mill book club: frosty winter break reads

Thanks to the talented and beautiful Kristin, the Mill’s Writing Studio is suggesting two books to cuddle up with over the winter break! Read one, read two, and come back ready to eat some goodies (like we won’t get enough at home) and discuss.

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

A smart, unsettling, and meticulously hilarious novel of friendship and real estate among the rich and rent-controlled. Lethem’s story centers around two unlikely friends, Chase Insteadman, a genial nonentity who was once a child sitcom star and is now best known as the loyal fiance of a space-stranded astronaut, and Perkus Tooth, a skinny, moody, underemployed cultural critic. Chase and Perkus are free-floating, dope-dependent bohemians in a borough built on ambition, living on its margins but with surprising access to its center of power.

The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer

The story of J.R. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Los Angeles Times who grew up knowing his father only as a voice on the radio. He was raised by a riotously dysfunctional family from Long Island, in Manhasset, NY (a place, that he writes, “believes in booze”). Without a father figure, Moehringer turns to his bartender Uncle Charlie, and subsequently the bar down the street from their home, to provide him with male role models. The bar’s colorful regulars, and the sometimes drunken, sometimes offbeat lessons that they teach him are the driving forces behind this well-written, compelling memoir.