Following the lead of Bookish Beck, I have been keeping track of instances of book serendipity, where the same subject comes up in more than one place around the same time. My lists aren’t nearly as comprehensive as Beck’s, maybe because I don’t have as much attention to detail. But here are a few I’ve noted in the past few months:
References to Pompey the Great in Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare and The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, read on the same day.
A transport with “Gypsy” in its name in Ancestry by Simon Mawer and The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller, read one after another.
Factions among the faculty of a girls’ school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark and the short story “The Greek Play” by H. C. Bailey in the British Library “Lessons in Crime,” read one after another.
A son of an important man disappears from school in adjacent stories in the British Library collection Lessons in Crime, “The Adventure of the Priory School” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and “The Missing Undergraduate” by Henry Wade.
In the category of related serendipity, two different blog reviews of books by Robert van Gulik randomly read on the same day.
What? Me Read? 
These are all very specific! I’ve never heard of van Gulik, so for him to turn up twice in a day seems particularly unusual.
i think so, too, because I had never heard of him, either.
Feeling smug that I’m one of the van Gulik serendipiters (do you like the new word?)
Perfect!