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 reading year is off to a good start! Over the years, I’ve noticed I tend to consistently read 4–7 books in the holiday week between Christmas and New Year’s. This year my family was under the weather during that time, which was overall a drag but did ensure I spent plenty of time on the couch with good books (and a few good and not-so-good movies). This year I wanted to spend the period from mid-December to mid-January, and especially that holiday week, reading a pleasing mix of backlist titles and forthcoming-in-2026 selections for the Summer Reading Guide and, to a lesser extent, the Spring Preview Library Chat we’re hosting on February 7 for MMD Book Clubbers and our WSIRN patrons. (We’re doing it a little bit different this year—and it will be decidedly lower-key—so no a la carte this time.)
I so enjoyed what I picked up. In today’s edition of Quick Lit, I’m happy to share three backlist titles that are 10+ years old (Carson McCullers and two by Anne Tyler) as well as two newer books published in spring 2025 that I listened to on audio (Happy Land and The River Has Roots). I can see it appears that I read largely older selections this month, but in fact my books during this time period were mostly new-in-2026—I just won’t be talking about them for a little while. (But I can assure there is good stuff on the way!)
I hope you enjoy the variety of this month’s selections, and that you find something that looks intriguing for your TBR here (and in these comments). I look forward to browsing your recent reads below, and picking up suggestions for my To Be Read list. Thanks in advance for sharing your short and sweet book reviews with us!
Welcome to January Quick Lit
“The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted.” So begins Tyler’s 19th novel, published in 2012. A reader comment (hi, Suzy!) on
December Quick Lit reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read this for ages, and I’m so grateful for the nudge to pick it up: I loved it. This is no ghost story. Instead, it’s about a man brought to reckoning when his wife dies in a tragic and unsettling accident at home. With his wife gone—and eventually, with the help of her reappearances—he finally brings himself to take a clear-eyed look, and ultimately come to terms with, the good and the bad of their marriage. Wistful, gentle, and quirky, and at once a tale of great sorrow and one of love and forgiveness. I ate up all the details, particularly those of the publishing variety: the main character helms a small vanity publisher in Baltimore, and his workplace stories were a riot.
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After reading and loving
The Beginner’s Goodbye, I wasn’t sure which Tyler to pick up next. (I welcome suggestions for future reading in comments!) I landed on this multigenerational tale of the Whitshank family and their Baltimore home. Seventy-something Red and Abby anchor the family: he works in construction, she’s now a retired social worker. They live in a cherished home built by Red’s father Junior; they raised their four kids in it and those kids are now grown and gone. But when Abby starts having intermittent memory troubles, the kids return home: prodigal son Denny and his responsible younger brother Stem move back in, and the two daughters, Nora and Amanda, start spending a lot more time at the family home. Moving back and forth in time, we get acquainted with each generation, learning the stories they tell themselves about family identity, as well as the secrets they’ve kept—and sometimes are
still keeping—from each other. Tyler is at once a sharp and compassionate observer of family life; this was a poignant exploration of how we make meaning of our stories, how we cope with our reality, and how we may choose to both lean on and hide from the people we love. I enjoyed this for its plethora of savvy insights about family life, numerous pithy one-liners, and the steady presence of the house throughout, a character in its own right.
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I read this novella in print early last year, but have heard such good things about the audio version since then that I just revisited it in that format. El-Mohtar has said the story’s “source and seed” is a 17th century folk ballad that she loved and wanted to “fix,” because in it, one sister murders another over love for the same man, and wouldn’t a happier version that celebrates sisterly love be welcome? (Yes!) In her reimagining, two sisters harvest ancient willows, sing to them to thank them for their magic, discuss their love for murder ballads, debate word choice and grammar, meditate on sisterly and romantic love, and get the happy ending they deserved all along. The story and its dreamy (yet intermittently sharp and funny) prose were delicious on audio, as narrated by Gem Carmella.
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I’ve been meaning to read this 1940 classic for decades, to fill what has come to feel like a major gap in my literary education, particularly when it comes to Southern lit. The novel’s backstory is in itself fascinating: McCullers was just 23 when it was published, and became an overnight literary sensation. Shortly thereafter she moved to Brooklyn and took up residence in the storied February House. I’ve long been captured by the poetry of the title, but the story itself wasn’t what I expected: it’s set in the 1930s in a small Georgia mill town, and focuses on four members of the community, three white and one Black—a poor teenage girl with big dreams, the unhappy owner of the town’s popular café, an itinerant political agitator, and an aging and weary Black doctor—as they face their own struggles. Each considers a fifth person to be a friend: a deaf-mute named John Singer, to whom they pour out their troubles, as they perceive him to be a sympathetic listener. None of them realize Singer is dealing with his own private loss, but he has no one to whom he can pour out
his troubles. I’m glad I finally read this, but found it utterly desolate. I’m toying with reading
The Member of the Wedding next, but am leery of a similarly devastating experience. Thoughts?
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I’ve loved Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s work in the past, especially her 2022 novel
Take My Hand which was one of my favorite books that year. I decided to listen to her 2025 release on audio, largely because Bahni Turpin narrates, along with Ashley J. Hobbs. Once again, here she takes inspiration from lesser-explored history that deserves to be better known.
Happy Land is about the “kingdom” established in 1873 in North Carolina by a group of freedpeople looking to escape white terrorist violence in nearby Spartanburg County SC, where they lived. This kingdom named a king and queen, formed a communal treasury, and eventually purchased land spread across the NC/SC state line. The story unfolds in two timelines: the first follows Luella, Happy Land’s first queen, and the second contemporary timeline follows her descendant Nikki. The stories are linked by the ancestral line and also by the fuller story of African American land loss in the 20th century. Perkins-Valdez excels at making history come alive through her rich historical details.
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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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