Books I inadvertently read in a sequence

This is about my reading life. I am not describing where I read several books randomly and then discovered they were part of a recognized set. It’s where I read two or more books randomly and discovered that they were about the same or a strongly related theme or somehow “spoke” to each other, without there being any overt references or evidence that the authors even knew about each other. For instance, in 2005, I read Vernon God Little by D. B. C. Pierre and Hey Nostradamus by Douglas Coupland, and then a year or two later, We Need To Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver. These three books are very different, in tone, point of view, worldview, and other ways, but all three are about boys who shoot people at their school. I didn’t know what the first two were about until I read them, and then of course I had to read the third. Prior to that, I think the first time I noticed the phenomenon, in 2003, was when I read two better-known books close together: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, and Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem.

I just started a new book from Lethem called The Feral Detective. I’ve been reading tons of crime novels of all sub-genres, nationalities, and levels of acclaim, for over 30 years now. And since “retirement,” I have been tormenting myself with insane reading challenges. (My 2020 Reading Challenge of 100 books is…