've just read and re-read are:
The Beauty of Dusk, by Frank Bruni
Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman
posted by applesurf at 8:47 PM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
The Beauty of Dusk, by Frank Bruni
Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman
posted by applesurf at 8:47 PM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff and This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff. Two brothers whose parents divorced; Toby went with Mom (who married Dwight) while older bro Geoff went with their Dad. Later, they wrote about it.
posted by Rash at 8:59 PM on April 28, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by Rash at 8:59 PM on April 28, 2022 [6 favorites]
Animal Farm, George Orwell -.The Pugachov Rebellion, Pushkin. The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins - Trout Fishing In America, Richard Brautigan. The Four Agreements, Ruiz - Meta Programming the Human Biocomputer, Dr. John C. Lilly.
posted by Oyéah at 9:20 PM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Oyéah at 9:20 PM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
So, this is three, not two but I read Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves, Waubgeshig Rice's Moon on the Crusted Snow and Tanya Talaga's Seven Fallen Feathers ago around the same time. The first two are both Indigenous speculative fiction and the third is non-fiction. The two novels share a lot of common themes and Talaga's book explains - as background to her telling us a lot about the state of modern Indigenous communities in Canada - the common cultural history out of which those themes grew.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:47 PM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by jacquilynne at 9:47 PM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
I read The Da Vinci Code on a long plane ride and it ruined my day. It was sooooo bad that I threw it down in disgust when I finished it. When I got to my destination, the library in the furnished rental had Foucault’s Pendulum by Eco, which was the first thing I picked up and read. I felt like it restored order in the world, and reset my brain from that Dan Brown slop.
It was the book Dan Brown was trying to write, or should have written, but already existed and didn’t need to be done again. It had an actual point of view and something interesting to say about the same subject. Did Brown even read it as part of his process? Probably not. So anyway, I can’t recommend Da Vinci Code, but if you have to read it, reading Foucaults Pendulum right after is an effective and edifying antidote.
posted by ohio at 10:48 PM on April 28, 2022 [13 favorites]
It was the book Dan Brown was trying to write, or should have written, but already existed and didn’t need to be done again. It had an actual point of view and something interesting to say about the same subject. Did Brown even read it as part of his process? Probably not. So anyway, I can’t recommend Da Vinci Code, but if you have to read it, reading Foucaults Pendulum right after is an effective and edifying antidote.
posted by ohio at 10:48 PM on April 28, 2022 [13 favorites]
Not two novels, but two works of art that complemented each other in this way for me: the novel Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen and the film Parasite, by Bong Joon-Ho. Both about the allure of attractive real estate, the clash between rich and poor, the dirty and sometimes subtle and sometimes crude work of keeping others in their place, and ways to outsource it. What struck me most, is in how in both works, the people at the top mostly seem to keep their hands clean, because by "the keeping others down"-part is usually enacted by the slightly more successful climbers.
"Wuthering Heights" and "Twilight" could also make an illuminating "compare and contrast". I can't really stomach the prose in Twilight, so all I know about it is by cultural osmosis, but there's apparently an intertextual reference to Wuthering Heights in Twilight, and I can see some delicious irony in that. Because both novels are obviously about dangerous lovers (I wrote a seminar paper once about that trope, Byronic heroes, neckbiter romance novels - good stuff). I think it's fun that the protagonist in Twilight is named Bella, whose favourite novel is Wuthering Heights, because Wuthering Height has an Isabella who also falls for the bad boy and is clearly in over her head, and it ends very badly for her. She's, crucially, not the romantic heroine, but an unfortunate side character, who's used and discarded. Not having read Twilight, I'm still willing to bet that Twillight's Bella fancies herself a Catherine, the actual heroine of Wuthering Height, who's the dangerous lover's real soulmate. And yet her author named her Bella after the other girl. One of these days I might actually read Twilight, just to find out whether that was an accident.
