Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Make your full reference freely my lord

I've been able to do quite a bit of reading the past few days, working my way through my twelfth book on the list, The Corrections.  So far, so good, but that's what I've come to expect from the books on The List.

I encountered a first today from this literary mission however, when I cam across mention of another book from The List in The Corrections.  One of the children in the book is reading through the Chronicles of Narnia series, specifically the third installment, Prince Caspian.  Although not on The List, there is mention of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as a couple of the adult characters wax poetic about reading it when they were children.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is most likely the only time one book from The List is going to mention another.  I base this assumption on a couple of different factors.  There are several books that take place before any of books from The List would have been written, such as Beloved, and Gone With the Wind.  Others, such as The Lord of the Rings are set in fantasy world that wouldn't be familiar with any of these novels.  Lastly, I figure that since so many of the novels on The List were written before 1950 (34 of them to be exact), that a good chunk of the books were simply written too early for any other book to reach such prominence that it would warrant be mentioned in another.  I suppose from this rationale, it would make sense that The Corrections would be mentioning another novel, as it is one of the most recent entries on The List, and therefore so many other books have had time to reach such a level of fame as to be included in a story.

Having said all this, I look forward to seeing how many times I am proven wrong.

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