I have this weird ability to choose books that when read sequentially, relate to each other. I don’t do this consciously. It just seems that, more often than not, my choices of books (usually from a large stack next to the bed), are linked in some meaningful but not obvious way.

Since the year began, this has happened to me twice. I picked up Discovery of Witches as a lighter book after I finished The Autobiography of Mark Twain. It’s a story about an independent woman, sure of herself in many ways, but unsure in others. She is trying to run from elements of her familial past. She makes what many believe are unwise choices when it comes to love. She gets into trouble. Ultimately, she needs to learn to rely on her family, her romantic partner, and the very past she has run from to overcome the obstacles and become all she can be.

When I was done with that book, I picked up The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman. I had loved her book Katerskill Falls. I wasn’t as enamored of some of her other work, but was intrigued enough by the reviews of her most recent work to purchase it. It’sthe story of an independent woman who is running from elements of her familial past, who many believe makes unwise choices in love, who gets into trouble, and to get out of it has to rely on her family, the lover she is unsure of, and her own abilities to overcome the obstacles in her life and become all she can be. Sound familiar?

The first book is more popular fiction than literature. The second is some combination of literature and chick-lit. I liked them both. And yet, in both ran an element of an otherwise strong female, adept and capable, smart and savvy, needing the help of some man to achieve her ultimate goals or get out of some scrape. That said, I look forward to the second installment of the first book and whatever Allegra Goodman chooses to write next.

When I finished those two books, I started in on The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. This is an impeccably researched novel of a boy turned man who hovers around the world of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, whose life is touched by both the Russian Revolution and McCarthyism, and who is marked by the stress of living a lie, or at least not the entire truth.

I loved this book, the first I’d read by Kingsolver. I will read her again. I felt not just transported to a time and a place about which I knew little, but learned a little about the art world, about Mexican history, and about the last days of Trotsky. The book opens with a powerful scene of a boy and his mother scared by the sounds of howler monkeys. Those animals take on a meaning to the boy, and the man, that relates to the screeching lies printed by the newspapers and magazines of the day. Howlers are the lies told.

I then picked up Beatrice by Virgil by Yann Martel, who wrote the acclaimed, Mann Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi. I don’t know still, weeks later, how I feel about this story. An attempt to tell a story of the Holocaust — and a book that questions whether or not one can use fiction to tell the story of the Holocaust —   using an animal fable featuring a donkey named Beatrice and a (wait for it) howler monkey named Virgil. I loved the book when the animals were part of it — a play being written within the novel. But there was another story within Martel’s book: that of Henry, a novelist who wanted to write a story about the Holocaust and was shot down by his publisher, his pregnant wife who doesn’t understand the obsession with tragedy, and a taxidermist who is working on the aforementioned play about Beatrice and Virgil.

Maybe I’ve just had enough of the Holocaust. When I was young, I read about it almost obsessively, haunting the adult sections of the local library from the fifth grade on. I share a birthday with Anne Frank. As a Jewish youth, much of my religious education, and a lot of the talk around the Seder table every Passover, featured the Holocaust, the relatives lost, the importance of Israel as a safe haven for Jews.

I saw Schindler’s List after it came out (and years after I read the book from which it is taken), but never wanted to watch it again, unlike many of my non-Jewish friends. I think it’s about seeing it as history or seeing it as art. I guess it’s both. And that’s what Yann Martel and his fictional doppelganger Henry struggle with, too. Maybe reading this book was too much like watching Schindler’s List for a second time.

Still, I may read The Life of Pi. I pride myself on reading most of the annual award-winning books. Eventually: I finally got around to reading the 1975 Pulitzer Prize winning A Pilgrim on Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard last month — a fine, fine book that I will read at least one more time.

I just finished Meg Wolitzer’s The Uncoupling two nights ago and started What is Left the Daughter last night. I find myself wondering what strange kinship will there be between this pair. At this point I can’t see it. But I don’t question my serendipitous habit of finding pairs of books that go well together.