posted by sohalt at 11:31 PM on April 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
"Wuthering Heights" and "Twilight" could also make an illuminating "compare and contrast". I can't really stomach the prose in Twilight, so all I know about it is by cultural osmosis, but there's apparently an intertextual reference to Wuthering Heights in Twilight, and I can see some delicious irony in that. Because both novels are obviously about dangerous lovers (I wrote a seminar paper once about that trope, Byronic heroes, neckbiter romance novels - good stuff). I think it's fun that the protagonist in Twilight is named Bella, whose favourite novel is Wuthering Heights, because Wuthering Height has an Isabella who also falls for the bad boy and is clearly in over her head, and it ends very badly for her. She's, crucially, not the romantic heroine, but an unfortunate side character, who's used and discarded. Not having read Twilight, I'm still willing to bet that Twillight's Bella fancies herself a Catherine, the actual heroine of Wuthering Height, who's the dangerous lover's real soulmate. And yet her author named her Bella after the other girl. One of these days I might actually read Twilight, just to find out whether that was an accident.
posted by sohalt at 11:31 PM on April 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
I spent a whole summer concurrently reading Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible, the King James Bible, and a Catholic bible. It was was much easier to understand the bibies with insights to historical and cultural background. I was raised Catholic (with 8 excruciating years in Catholic school) so it was also interesting to see the differences between the Catholic and Protestant versions. They don't even agree on the ten commandments. Before I read them, I was an atheist and afterwards I was an even more committed atheist.
A benefit of this study has enabled me to refute anyone who tries to convince me of any argument that is based on "it says so in the Holy Bible."
If you read them be aware that there are multiple triggers for extreme violence, degrading sexism, slavery, genocide, and incest. Spoiler: God is a corrupt and vain asshole.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 1:13 AM on April 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
A benefit of this study has enabled me to refute anyone who tries to convince me of any argument that is based on "it says so in the Holy Bible."
If you read them be aware that there are multiple triggers for extreme violence, degrading sexism, slavery, genocide, and incest. Spoiler: God is a corrupt and vain asshole.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 1:13 AM on April 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
A couple of months ago I read a memoir about growing up in a bookless home in Greater Manchester
No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader (Review) by Mark Hodkinson. Mark became a journalist, biographer and publisher despite this and hats off!
Last week, I finished My Name is Why (Review) by Lemn Sissay who grew up on the other side of Greater Manchester at about the same time and became a poet and Chancellor of the Local University.
tl;dr challenging though family life might be, growing up in care is a different gig.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:56 AM on April 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader (Review) by Mark Hodkinson. Mark became a journalist, biographer and publisher despite this and hats off!
Last week, I finished My Name is Why (Review) by Lemn Sissay who grew up on the other side of Greater Manchester at about the same time and became a poet and Chancellor of the Local University.
tl;dr challenging though family life might be, growing up in care is a different gig.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:56 AM on April 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
I recently read the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance) by Jeff Vandermeer and The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey in quick succession, and the conversation between the two stories/worlds/sets of characters really enriched both for me. Both are speculative fiction novels about something deeply inhuman altering the world as we know it and making it unrecognizable, and about women and queer people stepping into that change. Feels like a really inadequate description, go read them, they’re all amazing books!
posted by cabbage raccoon at 2:14 AM on April 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by cabbage raccoon at 2:14 AM on April 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
In the past couple weeks I read The Anomaly by Hervé le Tellier followed by Emily St. John Mendel's new short novel Sea of Tranquility. I don't want to give anything away but both explore the nature of reality and question what is or isn't out of control of the individual (and why). Both are excellent and kind of shockingly complimentary.
posted by CheeseLouise at 4:32 AM on April 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by CheeseLouise at 4:32 AM on April 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
It may be weird and old, but, perhaps Let us Now Praise Famous Men and To a God Unknown?
posted by eotvos at 4:53 AM on April 29, 2022
posted by eotvos at 4:53 AM on April 29, 2022
George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm are nominally about fascism and communism respectively, but really they're both about authoritarianism, and how top-down command and bottom-up revolution can lead to the same kind of outcomes - a huge amount of control for a very small number of people and increasing logical inconsistencies that must be ignored for an absolutist system to work.
