Someone once told me about the idea of a "paired reading"—basically, two books that, if read in succession, may lend particularly interesting insights/connections, due to some set of similarities/contrasts/etc between them.
I have two suggestions for such pairings:
(1)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.
When I first read
The Last Unicorn as an adolescent, I remember turning the last page and thinking: this is the last fairy tale that can ever be told. All the themes in the book are of
endings—the mundane and mortal treading into the realm of fairy-things, postmodern butterflies that flutter around giving confused advice, and the traveling companions are a two-bit magician (instead of a sagely wise wizard) and an old woman. The unicorn is forever changed by what happens to her, in a way that haunts me to this day—what it's like, for an immortal creature to feel
regret.
I Capture the Castle, similarly, feels like the very last "Austen-ish" novel you could ever write. I've
touched on it before, but to reiterate: it's got all the sweetness of an Austen romance, but with all these modern
complications. Money actually
matters, and not in the convenient "everyone gets to marry for love AND money" in the end way in Austen's books. The shadow of World War I hangs heavy over everything. Even in the book, the narrator thinks sadly of how she's probably "grown out of" her childhood "midsummer rites", that she'll never be able to do them again in the same way, and there's something nostalgic and heartbreaking about that.
(2) "Solitude" by Ursula Le Guin and "The Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart of the World" by Harlan Ellison.
This pairing is perhaps a bit less obvious. It's also a pair of short stories rather than novels!
"The Beast" gives us an almost
cosmic portrait of the nature of evil. (Kinda-sorta. It's a delightfully strange story.) It hinges on the question of—what if the badness, the madness, the chaos of our world comes from
elsewhere? And what if that happens because of a distant act of
mercy, or self-preservation?
Makes more sense after you've read the story but—essentially, it puts you in a frame of mind to wonder,
what's the rot at the heart of the world, which puts you in the right frame of mind for...
"Solitude," which is more lucid but in some ways stranger. Essentially, an anthropologist/scientist mother from a futuristic Earth-like culture decides she wants to study the people of the distant planet Eleven-Soro, so she lives among them for years, raising her two children in their culture. Her son eventually decides he wants to return home, but her daughter takes to the culture so much that she doesn't
want to go back.
From her mother's perspective, the people of Eleven-Soro suffered some sort of catastrophic population decline, and now have become primitive, and developed all kinds of superstitions to prevent the society from ever becoming industrialized/large-scale again. So they call airplanes and modern medicine evil sorcerer, and they live in communities separated by gender, and spend a great deal of their time alone.
From the daughter's perspective, however, it's not the
airplanes that are the evil sorcerery; it's the
mindset that created the plane that's the sorcerery. Protecting the solitude of oneself and one's people is a sacred thing, not a superstition, and her soul feels more whole in this culture.
While "Solitude" is more interested in human relations (or, rather, solitude-within-relations) than "The Beast", in a way, it's asking a similar question—does the root of "evil" rest in the machines that caused some long-past catastrophe, or in the minds that made them? and can it be restrained in this deliberate, weird, seemingly-stilted culture? where's the root of it?
(I may or may not update this post in the future with other paired reading suggestions as I think of them.)
ETA (3/25/2019): Silently and Very Fast by Cat Valente, and
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang.
Both wonder what it'd be like for robots to become sentient.
Valente takes a dreamlike,
Sandman-esque approach, drawing parallels between an AI's "birth" and various myths, parables, and fairy-tales. Chiang goes for a disability-studies sort of metaphor. Both are lovely tales but stand in striking contrast to each other.
ETA (3/1/2021): The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse and the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. I have yet to test this one, haha, I've only read the former, but from what I hear of the latter, they play with similar ideas? Will report back here if I ever get around to reading Mr. Banks
ETA (7/28/2021): Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde and
The Emergence of Probability by Ian Hacking
ETA (1/3/2022): The Player of Games by Ian M. Banks and any of:
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin,
The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata, "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forester, and
The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
ETA (4/27/2024): Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
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