My life in books

One of the books I'm reading just now is John Marino's The Grail Legend in Modern Literature. He opens his introduction with a reference to Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous. One of Mitchison's other books is Memoirs of a Spacewoman, which made a deep impression on me as a young girl, and since wolfinthewood recommended it, I've been hunting around for a copy of To the Chapel Perilous.

Marino, in discussing Mitchison, makes note of the fact that another Arthurian scholar, Raymond H. Thompson, has been collecting interviews with modern authors of Arthurian literature, including Mitchison, over the past two decades. Ray Thompson was my mentor in grad school.

Coincidences like this amuse and delight me to no end, whether it be the way the books I read cross my "real" life in some way, or simply how the books I choose to read, often more or less at random, relate to each other.

For instance, a couple of years ago, I was reading a history of women's lives in colonial Upper Canada, and while looking at the acknowledgments, realised that one of my colleagues at work had been one of the author's grad students and had assisted with the research.

And then there's the delightful coincidence from earlier this year, in which I read a passage in Tariq Ali's Street-fighting Years in which he mentions meeting C.L.R.James, the author of The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, a classic Marxist historical analysis of the Haitian Slave Revolt in the context of the French Revolution - which was in fact at that very moment sitting in my pile of "to-be-read-soon" books, as was Nalo Hopkinson's The Salt Roads, a portion of which, as I discovered soon thereafter, is set among the participants in an earlier and unsuccessful wave of Haitian uprisings.

I wonder what the English-language literary equivalent of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" would be - six degrees of Isaac Asimov? Georges Simenon? Barbara Cartland?