#ordinary monsters

[thestrangerthings]

Hitting my physical TBR

I currently own so many books that they're spilling out of the 4 large bookcases in my room into multiple other places in my parent's house. I don't exactly mind having so many books, but out of the 350 or so that I own, I've only read about a third, and the rate that I'm collecting far exceeds how quickly I can read them. Add in all the times I've skipped my TBR and taken trips to my library or downloaded books off libby, and I'm overwhelmed.

This stack was recently purchased from bookoutlet.com and when checking out, I told myself that I have to finish reading these in August or I can't even look at any books in September. I'm a huge mood reader so having a TBR isn't something I typically can handle, but I've gotta do something to curb my bad habits.

I've read 3 so far, but with 3 left to go, there's always the chance that life gets in the way and I don't make it. Let's hope that I do though.

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: Wrap-Up.

Hello world!! I read sixty-three (63) books in 2024, and here they are! The pages-out books are stand-ins for library books and other borrowed books (which were ADHD for Smartass Women, When Among Crows, Ghost Station, and The Killing Floor). Mostly these are shelved in the order I read them, save for the stack at the end (Ordinary Monsters is Too Tall to fit on my current shelf arrangement, and the borrowed books are out of order).

I posted individual photos (and sometimes reviews!) of everything pictured here, which you can find tagged with their titles or authors, or you can see all of them if you peruse my "books of 2024" tag. Now, for the Highlight Reel, in order of when I read them:

FIVE FAVES

The City We Became by NK Jemisin ★★★★★ Always love Jemisin, but this duology had me laughing more than I remembered for her other books, which I definitely needed! Excellent cast (your honor I love Paolo so much and also literally all of the boroughs), I tore through this by staying up past my bedtime too many nights in a row.

The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed ★★★★★ Perfect tiny little gutpunch of a book MADE FOR ME, I loved it so damn much. Everyone please go read this immediately.

The Actor and the Target by Declan Donnellan ★★★★★ I was not expecting this to rewire my brain, but it DID, over and over and over again. Very dense chewy book, which I read hoping to get inside an actor character's head better, but honestly I think anyone who does any kind of art or creative endeavor should read this, because OOF was it insightful. (I have ordered his second book that came out this year, but it's hugely on backorder apparently.)(Go figure: The first one was SO GOOD.)

Leech by Hiron Ennes ★★★★★ This was a reread for me, and I'm so glad I revisited it--it holds up even better than the first time through, because so much of it falls into place once you know what's really going on. Masterclass in POV, very gothic, very fucked up, very Deep Winter book, I very much think anyone who was An Animorphs Kid would enjoy the hell out of this (but mind the content warnings, of which there are Many).

Self-Portrait with Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka ★★★★½ This one also hit my perfect trifecta of weird-and-funny-and-fucked-up exactly right, which I wasn't expecting? Pleasant surprise there at the end of the year. Come for the family heart crimes, stay for the unhinged overseas texts to your husband about an art heist, what a blast.

TWO TWOS

turns out i didn't actually read any 1-star books this year, so here's the bottom of the barrel, and yes i DID write lengthy salty reviews about both of these, if you're interested in the particulars of My Beef

Ordinary Monsters by JM Miro ★★ This was too damn long and ~Messy™~, and all of that just to end on a cliffhanger because it's a trilogy. Why did I bother with this 600+ page brick (oh, right: because it sounded promising)(it was Not, or at least not Enough).

Ghost Station by SA Barnes ★★ This was TOO DAMN FRUSTRATING (bad science, bad scientists, stupid characters, etc), and there was JUST ENOUGH neat promising worldbuilding in the background that Could Have Been Cool to make this otherwise mediocre experience enraging. Super bummed, because I wanted to read this author's other stuff, but now I don't trust her and therefore shan't.

Overall! Had a great reading year--those Two Twos were the only things I rated that low, and I enjoyed everything else! Looking forward to another fabulous year of books :)

[firestorm09890]

reading a book and they keep introducing characters where instead of registering what they actually look like I just end up envisioning a completely unrelated character and it's sort of getting out of hand

[elliepassmore]

Bringer of Dust review

5/5 stars Recommended if you like: historical fantasy, epic fantasy, multiple POVs, powers, magic, mysteries, morally gray characters

Ordinary Monsters review

Bringer of Dust opens weeks to months after the ending of Ordinary Monsters. The Cairndale group is spread out across Europe working to find a way to bring Marlowe home. It was a little confusing to start in media res after so much time had passed in the book, but luckily the characters did each provide an overview of what had been going on since the conclusion of the last book.

