Welcome to Quick Lit, where I share short and sweet reviews of what I’ve been reading lately on (or around) the 15th of the month, and invite you to do the same.
It’s been a good and interesting reading month. I realized a few weeks ago that between new summer 2024 releases and all the reading I’m doing for our upcoming Fall Book Preview, the backlist was seriously underrepresented in my reading selections. The fix is easy enough: I made a conscious effort to mix in some older titles. Two of those are reflected here: Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Other older titles are still in progress, and I look forward to sharing those next month.
In addition to those forthcoming fall titles, I have been reading a fair number of brand-new releases, like Rufaro Faith Mazarura’s Olympics-themed debut Let the Games Begin and Jessica Joyce’s The Ex Vows, which were both published in July 2024. My newest audiobook, Kara Swisher’s Burn Book, was published in February.
I hope you find something that looks intriguing for your TBR on this list (and in these comments), and I look forward to browsing your recent reads below. Thanks in advance for sharing your short and sweet book reviews with us here!
Welcome to August Quick Lit
I so enjoyed rereading this with the Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club this month for Austen in August! (Our official schedule has us reading at a leisurely pace and finishing next week, but I got a little ahead of myself and already finished, oops.) Our community manager Ginger persuaded me to try the annotated edition, and I LOVED that nerdy experience. The editor’s notes talked about everything from the significance of a family owning a barouche vs a chaise and four to the geography of Lyme and Bath to the underdeveloped plot points Jane Austen likely would have smoothed in edits had her health not deteriorated. Fascinating! More info →
This year I stumbled upon so many references to The Bell Jar in both the fiction and nonfiction I was reading, and while I knew a little about the book from my literary studies I’d never read it in its entirety. This summer I decided to change that, as I knew those references would keep coming and I’d like to understand the full meaning. WOW, it was not what I expected. Why did no one tell me how gorgeous Plath’s sentences could be? And how incredibly difficult the content is at times. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, for I knew Plath described her work to her mother like this: “What I’ve done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalising to add colour – it’s a potboiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown.” I opted for the audio version; it was great in this format, as read by Maggie Gyllenhaal. More info →
This debut was all about the timing for me: it takes place during the 2024 Olympic summer olympics, though in this fictional version, they take place in Athens. This summer romance features a fan favorite sprinter named Zeke and an ambitious university grad named Olivia who shows up for her summer internship only to discover her position has been eliminated. She’s gutted, but when she accepts the offered volunteer position to get the athletes whatever they need, she gets an inside look at what happens in the Olympic Village—and keeps running into the handsome Zeke. The story did not excel on a sentence level, but the setting in the world of the summer Olympics and specifically the Olympic Village was tons of fun for a summer read. More info →
This was an interesting change of pace from my usual reading; I picked up the audiobook when our resident spreadsheet whisperer Donna mentioned she was enjoying the audio version. The author hosts a popular podcast and is a longtime tech reporter, but I wasn’t familiar with her work when I dove in to her tale—part professional memoir, part recent history—of covering U.S. tech companies beginning in the 1990s. Swisher’s breezy style and the breadth of material covered here made this entertaining reading for someone who doesn’t pay all that much attention to what’s happening in Silicon Valley, but would like to better understand the workings of an industry that affects all of us every day. More info →
I loved Joyce’s 2023 romance You, with a View and was delighted to learn she has a new book, just out July 16. This one centers on Eli and Georgia, a couple who met and fell in love when they were teenagers, but who broke up five years ago under painful circumstances. Now they’re back in California to celebrate the wedding of their mutual best friend Adam, and for his sake, they’ve resolved to pretend that everything is fine and they’re both at peace with how things ended. But the truth is they never got over each other, and when they’re brought back into each other’s lives for a week because of the wedding, sparks fly. This was a delightful, smartly-written read with heart and depth; I flew through it. (What a happy coincidence that I read this the same month as Persuasion.) More info →
What have YOU been reading lately? Tell us about your recent reads—or share the link to a blog or instagram post about them—in comments.
P.S. I took the top photo at Louisville’s newish romance bookstore A Novel Romance (mentioned in the freshly updated Louisville City Guide), which is where I picked up my copy of Let the Games Begin.
