Good Reads

I was sitting at the window seat just behind the pivoting joint of an articulated bus. A woman sat in one of the middle seats directly in front of me. She was reading A Little History of the World, a book I immediately noticed, because I've recently been reading portions of it between other novels.

A couple stops later, a man with a head cold sat down in the middle seat across from this woman, carrying nothing but a paperback copy of The Stand, by Stephen King. Setting aside the obvious coincidence of a man with a head cold reading a novel about the superflu, what's even stranger was I had also recently been reading the book. In fact, he owned the same edition I currently had in my bag.

I was amused at this point, but still willing to pass it off as nothing more than a mild coincidence. After all, The Stand, like most Stephen King novels, was a huge seller, and it's no surprise that someone might think to reread it amidst all the media hoopla about swine flu. And though "A Little History of the World" is no best-seller, it was recently released in paperback, and was a featured non-fiction item at Elliott Bay Books.

But then a woman sat next to me reading a bilingual copy of Dante's Paradiso, the sequel to his most famous work, Inferno. I've never read Paradiso, but I had been reading portions of Inferno recently, particuarly a bilingual translation with the Italian on the left side and the English on the right.

So there I was - suddenly surrounded by three books I had been at least partially connected to within the past week. And before that morning, they had seemed like disparate works to me, but as each passenger showed up in order, I started to see an overarching connection between them. There was the development of the world from pre-history to modernity; the speculative novel about humanity's near demise and ultimate redemption, and Dante's poetic vision of an ideal afterlife. Was the bus trying to send me some important message about the universe?

Maybe not. Just as I was stepping off the bus, the Flaming Lips were playing on my headphones: "Oh, oh, oh, finding the answer. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Finding there ain't no answer to find."