Rereads:

• A Confederacy of Dunces
• The Sundial
• Farewell Waltz
• The Double
• Heart of Darkness

This month: Discontent by Beatriz Serrano ; Fruit Fly by Josh Silver ; Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novak ; Country People by Daniel Mason

My absolute faves of the year so far = Sky Daddy by Kate Folk; Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon ; Edith Holler by Edward Carey ; Flesh by David Szalay ; Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein ; A Good Person by Kirsten King

would love to discuss any of these from the year so far !!

We Burned So Bright — TJ Klune
The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Glass Hotel — Emily St. John Mandel
Mad Ship — Robin Hobb
Cujo — Stephen King
Lincoln in the Bardo — George Saunders
We Have Always Lived in the Castle — Shirley Jackson

​

I honestly don't have a lot to say about this one, it was pretty good all around. I liked IT more but this had great characters and pretty good dialogue.

Jud was an easy favorite character.

I can't say I was scared at any point but the book was certainly upsetting at times in a good way.

Hall was a perfect voice cast for the book, especially for Louis and Jud.

4/5 just twenty more to go!

August was a good month for stats, but felt like a slog.

The Year of Magical Thinking was a re-read. The Megan Devine book is essential for anyone dealing with grief. Take Me With You also felt like a grief book, although it had other themes. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois was heavy, but I thought the audiobook was well done. Threw in a couple graphic novels this month and a children’s book specific to grief because my brain is digesting printed words all that great.

A Confederacy of Dunces is a classic? I found the main character so annoying I had to force myself to finish it.

I am not a romance reader, but People We Meet on Vacation was a good distraction audiobook.

August ended up being a strange one, a real mixed bag. Two books stood out as favorites: A Drop of Corruption and Last Argument of Kings, both fantastic. I had high hopes for Butcher’s Crossing, and while it was a good read (I gave it a 3.5), it didn’t quite live up to Stoner, which I read last month and though it was amazing!

Really excellent month of books.

I’ve wrapped up my Realm of the Elderlings journey (other than The Inheritance short story collection but that should be arriving from Thrift Books soon). Absolutely love this series so so much. I’ll give it a while to digest but I definitely see myself revisiting this series in the future.

Finally got around to listening to two trilogies that I’ve had on my Audible account for years now: His Dark Materials and the Book of the Ancestor. Both of these were way different that I had anticipated and were really great stories. A very catholic inspired month there.

My wife and I are continuing our co-op listen of the Dresden Files. It’s a reread for her and my first time through the story. It’s fun but I’m not super invested yet.

And my last book for the month, The Ballad of Perilous Graves, was a very fun New Orleans based urban fantasy. It initially reminded me of Ring Shout but this one felt like a love letter to New Orleans, Jazz Music, Graffiti culture, and the queer/trans experience. The climax gave me chills

This month was a fun month. This is the first month that ive read mostly fiction (including Go Ask Alice lol).

My favorite book was Flowers for Algernon, well earned 5 star read. So devastating, i had to take the rest of the day to decompress after finishing. (Then i watched "Flowers for Charlie")

Monstrilio was such a beautifully somber horror read.

The worst this month was the Dick Gregory book, was fun at first then it goes into conspiracy theory city lol.

I am at a total of 24/52 books for the year now.Looking forward to next months reads, hoping to dive into more of the classics!

I’ve been doing the annual 52-book reading challenge since 2018. The prompts are entertaining to contemplate and fulfill. I’ve been completing the challenge by June or July so I just do all 52 prompts again or do favorite prompts three or more times.

This year, that bored me. So I found another 52-book reading challenge to complete my secondary 52 books. I looked at other challenges like Popsugar (HARD pass!) and chose the TBR Takedown 2026 challenge. Some very interesting prompts that lit my brain up and enticed me with some new books to consider.

The red background books are read and rated. Black background books are yet to read. Black background books with stars are rereads. It’ll be interesting how many I can read in four months. 😎

The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent (5/5)

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb (5/5)

The Foxhole Court by Nora Sakavic (5/5)

I had fun with everything I finished this month. The Foxhole Court was a reread, the other two were new to me. I definitely feel myself being sucked into Hobb's world!

