Dear Great Book Guru, Having rung in the New Year with great enthusiasm, I am now ready to begin a year of intense and pleasurable reading.  Do you have a good book to start me off?  2024 Determined Reader

Dear 2024 Determined Reader, As a Christmas present, I received a very interesting, unusual book I think you might enjoy: BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL by Jonathan Lethem.  Not a novel in the traditional sense, this is a series of anecdotes, short, short stories, musings - all connected by characters that remain nameless - identified only by nickname or type (Wheeze, Younger Brother, Bully etc.), or sometimes simply a letter (C). The book covers the 1970’s up to 2019 and is set in a small area of downtown Brooklyn - Boerum Hill.  The boys - and they are almost all boys - are living in a world defined by gentrification. Race, class and income all work to separate them but the Dean Street boys as they call themselves are linked by propinquity through the decades. The crimes they experience are at times petty and sometimes horrific, but certainly color their youth and adult lives.  Who is the narrator who recounts these tales? Only at the very end do know for sure. Critics have called this an autonovel - a fictionalized autobiography, but this work is much more: a history of New York City, a paean to childhood, a socioeconomic study of gentrification, but mostly a compelling story of lives shaped by place and time. Highly recommended!