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.
Despite a three-day trip where I did almost zero reading, it’s been a great reading month. I just got back from the beach with my family, where this year I got to read almost a book every day. What a great feeling! Most of these were forthcoming fall 2025 titles (and WOW do I have some great stuff to tell you about come Fall Book Preview in September), but I also brought along some backlist novels that have been patiently waiting for me on my shelves, including Simon Mawer’s Prague Spring (2018) which I wrote about below. In fact, I’m just now realizing that none of my selections for this month’s Quick Lit are brand-new, though as you’ll hear, I made my way to several of them courtesy of the new releases featured in the MMD 2026 Summer Reading Guide. (Available now!)
Audiobook lovers: I read several of this month’s selections in print, but a great many on audio, and I’m happy to report I found them to be excellent in that format: Kayla Rae Whitaker’s The Animators (2017), Nayantara Roy’s The Magnificent Ruins (2024), and Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction work Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018).
Rounding out my list this month is Jane Smiley’s enormous textbook-like 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), which, while certainly dense and a little bit dry in places, I’m so glad I read and now can’t stop talking about.
I hope you enjoy this month’s selections, and that you find something that looks intriguing for your TBR here. And, as always, I can’t wait to hear what you’ve been reading lately!
Thanks in advance for sharing your short and sweet book reviews with us!
Welcome to July Quick Lit
Of Anne Tyler’s twenty-five novels, to date I’ve read seven overall and three this year; I wrote about my 2026 reads
The Beginner’s Goodbye and
A Spool of Blue Thread in
January Quick Lit. Despite having several more unread Tyler novels on my home bookshelves, I picked this up because it was one of Jane Smiley’s 100 novels in
13 Ways. I was baffled by her short essay on it, which begins, “
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is interesting in part because it doesn’t seem to have a reason to exist …. it sets forth no political or social issues about anything except how the Tull children were shaped by their family life.” I was bewildered by this commentary. Doesn’t have a reason to exist? Digging into how people were shaped by family life is one of my favorite things about fiction! But perhaps that observation may provide insight into why Tyler is or isn’t the author for you, and why. This 1982 novel chronicles almost fifty years of life in the Tull family, from the wooing and marriage of mother Pearl by the fickle and peripatetic salesman Beck, the births and early childhoods of their three children, Beck’s ultimate abandonment of the family, and then the grown children’s contentious relationships with their mother and each other. There’s much here that is hard and sad, but I’ve read enough Tyler to know she always employs a light touch with painful topics, and while trauma aplenty surfaces in her stories, readers can count on her to provide her characters moments of grace and redemption to ease, if not resolve, their hardships. (The way she brings things together in her final scenes here is far from tidy but oh-so-satisfying.) Readers, tell me: which Anne Tyler should I read next?
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I DNF’ed this when it first came out back in 2017, but returned to it because I loved Whitaker’s sophomore novel
Returns and Exchanges, featured in this year’s
Summer Reading Guide. I listened to the audio this time, and quickly got swept up in the story, as narrated by Alex McKenna. Mel and Sharon are two friends with rough childhoods in common (poverty, addiction, neglect), who escaped through their art and then found creative success. They meet in art school and form a personally and professionally beneficial partnership, making two groundbreaking films together. But their individual lives and working relationship are ever fraught, marked by unaddressed trauma and substance abuse. This novel was terribly painful at times, but I so appreciated its treatment of the central friendship, the business of art, and the struggles of sublimating a painful past into creative work. But what I LOVED was its unabashed praise of my hometown of Louisville, KY, where a big chunk of the book takes place.
Kentucky is an easy punching bag in fiction, and seeing Mel fall in love with it on the page and lay out its charms and quirks in detail was the counterpoint I didn’t know I was longing to read.
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I read half of this years ago and somehow never managed to finish it. But I read
so much Irish literature—including more than a few books in which The Troubles feature prominently—that it felt past time to address this gap in my knowledge.
Say Nothing is broadly about The Troubles but specifically about the IRA’s 1972 abduction and murder of recent widow and mother of ten Jean McConville. Keefe did a remarkable job of relaying not only what unfolded in Northern Ireland in this era, but what it might have felt like for citizens trying to live their daily lives amidst the violence and unrest. There were also so many details I didn’t know that blew me away, like Boston College’s involvement in the McConville case. I listened to the audiobook; Matthew Blaney’s Irish accent was perfection for this narrative.
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This past spring, Will and I visited
our friends Mel and Dave in Prague; I purchased this while there on Mel’s recommendation and just read it at the beach last week. I expected something Serious and Important—Mawer was shortlisted for the Booker, after all—but it reads like a political thriller. It begins in the midst of the Prague Spring, in summer 1968: James and Ellie are Oxford University students on holiday, determined to see as much of Europe as they can before school resumes again in the fall. Due to pure chance—a literal role of the dice—they end up in Prague. Elsewhere in Prague, British diplomat Sam falls headlong in love with activist Lenka, a leader among the young people’s political movement for a more open Czechoslovakia. Evidence that Prague is living in a new and freer era is everywhere—and yet the reader knows what the characters do not: it’s only a matter of time before Russian tanks roll in to reassert fierce Communist control. Fascinating and moving.
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After reading and loving Roy’s sophomore novel
Sisters of a Halved Heart—a
2026 MMD Minimalist Summer Reading Guide pick—I was eager to read more, so I turned to her 2024 debut. In it, Lila is a 29-year-old Indian-born book editor living in Brooklyn, who hasn’t returned to her hometown of Kolkata since she left at 16. Just after receiving a big promotion, she is shocked to learn her beloved grandfather has died, and that he’s rejected tradition and left the family’s crumbling five-story mansion to Lila. Lila takes an 8-week leave of absence and returns home, plunging back into the tight-knit, chaotic, infighting world she left behind, right at the moment they’re preparing for a cousin’s elaborate wedding. Lila is sucked right back in, and is forced to evaluate what feels like every last thing in her life: what she wants from her family, her work, her love life, even which continent she wishes to live on. While the “magnificent ruins” of the title no doubt refers to the family home, I also took it to mean that while the family structure and its members were wrecked by trauma, betrayal, and suffering, the relationships are too valuable to give up on—at least not yet. While this felt a little long at 448 pages, I found my reading time well-spent, and look forward to more from Roy. In the meantime, I’m excited to talk with her in
MMD Book Club about
Sisters later this month.
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It took me months to work my way through this 600+ page work of literary criticism, which first landed on my radar courtesy of Julie Berry and
this episode of What Should I Read Next?. It’s a dense work that required slow, careful reading, and I finally settled into a routine of reading ten pages a day in the mornings. This is a history of the novel, an exploration of its many possible aims and forms, and a critique of one hundred novels chosen by Smiley as a representative sampling of what the novel can do, but explicitly not a collection of “best” or “favorite” books. Smiley insists that when it comes to the novel, the primary question is not “What’s good” but “What do
I think is good?” and she writes here that her purpose is to encourage readers to
read, because it is the reading itself that “will teach [the reader] not only what she likes but what there is to like, and why.” This felt like a literature seminar in paperback form, and I came away with a very long list of books I’d like to read next.
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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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