The Millennialish Book Club

Published almost 40 years ago, this selection has earned the label of "modern classic" among book critics and bibliophiles. We'll be reading not just one book, but technically three of them in one cover. But don't let that knowledge daunt you--readers say the stories move quickly with plenty of energy. So be it. Let's delve into some mysteries set right here in the Big Apple itself and see if we can recognize the city we enjoy and call home!

From Goodreads:

The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels – from the author of 4 3 2 1: A Novel.

The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster’s work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.” Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.

We're revisiting Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but this time for one of his shortest novels. We had a great discussion about One Hundred Years of Solitude a few years back and Chronicles of a Death Foretold looks to be just as captivating! The story follows the aftermath of a murder that everyone seemed to know was coming but could not prevent, told with Garcia Marquez's signature magical realism.

From Goodreads:
A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place twenty-seven years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister.

Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to try and stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society--not just a pair of murderers—is put on trial.

We'll be reading another favorite author of this book club in June. In Intermezzo, Sally Rooney tells the story of characters whose interactions are marked by tension and unspoken feelings.

From Goodreads:
An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.