Also by Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, and Road to Wigan Pier are the non-fiction chasers to Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
posted by underclocked at 5:23 AM on April 29, 2022
Also by Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, and Road to Wigan Pier are the non-fiction chasers to Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
posted by underclocked at 5:23 AM on April 29, 2022
Someone mentioned the Southern Reach trilogy above- this works wonderfully with a lot of Stanislaw Lem. Particularly thinking of His Master’s Voice, Golem XIV, and The Chain of Chance.
posted by Jobst at 5:51 AM on April 29, 2022
posted by Jobst at 5:51 AM on April 29, 2022
Oooh, I have two for you. Not novels, but written by novelists and with similar themes on beauty, creativity, the early career arc of a writer, illness, addiction, friendship and loss. I think it may be important to read them in this order:
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
(Ann Patchett's book reflects upon her friendship with Lucy Grealy).
posted by nanook at 6:59 AM on April 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
(Ann Patchett's book reflects upon her friendship with Lucy Grealy).
posted by nanook at 6:59 AM on April 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, followed by Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. I've read "Arcadia" a few times, and I particularly enjoyed it when I was primed by Rovelli's recounting of the physics.
posted by icebergs at 8:00 AM on April 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by icebergs at 8:00 AM on April 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
Pick any two (or all three, like I find myself binging every few years): Thackaray's Vanity Fair with Wharton's The Custom of the Country with Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds for fantastic anti-heroines you can't help but root for.
Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Octavia Butler's Kindred are different modern, speculative books grappling with slavery in the US that are each gutting in different ways.
posted by Mchelly at 8:05 AM on April 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Octavia Butler's Kindred are different modern, speculative books grappling with slavery in the US that are each gutting in different ways.
posted by Mchelly at 8:05 AM on April 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
The Bees by Laline Paull and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (in any order, although I read The Bees first and Convenience Store Woman second)
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbar Tuchman (first) and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (second)
posted by velocipedestrienne at 10:26 AM on April 29, 2022
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbar Tuchman (first) and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (second)
posted by velocipedestrienne at 10:26 AM on April 29, 2022
The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson.
Preferred: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe - Hell's Angels, Hunter S. Thompson.
posted by Rash at 11:32 AM on April 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
Preferred: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe - Hell's Angels, Hunter S. Thompson.
posted by Rash at 11:32 AM on April 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
John Crowley's Ægypt Cycle
Dame Frances Yates' Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
posted by thatwhichfalls at 2:47 PM on April 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
Dame Frances Yates' Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
posted by thatwhichfalls at 2:47 PM on April 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'm currently reading The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth and it makes a really interesting pairing with my favorite book Riddley Walker. Both use a purpose-built, idiosyncratic orthography that recalls Old English, and both take place in societies at similar levels of development, but one is far-future post-apocalyptic England and one is England in the 11th century.
posted by babelfish at 5:31 PM on April 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by babelfish at 5:31 PM on April 29, 2022 [2 favorites]
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr by E.T.A. Hoffmann and The Lyre of Orpheus by Robertson Davies.
posted by perhapses at 7:03 PM on April 29, 2022
posted by perhapses at 7:03 PM on April 29, 2022
In the library world, the term used for this is "book pairings." A search with that term will bring up a lot of options.
posted by momochan at 9:46 AM on April 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by momochan at 9:46 AM on April 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
In the early bloom of hypertext scholarship, there were some great articles written about the overlaps between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and William Gibson's Neuromancer, and I've assigned them together in a few classes.
Two recent collections of war fiction, Will Mackin's Bring Out the Dog and Hassan Blasim's The Corpse Exhibition, fit together in uncanny and compelling ways. The connections get darker and more difficult if you add in the nonfiction Black Hearts by Jim Frederick and The Good Soldiers by David Finkel and the Wikileaks Collateral Murder video.
Christa Wolf's Cassandra and Madeline Miller's Circe.
Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire.
posted by vitia at 1:56 PM on April 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Two recent collections of war fiction, Will Mackin's Bring Out the Dog and Hassan Blasim's The Corpse Exhibition, fit together in uncanny and compelling ways. The connections get darker and more difficult if you add in the nonfiction Black Hearts by Jim Frederick and The Good Soldiers by David Finkel and the Wikileaks Collateral Murder video.