I had a reading slump back in spring but now I feel like the joy is back. August was solid

A Long Way by Chambers was a surprise for me. It’s technically a space opera, but really it’s a character driven novel about relationships and it was incredibly cozy and heartfelt.

When the Moon Hatched was also a surprise. I feel like this was what romantasy was supposed to be like. The actually romance and not the steamy parts. Very enjoyable.

The Vaster Wilds - Lauren Groff

My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh

Unlikely Animals - Annie Hartnett

The Overstory - Richard Powers

Atavists - Lydia Millet

Without You, There is No Us - Suki Kim

All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy

Martyr - Kaveh Akbar

Death in Her Hands - Ottessa Moshfegh

I've had few experiences in my life as powerful as reading "The Overstory" during a hiking trip in the Rocky Mountains. That book will stay with me for a long time.

I understand the appeal of "Martyr" but that one just didn't hit for me for some reason. "Atavists" was also disappointing but I've read a lot of Millet recently and it might've been too soon to pick up another of hers.

I wish Suki Kim's book about her experience as a teacher in North Korea was required reading for American students. Cormac McCarthy was excellent, but if I'm honest there were points where it dragged? And Ottessa just continues to blow my mind this year after previously reading "Eileen."

A solid month overall!
Let downs -
The Love Hypothesis (woof).
The Unicorn Hunters - this was still a great book, I think I just had really high expectations for whatever reason and was led down by the pacing and structure. But the prose is lovely and the characters are really well done. Would still recommend!

Favorites - A Trade of Blood - This was somehow even better than the first two.
Immaculate Conception - I can’t believe I let this sit on my shelf for so long. Really interesting with well explored themes and felt unique.

The best book was Red Sorghum by Mo Yan. I randomly chose it when I wanted to read a Chinese book and boy was it a great choice. It focuses on a small village before and during WWII. It’s brutal and disjointed and very funny and horrific. Very powerful.

Also great: - Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington - a whacky tale that feels like the movie Ponyo told from the old ladies point of view - including a climate disaster. It’s funny and sweet and very interesting. Also made me think of ‘Drive your plow over the bones of the dead’ and its charmingly unstable old protagonist - and indeed Olga T wrote the NYRB afterword for The hearing trumpet.
- The crow road by Iain Banks - a Scottish funny family saga from the early 90s. Dealing with death, unrequited love, sibling rivalries and lots of cousins. - A girl on the shore, manga by Inio Asano. Stunningly beautiful. The complicated life of teens. Sexual awakening, loneliness, the works. - Replay - a time loop story from the 80s. Thoughtful, interesting. - The blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin - a small novella that takes the classic Russian snow storm literary journey - and corrupting it. It’s the same world but it’s bizarre, decaying, absurd, folkloric and technologically strange.

Favorites: The Fox and the Devil; The Exorcists House: Genesis; Ghostland; Breathe In, Bleed Out; We Were Never Really Friends

I somehow read 12 books this month, which honestly surprised me because I started August pretty burnt out. Then I finished Assassin’s Quest and apparently entered some kind of reading crisis.

I was supposed to finish the month with a bunch of light, summery books. Instead, I abandoned that plan almost immediately and started reading horror. A lot of horror. Haunted houses, historical horror, supernatural weirdness, body horror... apparently that was what my brain needed after the emotional devastation of finishing the Farseer trilogy.

And honestly? It turned out to be a really good reading month. I had three 5-star reads, several 4-star books, and only one that I thought was truly mediocre.

⭐ 5 stars

Assassin’s Quest — Robin Hobb
Over 800 pages and completely immersive. I loved the journey, the characters, Nighteyes, the Fool... pretty much everything. And then I finished it and felt weirdly depressed about being done. The ending was satisfying overall, but I wanted MORE for Fitz after everything he went through. I genuinely didn't know what I was supposed to do with myself afterward.

The Tapestry of Fate — Shannon Chakraborty
Loved this just as much as The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi. Amina is still one of my favorite fantasy protagonists, and I love that she's a woman in her forties with a daughter, a bad knee, and actual responsibilities. The world-building is fantastic, the adventure is fun, and that ending has me desperately waiting for the next book.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter — Stephen Graham Jones
This one completely caught me off guard. Dark, brutal, disturbing, and incredibly immersive. I especially loved the three different perspectives, and I highly recommend the audiobook because the different voices really added something to the story. Probably my biggest surprise of the month.

