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The pleasure of browsing the shelves of a library or bookstore is the pleasure of surprise, of discovery. I don't know how many new readers Ryu Murakami has won by simply taking up shelf space next to Haruki Murakami, for example, but I suspect it's a not-insignificant number. And some not-insignificant portion of those readers have surely read more books by Ryu Murakami because they were surprised by how much they enjoyed him. These are the sorts of introductions that an algorithm can't broker. These are more than accidents—they're serendipities, and serendipities are part of the joy of reading. But they're not the only accidental-yet-meaningful discovery that comes from reading. I love it when I set down a book and pick up another, completely different book to find that they share some secret thematic link that only becomes obvious when the two books are read in sequence. A superstitious reader would call it a sign, but even the most reasonable person has to step back and wonder at the meaning behind the meaninglessness, if only for a moment.

Let's back up a bit: I went on vacation last week. Before I go on vacation, I have to choose the books I'll bring with me on vacation. This is important stuff: The books you bring on vacation can affect your mood. I go through a long and involved screening process that involves a two-foot stack of books in my living room. This process may or may not involve chicken blood and angry tears. Books enter the pile, they leave the pile, they re-enter the pile. I stare at their spines for a while, trying to divine whether or not I'll enjoy them or toss them aside after a disastrous first few pages. I eventually shave the two feet of books down by half, and I try for a relatively broad range of reading material.

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Two of the novels I brought with me* were about as diametrically opposed as works of fiction can be. The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence was recommended by a bookseller at Third Place Books, and it's definitely the crowd-pleaser of the two, a big-hearted John Irvingesque novel about a young man who gets hit in the head with a meteor and becomes a celebrity. Edward St. Aubyn's The Patrick Melrose Novels, which was given to me as a gift, is almost exactly the opposite of big-hearted, a collection of four novels about the eternally bored citizens of the British upper class and the terrible things they do to each other out of nothing so much as a sense of sport. One is a nasty but highly literary bit of business speckled throughout with dark comedy, and the other is an adorable, hard-to resist love letter to the work of Kurt Vonnegut. They're the sorts of books that should have absolutely nothing in common, but I was surprised to discover that they share a climactic dilemma, and they approach that dilemma from a remarkably similar place.

Woods veers into earnest cliche occasionally (but never in a leg-humping sort of way) as it documents the friendship between a bitter old man and a teenage boy. It's one of those debut novels that the author dumps everything into, presumably because he assumes he'll never have the opportunity to write another book again, resulting in pleasant digressions like a visit to the Large Hadron Collider and a delightful reappraisal of Vonnegut's underrated final novel, Timequake. Melrose is impossibly funny, especially for a book with a shocking amount of sexual misconduct, drug abuse, and cruelty, and it's elegantly constructed, too, circling around the life of Patrick Melrose, a highly intelligent young man who happened to suffer from the misfortune of being born to wealthy monsters. The former is a novel that looks to the best of human behavior, the latter dwells, beautifully, in the worst.

And yet both books conclude with meditations on assisted suicide and feature protagonists who reach out to assisted-suicide experts in Switzerland for guidance in their situation. Though both novels approach assisted suicide from very different moral standpoints, they approach the decision of taking one's own life when all other options have been exhausted with the same amount of sympathy and dignity. I pictured the main characters crossing paths in a hospital hallway—one a teenage boy practically vibrating with optimism, the other a middle-aged man who suspected from childhood that things would turn out badly, and who then did everything within his power to make that prophecy come true. They'd catch each others' eyes for a moment, nod in recognition despite themselves, and then head in opposite directions, to their fates. No matter what you choose to see when you look at the world, Woods and Melrose agree, there are some inescapable truths that simply cannot be ignored, and those truths demand our respect.

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As I was repeatedly tearing down and rebuilding that two-foot pile of vacation books, I must've subconsciously been in a British mood; Extence and St. Aubyn are both British authors, and so is Nick Harkaway, the author of Tigerman, which is the novel I tore through in the six-hour flight back to Seattle. Tigerman stars a very British man referred to as The Sergeant, who is living out a kind of purgatory on an environmentally ruined island. The Sergeant spends a lot of his time looking after an island native he calls boy. Boy is obsessed with comic books and inserts unspeakable internet phrases ("full of win," "ZOMG") into conversation. The island's population is dwindling as the nation is continually wracked with bizarre ecological assaults:

The third Cloud caused fish to change sex and provoked a wave of lust and license across Mancreu. It was remembered for months as a very good party, but the children born of passionate couplings in the Cloud could not speak. A German specialist, flown in to study the matter, pronounced that the entire section of the brain dealing with language—Broca's Area, he said—was missing.

As an international coalition of troops circle the island and prepare to consign it to history, the Sergeant decides he wants to adopt the boy. The best way he knows how to demonstrate his commitment to the boy is by becoming what the boy loves best: A hero. Tigerman is packed with action and wonderful character moments and all sorts of sharp observations about colonialism and fatherhood and heroism, but as I turned the pages so quickly I was afraid I would get paper cuts, it struck me as the perfect synthesis of the other two novels I read on vacation: The cynical and war-weary Sergeant trying to inspire the young and naive boy by reigniting his own childish spirit of joy and justice carved a path between Melrose and Woods, and he kept me on the edge of my tiny airplane seat as he was doing it.

* I had less luck with non-fiction during last week's vacation. I started reading Sheila Waller's upcoming The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour—and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News, but I had to abandon it fairly early on because I realized that my total lack of respect for television news—especially morning shows like Today, which I consider to be the face of True Evil—meant that nothing Waller could tell me would make me care about her subjects. And while some of the chapters in Bob Stanley's Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyonce were fascinating works of long-range music criticism—especially the bits about the Monkees and the Bee Gees—too much of it read like a series of lists of pop acts, in more or less chronological order. In too many places, the book took on a weary, trudging aspect as Stanley tried to include every major pop single he could think of. It's just too much, a list of names with a few identifying characteristics thrown in. When he writes passionately about an act he finds interesting, he's an excellent music critic, but comprehensiveness, for Stanley, is a curse.