One random summer evening, as I was thumbing the pages of Read This Next: 500 of the Best Books You'll Ever Read looking for something I might actually finish, and my sister sat across from me finishing her fifth book of the month, I felt the age old envy any sibling knows: if only I could finish books like her. It's an ugly emotion to confess to, which I think is a pity because such ugly emotions are often accompanied, for me at least, with great inspiration.

"What if we started a book club?" I said slowly, patting the unfinished cement floors with my bare feet, "Like, we each choose a book to make each other read. Like book's we've always wanted to read, or books we couldn't finish but wanted to." I thought of Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger's Life, which I had been immediately enamored with but inexplicably failed to finish before the library notice came, or Anna Karenina, which I was listening to at the time as an audiobook, and despite how amusing and enjoyable the story was, knew I would not be finishing it simply because of the length. "Or books we wanted each other to read, to broaden what we're reading," she suggested, and I thought of how often our third sister pestered us to pick up what she was currently reading, if only to have a sympathetic ear. Yes, if we had a book club, it would have to be the three of us, wouldn't it? "This will be great, I've been wanting to read more books." She was the last person who needed to read more books, similar to how an anorexic mentions she was needing to drop another pound. I'm not quite sure what drives her through all these books, but I had no doubt she would shoulder the burden of the extra books to read without problem.

When I later broached the topic to our third sister, she happily agreed, "I've been wanting to read more books," she unknowingly echoed her twin's words. As the one to suggest it, I was the one that investigated our options. Our local library, with a few email exchanges, set up our bookclub. While three people was rather small for a bookclub, we could place our holds en masse. This was quite good, because our goal, besides sharing our favorite reads, our top TBR books, our Moby Dicks, was to mutually encourage each other to finish books which we might otherwise struggle to get through in a timely manner. To put it bluntly, this was a book club where the goal was to slam books quickly, discuss them, and move on.

When setting up the book club officially with our library, they asked for a name they could put the holds under. I told them we were quite informal, and didn't have a name. When I went to pick up our first book, I found we had been bestowed a name: the Trio Bookclub.

The bookclub picks for this month, after some shifting around due to long hold lists and unavailable books, became Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino, Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, and The Rose Code by Kate Quinn.

Grotesque was a swap for an admittedly minor Japanese novel in translation selected by sister A, a swap which I put forward because sister B enjoyed Out by Kirino so much I figured it was a safe selection. Cannery Row was a swap for Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima, my pick, which was unfortunately unavailable due to insufficient copies. I put forward Cannery Row as a substitute because it was at the top of our B-list, which the library had requested in case they couldn't find us the titles we requested... I don't mean to brag, but all of November had to be reselected.

I'd read Cannery Row about six months ago and even finished it on my own, quite unusual for me. I got quite the kick out of the loose narrative style, pulled quite freely along the orator's sense for a funny tangent. Since my sisters insisted on trying out Steinbeck, I put this one in the pot, since it's easily the slimmest of his, only 212 pages. Finally, The Rose Code was supposed to be in last month's set, but all the copies of The Rose Code had been checked out for a different, much slower paced bookclub, so we switched Maurice by E. M. Forester for The Rose Code. Luckily, the holds came in this month.

All said and done, despite my attempts at the outset to have a monthly theme, April truly wasn't meant to be. Thematically, they're all over the place, written by incredibly different people in incredibly different places. All the same, part of the joy of reading in batches the way we do is that we find what is held in common between all these disparate stories. The context of a novel is not simply the setting and the issues addressed in the book, but it is the reader's context, who they are and where they are, and what books came before it and what books come after it. The order of our April books, more than any other month, has influenced our perception and enjoyment of these books.

1. Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino
2. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
3. The Rose Code by Kate Quinn