Christa Wolf's Cassandra and Madeline Miller's Circe.
Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire.
posted by vitia at 1:56 PM on April 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
I’m reading Studs Lonigan and I recently read The Adventures of Augie March; both tell the stories of depression-era working-class Chicago-born young men. Augie does a fair bit of traveling and so far the farthest Studs has gone from Washington Park is Terre Haute, for a funeral.
Both books are great reads- Bellow and Farrell can really rip a yarn- and the contrast between the two characters (and authors) is pretty interesting. Augie is someone who doesn’t have much agency (things happen to him and Bellow doesn’t dwell on what he’s thinking) while Farrell gives us a lot of Studs’ inner workings while the character literally goes nowhere (so far).
Studs Lonigan Is chock-full of incredibly racist characters (including the protagonist) which can make it a rough read, don’t say I didn’t warn you, but so far it’s been worth the effort (ask me again in a week or two). Augie March has some pretty harrowing parts but was much easier to get through.
posted by Admiral Viceroy at 4:47 PM on April 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Both books are great reads- Bellow and Farrell can really rip a yarn- and the contrast between the two characters (and authors) is pretty interesting. Augie is someone who doesn’t have much agency (things happen to him and Bellow doesn’t dwell on what he’s thinking) while Farrell gives us a lot of Studs’ inner workings while the character literally goes nowhere (so far).
Studs Lonigan Is chock-full of incredibly racist characters (including the protagonist) which can make it a rough read, don’t say I didn’t warn you, but so far it’s been worth the effort (ask me again in a week or two). Augie March has some pretty harrowing parts but was much easier to get through.
posted by Admiral Viceroy at 4:47 PM on April 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
HEY! I kind of asked this same question nine years ago. Oddly enough with another David Foster Wallace piece. ("A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and Moby Dick.) So click through and check those out, too. (Your post title is much better than mine.)
posted by rikschell at 8:02 PM on May 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 8:02 PM on May 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
"A Supposedly Fun Deadly Monomaniacal Whale-Hunt I'll Never Do Again"
posted by crazy_yeti at 11:40 AM on May 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by crazy_yeti at 11:40 AM on May 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
> Not two novels, but two works of art that complemented each other in this way for me
watched back-to-back on a flight and resonated...
-i am mother
-room
posted by kliuless at 12:12 AM on May 4, 2022
watched back-to-back on a flight and resonated...
-i am mother
-room
posted by kliuless at 12:12 AM on May 4, 2022
1984 and Brave New World blew my mind in sequence when I was a wee teen.
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and John Wyndham's The Chrysalids
or maybe Handmaid's Tale with PD James' Children of Men
posted by nouvelle-personne at 6:41 PM on May 4, 2022
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and John Wyndham's The Chrysalids
or maybe Handmaid's Tale with PD James' Children of Men
posted by nouvelle-personne at 6:41 PM on May 4, 2022
I once read Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible, about white missionaries in Africa, not long after I had read Heart of Darkness and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart for a course I was taking. I was so struck by how themes and imagery in The Poisonwood Bible were clearly responding to/riffing on/taking part in a conversation with those earlier books. I ended up leading a book group where we read those three books in that order, and my book group participants definitely saw what I had hoped they would see, and felt like it enriched reading The Poisonwood Bible to know these earlier books, one by a white European and one by a Nigerian about a village that is encountering missionaries.
As an erstwhile literature scholar, this kind of thing is one of my favorite things that can happen with books—when you can see how books written at different times are part of the same conversation, or how books written during a specific period are taking on similar issues in similar and different ways.
posted by Well I never at 7:05 PM on May 8, 2022
As an erstwhile literature scholar, this kind of thing is one of my favorite things that can happen with books—when you can see how books written at different times are part of the same conversation, or how books written during a specific period are taking on similar issues in similar and different ways.
posted by Well I never at 7:05 PM on May 8, 2022
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posted by PussKillian at 7:15 PM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]