I'm not sure if this means anything, but...

So, I know on this site there's been a certain focus on Pynchon (of course), as well as Murakami, and I've mentioned David Foster Wallace, Chandler Brossard, and Richard Flanagan on occasion as well. Flanagan wrote Gould's Book of Fish, and once I'd finished it, I  remember thinking that it had surpassed Mitchell's Cloud Atlas as my favorite non-Pynchon, non-Murakami novel.

Since then I think it may have crawled up the list, and rivals some of Murakami's best work. It's seriously good, and I've been thinking about getting a copy for you, Norm, but that's not relevant to this discussion. Before I got it I thought it was about a guy, or a family, fishing. I couldn't have been more misguided. Still, easily the best book I read in 2012.

In any case, there's a post here. I remembered the other night that Flanagan has his chapters each revolve around his main character's painting of a specific fish, about how that fish represents one of the weirdos he's met on his prison island, and about how he breaks down the sections of the chapters: he uses Roman numerals. That was the one thing I wanted to take another glance at: the Roman numeral breakdowns. I remembered that in my own book, Robot Crickets, in the last section I used Roman numerals as well for the sectional demarcations. It wasn't apparent at the time for me that it was in direct homage to Flanagan, but it would now be hard to argue that it wan't.

I noticed that I had used periods at the end of the numerals, and when I opened up Gould's... I saw he hadn't. But then I noticed something weird about the random pages that I opened each book to:

I'm not sure if it's easily seen here, but both pages have, on the left side, section VIII, and on the right side, section IX. In Gould's..., this is the page 200-01 spread, in chapter Leatherjacket (since each chapter is named for one of the twelve fish Gould paints, the numbers assigned to those chapters come from the reader, meaning this is chapter 5). In Robot Crickets, this is the page 82-3 spread, when the two tiny aliens Silde and Nafil and readying the meatball.

So, like the title of this post says, I'm not sure this means anything. Just one of those random moments...