#ghost station

Gus/Chuck matching Pinocchio/Geppetto skins!! 🎃🍁SOOO PROUD OF THESE.

The Train Is Always About to Come, 35mm memory

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.

“…Was that an actual sense of humor I’m detecting, Commander? Perhaps you’re more ill than we realized.”