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.
Because I just shared allll the favorites last week (my print favorites are here and my audio favorites are here), sharing another reading roundup feels a little extra. And most of what I’ve been reading lately—aside from a handful of very good “therapy books”—won’t be published until 2025. But I wanted to tell you about one standout book I recently finished, another that felt like the right book at the right time, and give you a space to share your recent reads.
The book I can’t stop talking about
Let’s start with the book I can’t stop talking about: This Is What It Sounds Like: A Legendary Producer Turned Neuroscientist on Finding Yourself Through Music by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas. This was recommended by a publishing professor at WriterFest (hi, Sara!) and I queued up the audiobook immediately.
From the very beginning, this book struck me as the musical equivalent of what we do on What Should I Read Next? On that podcast, my goal is to give readers insight into their own literary taste: what do they like, what do they not like, and why? In This Is What It Sounds Like, the authors state the book’s goal early on: “by contrasting our divergent responses to music, we’ll help you get better acquainted with your own musical identity, especially those hidden aspects of your musical appetites that you may have never recognized before.”
While I was frustrated with the gap between what the authors set out to do and what I feel they actually accomplished, I still found this read insightful and thought-provoking, as well as a plain good time. The authors say the best way to experience the book is to read a little and then listen to the songs they cite as examples. I had so much fun toggling back between Spotify and my audiobook app! (Although this did make the book impossible to listen to while driving.)
An engaging therapy memoir
This past month I also listened to End of the Hour: A Therapist’s Memoir by Meghan Riordan Jarvis, narrated by the author. This book had been on my radar since it came out last November, but it wasn’t until a friend (hi, Jessica!) urged me to read it that I jumped on it as perhaps the right book for me right now. I downloaded it immediately (notice a theme here?) and listened to the audiobook nearly in one sitting on a solo road trip.
In her first person account, Jarvis walks the reader through how she came undone after her father died from cancer and her mother died not long thereafter, and the compound PTSD she subsequently experienced. I was intrigued by her tale of childhood trauma that led her to become a therapist in the first place, and then how later, even though her job was to help her patients navigate grief and trauma, she found those tools insufficient for the situation she found herself in. The most interesting parts of the book to me involved the treatment she sought (or rather, was steered toward) when she reached her own limits.
I happened to listen to this not long after Adrienne Brodeur’s Wild Game, which felt like an excellent pairing as they share a Cape Cod setting that plays an important role in each.
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.
The post What I’ve been reading lately: the new and the notable appeared first on Modern Mrs Darcy.