⭐ 4–4.5 stars

This House Will Feed — Maria Tureaud — 4.5⭐
Historical fiction + gothic horror + Irish Potato Famine + creepy isolated manor. Basically designed for me. I loved the atmosphere and the history, although, as usual, I wanted about 500% more description of the house itself.

Old Birds Fly in Poetic Hues — Jossalin Page — 4⭐
I'm not much of a poetry reader, so this was a really nice surprise. Definitely a collection I think is better read slowly rather than all at once.

Just Like Home — Sarah Gailey — 4⭐
Exactly what I needed to get me out of my reading slump. Dark, creepy, gory haunted-house horror. I really enjoyed this one.

We Live Here Now — Sarah Pinborough — 4⭐
Another haunted house! I really liked the three perspectives and the increasingly strange things happening in the house. I just wanted more of the house itself because apparently I have a very specific haunted-house problem.

The Unknown — Riley Sager — 4.25⭐
I've read seven Riley Sager books now, and this is definitely one of the better ones for me. Isolated island, missing women, séances, questionable supernatural activity, and a movie cast stranded in the middle of it all. Fun mystery and some good twists.

Geiger Vol. 1–6 — Geoff Johns, Gary Frank & Brad Anderson — 4⭐
I haven't read a graphic novel in probably 20 years, so this was a fun return to the format. Post-apocalyptic radioactive wasteland, mutants, weird creatures, and lots of action. Also, the main character's name is Geiger, which happens to be my last name, so obviously I had to read it.

⭐ The rest

The Caretaker — Marcus Kliewer — 3.5⭐
Creepy, fast-paced, and I read the entire thing during one rainy Florida afternoon. I spent a lot of the book wanting to yell at Macy to PLEASE just follow the rules. 

The Romance Revival — Christina Lauren — 3⭐
I wanted a light summer romance and instead got romance + science fiction + thriller. Interesting concept, but I never completely connected with the romance and wished the book had leaned harder into the sci-fi/thriller elements.

The Widow — John Grisham — 3⭐
Picked this one up from a Little Free Library and was excited because it's a newer Grisham. Unfortunately, I kept waiting for the clever lawyers, scheming, twists, and complicated plot I associate with his books. It just never really got there for me.

So that's August.

12 books, 3 five-stars, a whole lot of horror, and absolutely no idea how I went from “light summer reading” to “another haunted house.”

Honestly, I'm not even mad about it. 

The Haar
By David Sodergren

Fun, bloody horror novel with an unconventional premise that you can finish in an evening. Commits fully to it's sentimental side, the melancholy of being an aging widow, stoically resigned to the end coming around, suffering the frequent mortal aches of feeling around for the phantom limb of an expired loved one, commits to it enough that you'll be shocked everytime that the novel swings to the complete opposite end of the pendulum and reminds you that it's in the horror genre, disintegrating into gruesome gore and brutal monster horror. There's even a touch of 'Our Wives Under the Sea'-style oceanic hijinks.

Like the obligatory short, sweet, un-selfconscious slasher that comes out every october, wouldn't be surprised if this gets A24ed in the next few years.

3.5/5

The Elsewhereans: A Documentary Novel
By Jeet Thayil

This was actually a little hard to get through, very sombre, dry prose, but overall I found it to be quite beautiful. A novel about that it means to be the watery, ephemeral thing that is a human being enmeshed within a constantly shifting and dissolving matrix of newborn nationalities and identities, strange chimeras born and cobbled out of alchemies of colonialism and globalization, living in an age where identity is constantly melted down and reformed violently into new and alien shapes, one more illusionary manmade eternity in a long line of eternities in a planet that turns entire continents from blue to brown in an indifferent cosmic blink. We think the world and all it's divisions, are all fact, truth, sharp delineations, but they are as much waterware as we are, and in a hundred years all will become unrecognisable again - it is just the cycle of things. As the woman in the boat says - this is not a geographical journey, but a mental one.

