Beginner: please suggest layout to publish book covers and excerpts

Dear friends,

I would like to publish a montly zine for friends and family to recommend books.

Each issue will have a varying number of books. In the first instance I would like to list sixteen as an example, but numbers could go from just 3-4 to maybe 20.

I was thinking about generating a variable number of A4 pages which show a picture of the book cover on a left column and in a corresponding right column row the excerpt/desrtiption text.

The challenges I have are that the source images might not be all in the same format, the descriptive texts will not be all of the same number of words and that of course depending on the number of books the number of pages will vary.

Could you please suggest a template/approach in simple terms that will ease this workflow?

Thank you very much in advance.

(Illustrator - Mac)