From book to book, forever on - reading is a literary education
I have a niggling feeling I may have posted to this effect before, but can't actually trace it if I did.
Was thinking, pursuant to recently reading Wigs on the Green, about books one reads because one has encountered them mentioned in other books. It's not just that I first encountered mention of WotG in Decca Mitford's Hons and Rebels, but that I was actually introduced to The Pursuit of Love (the Mitford entry-drug) in the first place through a passing mention in Ann Bridge's romantic thriller, The Light-Hearted Quest. So I picked it up in the Library.
I am sure there are other books the existence of which I became aware of because characters in books were reading them (Jo March sobbing over The Wide Wide World &/or The Heir of Redclyffe) or alluded to them. (Antonia Forest has a plethora of these, says A Reader who within the past few months read Algernon Blackwood's Jimbo, downloaded from Project Gutenberg, only because Nicola refers to it - though doesn't actually give the title! - in Falconer's Lure).
I think I was alerted to the very existence of Proust by either I Capture the Castle or Diana Tutton's Guard Your Daughters.
Do other people do this - note what the characters in a book are reading and put them on their own mental tbr list?
A whole other area is books that people mention or are writing or reading in books that are fictive constructs that one wishes one could read (l'Abbe Fausse-Maigre's The Higher Commonsense for the win!), though there are also those works of High Seriousness being written, often with great anguish, by SRS fictional authors, which sound very much not to be set lightly aside. I must say I do sometimes wish I could get into the continuum where Bennis Hannaford's Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia actually exist.
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