scenic overlap

I once wrote a little report on a man named Jack London. it was part of a whole scenic overview of the second decade of the 20th century, which Mr. London was unfortunate enough to die in the middle of. the end result of this project of mine was a binder full of random facts from 1910-1920. for all that research I did about his life and adventures, I never read any of London's books.

I still haven't. unless you count the first two pages of The Road several weeks ago when I found it lying around in our basement at home.

at the library a few weeks ago, as I proceeded to the check-out counter with as many books as I could carry under one arm, Jack London in Paradise jumped out and added itself to my stack.

it takes place in California and then Hawaii. I haven't been to California lately, but I was in Hawaii this summer. that fact is merely the cherry on top of all the overlapping.

to begin with, the other Jack, in On the Road, is out west and all over the place in the late 40s. I get to look at San Fransisco not through the eyes of a wealthy film-maker and his very famous Socialist writer friend, but through a beatnik hitchhiker, scraping the bottom of the country.

and then fast-forward to the next century and I get an old rock star living in that same San Fransisco with his girlfriend, just waiting for the drama and messiness of rock-star life to catch up with them.

and across the Atlantic from all these, there was the biography of C.S.Lewis I read, with all the coziness of his society in Oxford, which overlapped with the latest from Laurie R. King's Sherlock Holmes series, in which Mary goes punting on the river with her old professor. just maybe that old professor was acquainted with Mr. Lewis, shared his students, or stopped by to discuss literature once in a while--wouldn't that be interesting?

all these books, fictional and semi-fictional, reusing the geography of the world again and again, one after the other.

now it's my turn?

and that's my excuse for wanting to travel the world...