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.
I hope your summer reading life is bringing you joy. If you’ve hung out around here for a while, you’ve heard me say before that once each year’s Summer Reading Guide is out I revel in bookish possibility, reading all kinds of stuff for all kinds of reasons. I tend to pick up very old books I’ve been putting off for ages (this summer much of my reading time has been devoted to Robert Caro’s 1974 classic The Power Broker, a 1,344 page behemoth), new summer releases I just hadn’t heard about yet when I was putting the Guide together, quirky books that are either just for fun or part of bigger personal literary projects, and yet-to-be-released titles I might feature in September’s Fall Book Preview.
In summer 2025, so far I’ve done exactly that—and as you might deduce, not all of the above categories make for good Quick Lit sharing! But today I’m happy to share a small sampling that gives a good indication of my reading life these days: narrative nonfiction that’s right up my alley, a plotty thriller by a new-to-me author that sounded super fun for summer, and literary fiction I’ve been meaning to read for ages.
I hope you find something that looks intriguing for your TBR here (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!
Welcome to July Quick Lit
I picked up this 2012 release because I’ve come to love Liz Moore’s work and am toying with the idea of becoming a completist. It’s been on my TBR list for many years, yet the uncomfortable descriptions of one protagonist’s fatness almost led me to put down the book in the opening pages. (I appreciated
this interview with Moore, in which she puts words to her own discomfort at how these descriptions were written, and what she would do differently were she to write this book today.) I’m glad I stuck with it, because I was quickly swept up in the story of three lonely and struggling characters who seem to have nothing in common, but who are brought together by fate and circumstance to maybe, hopefully become a family to one another. The title of the book refers to many things: addiction, compulsive behaviors, the burdens we carry, and the near-impossible weight of the burdens placed on us by our parents. But who might help us deal with these hardships, and carry these burdens? That is the question
Heft seeks to answer.
More info →
I’ve been meaning to read this narrative nonfiction work since it first came out in 2021; I was a German minor back in the day, and German history has been much more top of mind since we visited my oldest in the north on his study abroad term there last spring. This true story reads like a real life historical thriller, detailing how 29 people escaped from East Berlin to freedom in the West by tunneling under the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War. I was stunned by how much I didn’t know about German and local history, and utterly shocked to discover this escape was not only filmed but funded by the U.S. news outlet NBC. I listened to the audio version (narrated by the author), which was well done but didn’t enhance the story.
More info →
I picked up this absorbing 2020 thriller after reading and LOVING Clark’s June 2025 release
The Ghostwriter, which appears in this year’s
Summer Reading Guide. In this novel, two women on opposite coasts are both trying to escape desperate, dangerous men—and do so by switching IDs at JFK airport just before their respective flights. (As one of the women recounts early in the novel, “The only way to get a fake ID is to find someone who’s willing to give you theirs.”) I raced through this, enjoying both the plotty ride and the more nuanced musings on identity explored in these pages. Because of how Clark employs voice and perspective in this story, this thriller would be more fun than most to unpack with book club pals.
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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.
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