The big cast is back, with most POV characters from Ordinary Monsters getting a POV in this one as well (as long as they're alive). That being said, Alice and Mrs. Davenshaw switched roles in terms of prominence, with the latter getting far more POV chapters than the former. I wasn't really sure what to think of Mrs. Davenshaw in the first book, so I'm glad to have gotten to know her better here. Same with Mrs. Fick, who showed up for only a couple of chapters in book 1 but is a very important character here. I didn't really like her the first time, but reading her here provides a lot of perspective about her and her life and it shows a side to her that we didn't get to see in OM.

There are again a lot of intersecting threads that all feed into the main storyline. Charlie is off in England and joins up with Mrs. Fick to try and see if she'll help decipher old texts. Ribs and Alice are in Paris searching for the other orsine. Komako is in Spain looking for the Spanish Glyphic. Then we have some new characters: Jeta, a bone witch with a bone (haha) to pick with Cairndale and the Talents; and Micah, an exile who reviles Talents. Then there's the Abbess, someone with eyes everywhere who seems to be pulling strings behind the scenes, and Claker Jack, the person who runs the exiles in London and, like Jeta, absolutely loathes Talents. Both the Abbess and Claker Jack have their own agendas that put them at odds with the survivors from Cairndale, and it was interesting to see how everyone's desire for a particular thing (once Marlowe, now something else) can have very different results.

I definitely feel like the world of the Talents has been expanded with this novel. The first one was mainly about Marlowe and Charlie getting to Cairndale and the danger that Jacob Marber posed. It was a fantastic setup to the trilogy, and in this second book we get to see that world and its threats expanded. I enjoyed seeing the different areas Talents gathered and how different leaders created different 'havens.' Dr. Berghast and his predecessors had Cairndale, the Abbess has an abbey of Talent women in Paris, Claker Jack has his exiles under London, and the Agnoscenti, an ancient sect of Talent with esoteric purposes, had their base in Sicily. We also get more background into Talents and their lore, as well as why everyone seems interested in Marlowe, from Dr. Berghast to Jacob Marber to the drughe.

Like with the first book, a lot of the actions the characters take are couched in gray morality. Komako and Charlie in particular struggle with this, as they've both done things in the past that haunt them and are now also dealing with a darker, more dangerous world. I actually feel particularly bad for Komako, she's not in a fantastic place mentally when this book opens and while it seems to get better for her for a time, the ending of this book is so much more devastating than OM's ending, so I feel like she's going to ricochet right back to a bad place. Jeta, one of our new characters, also does a lot of terrible things, some of it for the right reasons but a lot of it...not so much. I actually really enjoyed Jeta's arc and am looking forward to seeing more of her in book 3.

I'm glad Onwukwe came back to narrate this book, and I'm really hoping he does the third as well. He once again brought a lot of character and quality to the characters and it was always easy to tell which character he was narrating for at any given time.

I really enjoyed this sequel to Ordinary Monsters and while it wasn't what I imagined, it fits the characters and the world so well! I listened to the audiobook and normally I only listen when traveling or commuting, but I could not stop thinking of this book and ended up listening to it at home too.

[captain-nikola-b]

My favorite books aesthetic

"Ordinary monsters" by J.M. Miro

[nerd-at-sea5]

if there’s one thing about me it’s that i will quote the media i consume at my friends who have no idea what im talking about

[aurorawest]

Reading update

White Trash Warlock by David R Slayton - 4.75/5 stars

Urban fantasy with a protagonist from a trailer park, who, for bonus points, got sectioned by his older brother as a teen. Daddy issues, mommy issues, and brother issues, what's not to like? I ordered everything else by this author I could find when I finished the book, including the other two books in this series.

The Fascinators by Andrew Eliopulos - DNF

Boring.

The Revolutionary and the Rogue by Blake Ferre - DNF

Boring, with the added crime of actual plot happening but still, somehow, nothing actually happening. I kept reading whole pages and realizing I had no idea what I'd just read.

The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard - DNF

OMFG CAN I CATCH A BREAK. This was such a disappointing DNF, too, because I'd really been looking forward to it. One of the characters is a spaceship and it bills itself as a space opera? Yes please. But after the initial marriage of convenience setup, it's just all a bunch of pointless, boring conversations. Nothing happens. I flipped ahead. Still nothing happening. Not a space opera but definitely cozy sci-fi, which I think I officially hate.

Honeytrap by Aster Glenn Gray - 5/5 stars

An FBI agent and a GRU agent get assigned to work a case together in 1959 and they fall in looooove. But oof, this book was so good. I'm not sure I've ever had a time skip hit me in the gut so hard. I really can't recommend this book enough, it fits squarely in my niche interest of mid-century America or Britain m/m romance. I think Natasha Pulley also awakened something in me with The Half Life of Valery K, because I seem to be a sucker for gay Soviet men. Speaking of, if you liked The Half Life of Valery K, I bet you'll like this too! Anyway, read this, but be prepared to be hurt by it.

