It brings me such joy when books I’m reading overlap… characters unexpectedly popping up in both books I’m reading*. The more obscure, the better. Particularly when fiction is involved.

Here are some of my favorites.

And by “favorites”, I mostly mean “occasions when I thought to doodle about it.”

*Or TV I’m watching.

Walter Winchell

I’d never heard of Walter Winchell before, so I was obviously delighted when he showed up in both Roosevelt Sweeps Nation: FDR's 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal by David Pietrusza and Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls. I am less delighted to learn (while preparing this post) that he was kind of a d!ck.

But, as they say, every pancake has two sides.

On the flip side, Winchell helped FDR and wasn’t afraid to directly attack Adolf Hitler and pro-fascist organizations in America. Unlike some people, who paid Hitler and Mussolini to write for their paper.

John Quincy Adams

From Day 362 of my Doomsday Diaries:

JQA was the title character in John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life by Paul C. Nagel.
He was an answer in LearningPlunge trivia.
AND he was in Hamstersaurus Rex Gets Crushed by Tom O’Donnell / illustrated by Tim Miller (“John ‘Quintuple Cheeseburger’ Adams — or John ‘Quincy’ Adams for short.”)

Japanese-American interment
And also San Francisco same-sex weddings

Kamala Harris’ The Truths We Hold: An American Journey and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin both mention Japanese-American internment during World War II and the reversal of same-sex weddings in San Francisco. Harris performed some of the marriages herself!

For more doodles from Harris’ book and/or to read my rant about why the “it’s just four years” argument is a crock, read this.

Integrated schools

I’m sure you know that Kamala Harris didn’t know it at the time, but she and her sister were a part of a national desegregation experiment. I learned in my previous book, The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn by Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, that future VP Richard Mentor Johnson and Julia Chinn ran one of the first integrated schools in the country. It was kind of a money-grab.

Lewis & Clark & Napoleon

Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation by Peter Stark mention Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Napoleon. Not a big surprise. But they were a surprise in The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie.

Fun and scatological fact: we owe know about Lewis & Clark’s journey to poison poop pills.

Benjamin Franklin

The Founding Father appeared in A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland by Troy Senik and also Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.

MK-Ultra

Stephen King mentioned the CIA’s human experiment program, MK-Ultra in 11/22/63. Then I saw it in the TV show Stranger Things.

While I reread 11/22/63, I also read An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. Tons of overlap (nothing about MK-Ultra though). No surprises there.

I have more doodles inspired by An Unfinished Love Story, if you’re interested.

Issues

I read Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park while I read Becoming Queen Victoria: The Unexpected Rise of Britain's Greatest Monarch by Kate Williams, assuming I’d only doodle my way through the non-fiction book. I was wrong.

Lots of random coincidences (some are overlaps):

Both covers have the same gorgeous green on the left and are darker on the right half.
I’d never heard of “issues” (offspring) until Becoming Queen Victoria. It was used in Same Bed Different Dreams, too, and I was delighted to know what it meant.
Victoriaville was mentioned in Same Bed Different Dreams. Any guesses who that’s named after?
One of my issues asked what a lute was and when I answered, she asked “isn’t that a flute?” and yeah. Yeah, it was. But Same Bed Different Dreams had both a lutist and a flutist in the same sentence! [gasp!]
I pulled Matthew Algeo’s The President Is a Sick Man: Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Expose the Truth off the shelf to find out if Dr. William Williams Keen treated Woodrow Wilson’s daughter Jessie (mentioned in Same Bed Different Dreams). I don’t know the answer. BUT I discovered that Dr. Keen rode through the streets of Philly, which were decorated in anticipation of a visit from the Prince of Wales. Who was he, you ask? Oh, Queen Victoria’s son, the future King Edward VII! (Mentioned repeatedly in Becoming Queen Victoria. Obviously.)

Find more doodles from Becoming Queen Victoria here. Or if you want to better understand King Edward VII’s place in the royal line-up, see how I spiraled out of control with a forest of royal family trees.

But wait there’s more!

I also read Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments at the same time. There were several overlaps with all three books. I have a whole post dedicated to that if you’re curious.

Here you go.

The Iron Curtain

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” reflected Winston Churchill in Catherine Grace Katz’s The Daughters of Yalta: the Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War. A couple of days earlier, we “attended” a reading of Mac Saves the World where author Mac Barnett and illustrator Mike Lowery discussed the Iron Curtain. I, too, grew up thinking it was a real iron divider.

The Mac B. Kid Spy series is unbelievably fun. Plus, the Queen of England is a main character. Pulling this post together is really making me miss reading with my kids. All of the kids’ books referenced in this post are amazing, but this series? Hilarious.

Serendipitously, I found out the day after starting this post that Mac Barnett was appointed by The Library of Congress and Every Child a Reader as the 2025-2026 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Look at this post — accidentally timely! And a coincidence wrapped up in a coincidence! Hooray!

Washington’s favorite chair

Ok, maybe not his favorite chair. But one of George Washington’s favorite gadgets was a fan chair, is a thing I learned in Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy by Nathaniel Philbrick. I’d just learned that the fan chair was one of Benjamin Franklin’s inventions, while reading Now & Ben: The Modern Inventions of Benjamin Franklin by Gene Barretta with my kids.