A passage I liked:

At the metal staircase, half a dozen people cluster around some sort of tour guide, a white-haired woman with a cane whose eyes are hidden behind impenetrable dark glasses.

She is like no guide Chachiamma has ever heard.

‘… that we’re all different,’ she says. ‘But are we really? And if so, how so? I hear a question these days, people asking: Where are you from? The reply is always one or two words, always inaccurate. Nobody is from one place. Where we are really from is where we’re going now. This body of water wasn’t always here. It appeared after Europe broke off from the mother continent. By this, I mean a very simple thing. This journey is a return, and it might be the single most important journey you will make.'

Here the woman pauses, and the people listening look at each other, at the sky, at the brilliant water. Some wander away to take pictures.

She says, ‘Like the Suez Canal, this is a mental waterbody more than a physical one. It separates Africa from Asia and Europe and underlines the fact that we’re connected.'

No rating.

Narcopolis

By Jeet Thayil

An uncontrolled, manic odyssey through a subaltern Bombay in the throes of a violent metamorphosis, jumping from person to person who drift through a world where all is melted into something fluid, fused, and incorporeal in a narcotic fugue. Grimy, nasty, and apocalyptic, for what is metamorphosis but a series of apocalypses? A chemical apocalypse, a social apocalypse, an internal apocalypse. Entire histories fade in and out like short-lived insects, nonsensical histories that leave you not with a truth, but only a feeling, an imprint of what it meant to exist in a place and a time. It feels like you yourself are a substance in a pipe, a fullness that is boiled and juiced until all there is left is a trembling, ghostly residue, and vapour, smoky and nonsensical.

Extremely surprised that people did not take to this - maybe it is something that can only be understood, made sense of by an Indian sensory palate, so used to excess, so used to ephemera, and privy to all the historical, cultural shorthands, the kind of creature who is tuned to the manic velocity of this novel.

No highlights; this entire book is a hot and furious trance.

5/5

A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing

By Alice Evelyn Yang

A powerful, visceral epic weaving together three generations of a family from occupied Manchuria to 70s China to present-day New York, fractured and misshapen by war, upheaval, abandonment. Generational trauma is something that the novel sublimates into a fleshy, vicious characters of it's own, breaking into the world of mortals and shaping them with disturbing premonitions, otherwordly visions, even stepping into physical forms to inflict bodily pain upon them. A vision of a world violently disintegrating, first at the hands of wartime cruelty, second in the vast tidal waves of bloodletting that come afterwards, sparing nothing, not even your own kin, the horrors you become capable of when caught up in the throes of mass hysteria, and then, a child relentlessly haunted by all of it, harangued by spectres and omens. What it feels like to live through the terrifying breakdown of the world you knew, and the horrible things you must do to survive it. Metamorphoses, described not with the resigned detachment of Narcopolis, but like a violent, demonic transformation of werewolves, blurring the line between the real and the numinous, ripping up one from the inside. This book is really all about metamorphosis, the violence of people, and the violence of time. How, in spite of these horrors, people had to live their lives, fall in love, raise children, survive the ire of their in-laws, dare to hope for a better life. The prose is dark, mean, angry, haunting, otherwordly (a mild case of excessive description, i have to admit, but that is hardly an artistic failing).

Surprised this isn't more popular. Great piece of magical realism and looking forward to more from this author.

Lines I liked:

The war began six years ago in 1937. Back then, the stories from farther south – ferried to their village by migrants, letters, rickshaws, trains, and boats – were thought to be tall tales. But in the spring of 1938, the birds that'd flown south in the winter returned to make their nests, carrying their scavenged southern treasures. Rather than their usual loot of feathers, lichen, and spider silk, they carried human hair, skin, and bones. Gory bundles of soft intestines and hard twigs spun together decorated the trees. Later, they would rot, leaving dark streaks of decomposition like sap down the bark.

Mouse's absence developed a physicality. Her vacancy grew its own body – spindly, long phantom legs of grief that nudged against Ming when she was hemming or laundering.