Ordinary Monsters by JM Miro - 4/5 stars

X-men meets Strangers Things with a dash of English boarding school, set in Victorian Britain.

Human Enough by ES Yu - DNF

Promising until it devolved into boring, pointless conversations and tumblr posts on neurodivergence.

Olympic Enemies by Rebecca J Caffery - DNF

I put this down on page 12 and my wife grabbed it to flip through it, cackling at the amateurish prose.

Frost Bite by J Emery - 4.5/5 stars

Snowed-in cabin fic with an enemies to lovers romance between a vampire and a (former) vampire hunter. It was cute and a quick read.

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner - DNF

Very Not Like Other Girls. Also read a review that said pregnancy was a huge focus of the book, and that's a squick for me.

Reverie by Ryan La Sala - 3.75/5 stars

This book didn't quite live up to the promise of its beginning (missing memories, bizarre disruptions to time and space) and the writing was a little twee at times, but overall I enjoyed it. This was the author's debut, so I suspect subsequent books will probably be better. I did feel like the teenage main characters were weirdly inured to death, which also contributed to me knocking of a quarter of a star from what would otherwise have been a solid 4 star book.

All Souls Near & Nigh by Hailey Turner - 3/5 stars

If you like The Tarot Sequence by KD Edwards, this series might be worth picking up. I will say, though, that it's nowhere near as good. I think it's a combination of pacing and too many characters that detracts from my enjoyment of this series. This is the second book and I enjoyed it more than the first, probably because I sort of remembered the massive cast of characters from the first one. It's one of those things where I really don't think they're all necessary and some should be combined with others. The pacing is also...weird. It's pretty much nonstop action. At one point I think the main character drove back and forth between various crime scene locations and his office like 5 times in a day.

That said! Despite the issues, clearly I still picked up book 2, and I'll probably read book 3 at some point. I really like the two main characters.

[books-coffee-and-the-woods]

Starting this book tonight!

[bookishlyvintage]

The First Bright Thing, JR Dawson

"You are your own story, not a character in someone else's."

☆☆☆☆☆ | full review

[bubblesandpages]

*Gasp*

[jarfullofbubbles]

Spoilers for Piranesi and Ordinary Monsters

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: June Wrap-Up.

Okay, y'all have Convinced Me--I'm going to start doing little wrap up posts! Behold: a shelf of what I read in June (not pictured: the bookmark at page 466 of ORDINARY MONSTERS, because despite having read two (2) books worth of book so far, I'm still not quite done with that one).

June was kind of a slow reading month for me (I did a LOT of writing, looking back--nice). I wanted to take OTHER TERRORS and THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE a bite at a time so the horrors and figures of rhetoric (respectively) didn't all run together. Both of those, much like A SHINING, turned out to be pleasantly leisurely wanders, whereas MONSTERS is kind of a plod.

I already did bigger write-ups for TERRORS and SHINING, linked in the bullets below.

OTHER TERRORS - ★★★★ Great bite-sized horror anthology with a really inclusive mix, as promised! I enjoyed most of these (always nice in an anthology!)

A SHINING - ★★★★ Weird fucked up heavy little book in translation, lit-fic flavored, but very approachable, I thought. Tiny enough to swallow in a sitting, but also kind of exhausting to do it that way? I'll definitely reread this one in the future.

THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE - ★★★ Fun romp through rhetoric! The examples were fun, and I appreciated the humor, but I also find myself still uncertain what a bunch of the figures actually ARE, definitions-wise, despite having read a book full of so many of them (I did just buy his recommended A HANDLIST OF RHETORICAL TERMS to help with that, at least, which is. almost entirely. definitions by volume). Neat thing to have on my references shelf, but it wasn't as excellent as I was hoping it'd be.

ORDINARY MONSTERS - 466/658 pages read; will report back later (but it's not looking good, folks).

[ladyinrosso]

Part of what I find fascinating of Jacob Marber surely lies in the fact that he falls in that circle of characters those plans backfire so badly that in the end they reach the polar opposite effect of what they were hoping for.

spoilers under the cut, if you haven't reached Ordinary Monster's last page read at your own risk

or when you will do literally everything like turning your best friend into an undead monster so that your abusers can't put their hands on this kid that is very likely your own child only for said kid to end up imprisoned in another dimension with them

[therealvinelle]

Have you read ordinary monsters?

Nope! Generally don't read recently published books, Midnight Sun and the first half/two thirds of A Ballad of Songbirds and Snake are the only examples coming to mind.

[mellow-is-liveblogging]

been readin ordinary monsters by j.m. miro and as soon as i got to oskar's description i couldnt stop imagining him as