Lit Chat Vol. 36 — July/August in Review
Hi friends,
We’re in the home stretch: the final weeks of summer, and the final weeks before I get married (!!), which means I am feeling crazy most of the time but also feeling very much at peace with leaving this period of my life behind. If I had a dime for every time I said “let’s just get this show on the road” in the past two weeks, I would have…a couple dollars, probably.
I’m still not reading at my usual pace, although I did have a stretch in August where I deleted Instagram and read four or five short novels in a week. That was nice! Would love to do that again sometime.
Normally, I dream of fall and back-to-school reading, and maybe with all the traveling I have coming up there will be some good stretches of plane/train time to read. However! I’m also trying to give myself grace and remember that I am going through a Wild Time and it’s okay to choose a snooze over a book if that’s what’s needed.
That said, I will do my best, because I miss my reading brain! In the meantime, before we say goodbye to summer completely, shall we dive into my July/August reads?
THE FOUNDATION
Watership Down — Richard Adams
My two assumptions about this book before I read it were that it was 1) a WWI book about a boat and that it was 2) somehow for children. I was wrong on both fronts! Okay, yes, it is technically still marketed to children, but this book was stressful as hell and child me would not have fared well. Also, the animated movie version looks terrifying.
It’s about a group of rabbits who break off from the rest of their warren to find a new home after one of them receives a vision that their home will be decimated. The Odyssey associations are definitely there if you’re looking for them, although I think as a society we’ve largely moved on by now. I loved the idyllic descriptions of English countryside and enjoyed how committed the book was to not anthropomorphizing the rabbits, but portraying them as a distinct culture all their own. Despite the ever-present danger to these classic prey animals, the reading experience is net wholesome and I admit to shedding a tear or two by the end. Recommend to children with caution.
Ultramarine — Mariette Navarro, tr. by Eve Hill-Agnus
This was the most recent pick for my office book club, and I will say I appreciated it much more after our discussion. I read it in one pleasant afternoon on the Metro North, expecting it to be spookier than it was and coming away disappointed. The premise is: twenty sailors working on a freighter in the middle of the ocean go into the water for a clandestine swim, and twenty-one men come back on board. While not as spooky as one might expect, our book club conversation did help me see how thematically rich and interested in big ideas of femininity, agency, trade, and capitalism the book was. The author is a playwright primarily, which I think explains why the prose reads the way it does—atmospheric and bordering on poetry, to the point where what little dialogue there is actually feels quite out of place. The cover’s pretty metal though, no?
We Were Forbidden — Jacqueline Harpman, tr. by Ros Schwartz
I read this one on the Amtrak home from a work conference, and we all know how much I love a train read. You may recall Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men won the top spot in my 2025 Best of Bracket, and though one of the three stories collected here has a similar dystopian beat, the others were unexpectedly hilarious. One is a (semi?)autobiographical vignette of Harpman’s childhood growing up in Casablanca during Nazi occupation in WWII, and her feud with another student over which she still holds a grudge. The other story is more of a daydream, a woman fantasizing about other lives and roles she might have played out in a fictionalized version of her life, which are then each followed through to their whimsical conclusions. These stories show Harpman’s range of relatable pettiness, humor, and playfulness, and of course, her signature wisdom and understanding of the human condition. A treat for a train ride!
The Correspondent — Virginia Evans
This has been one of the buzziest books of the year, and as such, the library hold list is approximately six months long. I get why! Everybody loves an epistolary novel! It seems so much easier to keep reading just one more page when each page is a single letter. Sybil Van Antwerp is the titled correspondent, a woman who has always found it easier to connect with people via letters than in person. She keeps up a steady stream of correspondence with family, friends, and famous authors alike—Joan Didion makes a cameo as a regular pen pal—but through the course of the novel comes to learn that real connection comes from putting herself outside of her comfort zone and dealing with everything you’ve been avoiding in the real world. Book club this one with your mom/aunt/grandma this fall and let yourselves relish in the coziness as the leaves start to turn.
