Ralph Ellison died while I was reading Invisible Man in high school. I found it strangely eerie at the time. If Steig Larsson dies (which he can’t, since he’s already dead) while I read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest this week, I doubt I’d think much about it.
I had just started reading all of the Novels of the Company when Kage Baker died.
The closest I’ve come was when I read an annotated version of Lolita by Nabokov, with the annotations written by a local college professor named Alfred Appel Jr. Appel died about a month after I finished reading it.
I LOLed at this…
I’ve been looking for a couple of days for my post about this. Maybe two years ago I read a review of a mystery by a Canadian author whose name I can’t remember. It sounded good so I wrote it on the list I keep in my wallet. Next time I went to the library I borrowed it, and it was indeed good, so I went to google him to see what else he’d written. I learned that he had died unexpectedly the day before. Pretty young guy, too. Can’t find who it was. Whenever I search all I get is Louise Penny, who is female and not dead.
I just stumbled on this three-year-old thread in a search, and I’m zombifying it to mention that I was in the middle of *The Light Fantastic *when Terry Pratchett died.
I was reading From Dawn to Decadence when Jacques Barzun died, but to be fair, it is 900 pages long, and he was 93 when it was published (although he then lived to 104).
Not quite, but I had The Satanic Verses out from the library when the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was proclaimed.
Was just finishing the last chapter of A Tale of Two Cities when poor Mr. Dickens passed.
Well, geez, don’t read while you’re driving. That’s just common sense.
So if you’re reading his book when he dies, who do you return it to? His spouse? Whoever’s in charge of his estate?
Was reading Kon-Tiki. Finished the last page and set it down. Pulled up CNN. “Norwegian explorer dies.” Whaaaaaat?
Abbie Hoffman, Steal this Urine Test
John D. Macdonald, The Green Ripper (third reading)
Ross Thomas, Ah, Treachery!
No, but Spencer Tracy died (or at least my mother informed me) when I was watching “30 seconds over Tokyo”
I was reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” when Gabriel García Márquez died.
Octavia Butler - I can’t recall if I was actively reading a book, or in the process of reading her books, with one at the top of my pile.
I remember really enjoying her Xenogensis series for the cool, interesting science-fiction it is. Adding the layer of Trek/Twilight deeper meaning, reflecting our real world was done in a thoughtful, non-preachy way. Being an African American Women was part, but by no means all, of what she brought to her writing.
When she died, I remember really being affected and being very surprised by my reaction. It has been interesting to watch as her reputation, to my eye, appears to be growing. Good to see.
“Just hang on…I’ll throw you the lifering as soon as I finish this chapter…”
The die-brary…
ah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-haaaaaa…
Evan Hunter, a/k/a Ed McBain. I was introduced to his books at a very young age, as my mother was a huge fan. I’m sure the first adult book I read was a McBain. I was enjoying his las8est 7th Precinct book Fiddlers when I red that it would be his last, as he had died. I cried.
OPEN SPOILER: The murderer in Fiddlers is killing the people who “fiddled” with his life. Obviously the title is a euphemism, because if McBain had called it FUCKED, it might be confused with a Carol Higgins Clark mystery.
Asimov, Crichton, Douglas Adams, James O. Rigney aka Robert Jordan, and Pratchett. I cringe every time I open a Gaiman novel…