You loved how Daniel Quinn answers a wrong-number call meant for “Paul Auster,” then chases a case that slowly morphs into a story about stories—complete with the red notebook and that vertiginous Auster-as-character reveal. Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler turns that same thrill into its whole engine: you, the reader, become a character navigating false starts, missing chapters, and narrative trapdoors. If following Stillman through Manhattan felt like tailing meaning itself, Calvino lets you pursue the very act of reading with the same dizzying fascination.

In City of Glass, the ground keeps slipping—Quinn’s identity blurs, the case refracts, and even the narrator’s authority collapses when “Paul Auster” strolls onstage. Nabokov’s Pale Fire perfects that delicious uncertainty: a 999-line poem is “annotated” by Charles Kinbote, whose footnotes hijack the text and twist every fact to fit his private myth. If the red notebook made you question what can be reliably recorded, Kinbote’s commentary will make you question what can be reliably read.

Quinn’s surveillance of Peter Stillman Sr., the meditations on Adamic language, and that creeping sense that meaning is always one step ahead—these echo through Kafka’s The Trial. Josef K. is arrested for reasons never clarified, caught in a maze of opaque procedures and shifting authorities. If the Stillman case felt like pursuing a puzzle that exposes the limits of reason, Kafka’s courtroom without laws will give you that same chill of cosmic ambiguity.

Following Stillman through the city, Quinn’s identity thins until he’s almost only his red notebook. In Saramago’s The Double, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso discovers his exact look-alike and begins a private manhunt that destabilizes his sense of self. If Quinn’s stakeouts and self-erasure gripped you, Saramago’s hypnotic unraveling—where “finding the answer” threatens the finder—offers the same intimate, claustrophobic descent.

Much of the charge in City of Glass comes from simply walking Manhattan—Quinn tailing Stillman, mapping routes, filling pages of the notebook as the city becomes a text. In Open City, Julius wanders New York and beyond, his reflections turning streets into an atlas of memory, identity, and chance encounters. If those quiet hours of urban drifting in Auster felt spellbinding, Cole offers that same intense, solitary attention to the city’s secret currents.