SOLID SUPPORTS
Station Eleven — Emily St. John Mandel
I know I’m ten years too late on this one, and honestly, I felt it! Reading this book post-Covid felt like watching the movie Her post-ChatGPT (I did both this year). I can envision the impact both works would have had on contemporary society before the events they described were a reality, and it just made me feel a weird nostalgia for the simplicity of those before-times rather than any genuine anxiety about the future.
That said, I did enjoy Station Eleven, although not as much as Sea of Tranquility. It follows a set of characters both before and after a devastating pandemic hits the globe, most of whom have some connection to a famous actor: his best friend, his former wife, his son, and the little girl—now a grown adult in a traveling theatre troupe—who was on stage with him when he died, the night the pandemic started. I do love books that can successfully land the plane of intersecting storylines—I just think SoT landed it better, with fewer characters. Someone tell me if the TV show is worth watching?
Seascraper — Benjamin Wood
Phillip picked this one up on our Barcelona trip this summer, and it was one of the slim little volumes I read in about a day. It’s the story of a young man in a coastal English town with dreams of being a musician, who makes his living from an old-fashioned method of collecting and selling shrimp. It seems his luck has finally changed when a movie director comes to town and offers a life-changing amount of money for his help with a new film set on the beach.
You get the sense early on that things aren’t quite what they seem, but I caught myself doubting if maybe it wasn’t just the atmospheric gloom I was sensing, the ambient heaviness that settles into its characters and their lives like the ever-present fog. No spoilers, but there’s an episode towards the end that’s one of the spookiest and most cinematic moments of reality-bending that I’ve read in a long time. The prose throughout is quiet but gorgeous, rendering the little foggy town of Longferry with as much clarity and strength of emotion as we read our protagonist’s hidden hopes and private anguish. This is perhaps an anti-beach read, but due to its size, I’ll still recommend you toss it in your tote for one of your final summer beach days.
THE TIPPY TOP
Heart the Lover — Lily King
Oh, Lily King. I really considered sending her a Correspondents-style letter after inhaling this book in one luxurious Sunday morning in bed, that’s how much I loved it. I bought this book way back in February and had been saving it for when I needed it the most, and a Sunday to myself after a long work conference was exactly that moment.
I knew I would love it because Writers & Lovers has a coveted spot on my Favorite Books Shelf, and King’s latest did not disappoint. It’s about an unnamed narrator, the relationships she has with two men in college, and the way those relationships wind up shaping the rest of her life. There’s a big time jump halfway through the book that brings us to the narrator’s forties, when a difficult piece of news threatens to bring her right back to a chapter in her life she had thought closed, during an already high-stress time of personal uncertainty in her family.
This book may send you into a mild spiral over the passage of time and what we owe to all the people whose lives we have impacted and vice versa, so read at your own risk! It’s witty and earnest, not quite a romance and not quite a comedy, but very much a book about love: the forms it takes, the way it changes throughout our lives, and what it leaves behind when it goes. No spoilers, but Writers & Lovers is kind of an essential companion read and if you love one, chances are high you’ll love the other like I did. Truly can’t recommend both of them highly enough.
And that’s a wrap on my summer reading! It may be quite some time before you hear from me next, but to tide you over until then, I can tell you I’m currently taking my sweet time with George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain and enjoying feeling like I’m a student in his MFA at Syracuse.
I’ve got some thoughts for changes to this lil newsletter come next year when life calms down a bit, but in the meantime, I hope you have a fabulous end of your summer and a gentle start to your fall, and that you’re reading at whatever pace feels right with absolutely zero guilt about it, especeially if that pace is glacial like mine.
Until next time, happy reading!
❤ Catherine
Housekeeping note: all book links go to my Bookshop storefront, where each purchase supports independent bookstores (and this newsletter, because I get a small percentage of each sale).
Catherine Thoms 