Islands in the stream; strawberries and cream

Last week Scott Pack mentioned on his blog that he’d taken a couple of location-specific books with him on holiday to the Isle of Wight.

I too am off on holiday soon, and not that I’m lucky enough to be heading to a tropical island—last time I looked south Devon was neither tropical, nor and an island—but I’m just finishing up with Robinson Crusoe (on the Kindle, Tim) and have also indulged in a hardback copy of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet, which I’ve lined up next. It’s a coincidental quirk, but, without having read The Thousand Autumns… etc.  I’m assuming there are similarities between it and Defoe’s classic, both in historical setting and in the situations the lead characters come up against. In other words, they are complementary books.

So what I’m getting at, in a roundabout fashion, is asking you this: What two books would you recommend that go together like strawberries and cream? (I would say like peas in a pod, but don’t want to set Aliya back any steps on the road to recovery.)

The only rule is recommended books aren’t allowed to be by the same author, or a second author picking up characters from the first, a la Wide Sargasso Sea or Roger Morris’ Inspector Porfiry series.

PS Talking of Scott, Happy Birthday Bookswap.

Points of view

So I'm well into the throes of the new SF novel and, as alluded to previously, there are a lot of characters in it. The whole thing is written in third person from the various points of view of this multitude of characters, and I've employed the technique of having the narration reflecting the character it's dealing with at any particular time. I'm just beginning to wonder how sensible this is. With some of the characters it's almost indiscernible, given their similar backgrounds and motivations, but with others it's very pronounced. For instance, at the most obvious level, you've got American characters where the narration will refer to their pants, whereas if they were British I'd use the term trousers, or jeans or whatever.

Any opinions on this approach? Using such a diverse group of narrative voices is part of the joy of more non-traditionally-structured (like David Mitchell's Ghostwritten), but can anyone point out this type of approach in a novel with a 'normal' multi-character structure?