Chicks On Lit discussion

Are there any groups of books that you think complement each other? that lend to a nice compare/contrast? that are interesting to read in succession?

For example, after I read The Help, Amazon recommended that I read The Space Between Us. I thought the coupling was excellent. They are both about domestic help, but the first takes place in the US and the second takes place in India. Very different books, but I enjoyed thinking about them together.

I also thought about coupling Room and Jaycee Dugard's book A Stolen Life: A Memoir. The first is fiction and the second non-fiction. I haven't read A Stolen Life: A Memoir. But I still thought it'd be interesting to group them together.

Has anyone else thought about this? Any other examples or recommendations?

(It thought about this, not because I'm looking for a group of books to read together, but because teachers often put together a group of books to be read in a particular order. In the absence of school, I always pick my books individually and never as a group, so maybe it'd be interesting to read some together.)

I've done this inadvertently a couple of times:

I read Black Boy (a nonfiction autobiographical account of the author's experiences growing up in Birmingham during the civil rights movement) just before my neighbor handed me The Help.

Recently I read Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (a nonfiction account of three generations of Chinese women living in China before and during Mao's early years of communism) and then read The Kitchen God's Wife (a fictional story of one woman's escape from China during the early period of Wild Swans).

Both times I was better able to understand the second book after reading the first.


In my early years of teaching and during my internship we were instructed in "Making Connections" for elementary school reading comprehension instruction. There were three types of connections: Text to Text (examples above), Text to World, and Text to Self. Since then I've always thought of these connections when I've read a book that reminded me of something else in my experiences, world events, or another book.

Goodreads also has a feature on each book's info page on the right-hand side called "Readers Also Enjoyed" that has related books that I assume people read in addition to the book listed. I've never used this feature, but have noticed it a few times.