Quick Lit October 2024 Archives

The Insecure Mind of Sergei Kraev

by Eric Silberstein

From the publisher: "Math is perfect; people are not. The year is 2100 and the chaos of the early Internet era is long behind us. Mathematical proof ensures that neural implants can’t be hacked, and the Board of Reality Overseers blocks false information from spreading. When undergraduate Sergei Kraev, who dreams of becoming a professor, is accepted into a prestigious graduate program in computer science, he is thrilled, and throws himself into his assigned research project—one important enough that if he succeeds, he’ll earn the academic appointment of his choice. But Sergei, plagued by insecurity, falls under the influence of Sunny Kim, the beautiful and charismatic leader of a K-pop cult. Sergei then makes a decision that leads him into a terrifying trap and places the lives of billions at risk."

You Be Mother

by Meg Mason

From the publisher: "What do you do, when you find the perfect family, and it's not yours? A charming, funny and irresistible novel about families, friendship and tiny little white lies. The only thing Abi ever wanted was a proper family. So when she falls pregnant by an Australian exchange student in London, she cannot pack up her old life in Croydon fast enough, to start all over in Sydney and make her own family. It is not until she arrives, with three-week-old Jude in tow, that Abi realises Stu is not quite ready to be a father after all. And he is the only person she knows in this hot, dazzling, confusing city, where the job of making friends is turning out to be harder than she thought. That is, until she meets Phyllida, her wealthy, charming, imperious older neighbour, and they become almost like mother and daughter. If only Abi had not told Phil that teeny tiny small lie, the very first day they met…"

Dayswork: A Novel

by Chris Bachelder, Jennifer Habel

In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville’s impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her preoccupation both deepens and expands, and her days’ work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers—among them Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell—whose lives resonate with Melville’s. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition.

This House Is Mine

by Dörte Hansen

From the publisher: "All her life Vera has felt like a stranger in the old and drafty half-timbered farmhouse she arrived at as a five-year-old refugee from East Prussia in 1945, and yet she can’t seem to let it go. Sixty years later, her niece Anne suddenly shows up at her door with her small son. Anne has fled the trendy Hamburg, Germany neighborhood she never fit into after her relationship imploded. Vera and Anne are strangers to each other but have much more in common than they think. As the two strong-willed and very different women share the great old house, they find what they have never thought to search for: a family."

Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir

by Ina Garten

Ina Garten’s much-anticipated memoir was certainly on my radar but wasn’t necessarily a priority read. But then I found myself in need of a new audiobook on October 1, the memoir’s actual release day. I downloaded the audiobook on a whim and couldn’t stop listening to Ina narrate her own story. I listened to much of it in the car on a rather stressful solo road trip, and found Ina to be the perfect traveling companion: chatty, engaging, and soothing all at once. Maybe you should take my words with a grain of salt because I’m by no means a superfan: I have a few Ina Garten cookbooks, I’ve had good luck with her recipes, I’ve seen a few snippets of her tv show while vacationing someplace with all the channels. I’m not a student of Everything Ina—but golly I loved this memoir.

Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball

by Keith O'Brien

What uncanny timing, to read this lauded biography just before Pete Rose died on September 30, which reignited conversations about whether his longtime ban from baseball should be lifted so as to clear the way for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky in a baseball-loving family, not even 90 minutes away from the Cincinnati Reds’ stadium. I’m not much of a fan these days, but I was interested in learning more about the man, the city, and the baseball culture that loomed so large in my childhood. And while it was interesting, to have so many blanks filled in that completely escaped me as a child, it was also very, very sad. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Ellen O’Dair.

Quick Lit October 2024

The Insecure Mind of Sergei Kraev

You Be Mother

Dayswork: A Novel

This House Is Mine

Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir

Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball

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