​Weihong opened his mouth and found, for a second, that no sound would come out. He would not be able to take his next words back. But his body was no longer his body. It was a mollusc shell, hollowed out for a creature of fate that had burrowed inside. It was possessing him, pressing itself outwards against the underside of his skin, against his eardrums, his vocal cords. It whispered that he had been here before, had been here time and time again, and then it went through the same actions and words that it had always done – Weihong unable to do anything but watch as fortune played itself out.

Our violence was not literate. There were no words to describe what we did. Atrocity. Massacre. Bloodbath. They approached but did not capture. They missed the essence of our savagery – which was that we enjoyed it. The lawlessness. The godliness. The Chairman had dug out a dark seed within us and given it permission to bloom.

And once, in a drunken stupor – when the veil between reality and dream grew filmy and sheer like cellophane – he went inside and found his wife and daughter sitting at this make-believe kitchen table, waiting for him. They were not angry. They welcomed him back from his travels. He was home.

A lesson he had learned: his past resisted chronology. It looped. It wound. It spiralled like a Fibonacci sequence. Some ages felt closer to him than others. Multiples of seven, he'd noticed, consumed him, felt uncomfortably, inexplicably real. Fourteen. Twenty-one. Thirty-five. He did not know why. What he also knew: his mind coiled, serpentine, suffocating those memories he most wanted to forget – the same ones he now needed.

Fei was a spoiled, sensitive boy, but Ming still felt a pang at his expression. In these early, amorphous years – when memory had just begun to stick – Ming thought of her and Fei as One Being: a two-headed snake. Perhaps age would split them into separate entities, but Ming believed they would still echo and enfold each other, like stacked soup spoons.

5/5

Our Wives Under The Sea
By Julia Armfield

An entire oceanic world sublimated out of the dark, abyssal texture of a mind, a memory befogged by grief, murky, nebulous, suspended in a directionless darkness while the sounds of the earth come loud and distorted as though from a great distance. Everything is a pale ghost of itself, half-seen, blurred. Sepulchral, but also teeming with life, with warm, bursting flesh. Reality is a thin, watery veil, through which ghosts slip in and out at will. The uncontainable anger at watching someone you love and adore waste away before you, the strange and irrational mental gymnastics we engage in to try to make sense of it. All the while, you are haunted by what they had been, what they could've been. If the absolutely gorgeous prose does not do it for you, then maybe at least the fun scientific facts will. Did you know that the Pacific might have been formed by a chunk of the earth ripping away from itself and forming into the moon? I didn't till I read this, and the imagery of it sends chills down my spine.

Lines I liked:

August in the city is always strange, wet, scuttled through with insects freshly burst from shells.

“Some people," she says, "think the granite floor of the Pacific was torn away to make the moon. Darwin's son, actually. He said that. That when the earth was young it rotated very quickly – it went so fast that part of it flew off into space and the Pacific is the scar it left behind."

It was very easy to offend my mother. Rather in the way that it's very easy to kill an orchid, it often seemed little short of inevitable.

On occasion, I would look in the mirror and consider the briskly diminishing fact of myself, hold my hands to the sides of my face as if preventing collapse.

Summer slunk into the brickwork, bloating the building outwards, pressure in the walls. The space above the oven swelled and leaked some viscous substance like a body pierced between its ribs.

Certainly we were trapped but in retrospect it's still hard to imagine the kind of lethargy that seemed to grip us. I can't explain it, except to say that inaction felt obvious, a decision already made by someone else. The basic truth of the situation occurred to me only as if shouted across some great distance and barely heard.

4.5/5

Stuff i read in July: https://kingoflimbs.substack.com/p/shit-i-read-in-july

Stuff I read in June: https://kingoflimbs.substack.com/p/shit-i-read-in-june

quite enjoyable month !! No new canon classics but I love seeing this mixture of genres and formats together with graphic novels, novellas, nonfiction, etc . I tried hard sci-fi for the first time with my first Le Guin and it was effortful but worth the effort.

Working through several series at the moment, lol. Anyways, I've greatly enjoyed the Earthsea series, The Deathgate Cycle series, One Piece series, and Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. I'm indecisive about continuing The Empire of the Vampire series, and will definitely be dropping Wild Magic and whichever series that The Pure Moon series belongs to.

My lowest rated book is Wild Magic. Highest rated is Wizard of Earthsea. The blank book cover is One Piece, vol. 10.