I’ve had this experience frequently where I’m reading something that connects directly to something else I’ve recently read or heard about or thought about. I’ve decided to call this phenomenon “literary synchronicity,” and I think the story I told in my first post about the editor of The Encyclopedia of Community surreptitiously taking my picture at a protest after I had recently cited her book for INFO 200 falls into this category. Now I find myself with another instance of literary synchronicity on my hands, this time related to INFO 287.

Our current module includes a reading from Wholehearted Librarianship in which Professor Stephens discusses the book Dear Fahrenheit 451 by Annie Spence:

Screenshot of the following text: My summer reading pile included a preview of Annie Spence’s book Dear Fahrenheit 451 (2017). Spence is a former student of mine who went on to be a public librarian. Her new work is a collection of personal “letters” to books of all kinds—for example, Dear Color Me Beautiful or Dear The Hobbit. There is also a dash of “It’s You, Not Me” breakup-style notes for soon-to-be weeded titles that are destined for the book sale. The book is a funny, insightful, and personal approach to readers’ advisory and a clever meditation on why some books are deselected. Librarians could use the book and Spence’s approach for programming, sharing their own letters to books, and encouraging readers to pen their own.

I haven’t read this book yet, but it has been sitting on a shelf above my desk for about two years, ever since I rescued it while weeding books that had been de-selected from my library’s collection. It even made an appearance in the banner of my main SJSU iSchool blog.

A shelf of books about reading and writing organized in rainbow order.

I think this probably means it’s time for me to crack it open and read it! Especially since I’ve expressed that the module on storytelling is the one I’m looking forward to the most. One day I’ll start to keep track of all of these connections, but I figured I’d at least I’d share this one here!