Kitewithfish

Wednesday Reading Meme for April 15, 2026

2026-04-16T02:05:50Z

What I’ve Read
The Wimsey Papers by Dorothy L. Sayers – A great look at Sayers’s wartime thoughts in 1935. It’s a loose collection of “letters” between Wimsey relatives that give the impression being Sayers’s soapbox. It’s honestly fairly touching but I’m biased.

Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson – Fascinating alternate history novel, told in several timelines. The older timeline is an alternate history of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, where it actually went off as planned with Harriet Tubman’s help. The younger timeline is about the survivors of a dead astronaut coping with the new Mars mission. It’s great and weird and hopeful and antiracist in a wrathful and constructive way.

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata – Mixed bag. The first section is from the perspective of an abused and neglected child with a single friend – she’s so alienated from humanity she grows to actually believe she’s an alien. It depicts the abuse and violence with the character disassociating thru it all in a very convincing and harrowing way. She thinks of herself and society as The Factory – they make babies and enforce that role on everyone around them – she’ll grow up into the role eventually. The second half of the book didn’t work for me so well – we meet up with the same character in a much calmer time of her life, but the forces of The Factory are more distant until they are radically not. The second half of the book feels ... like a parody of alienation? She’s not feeling her own emotions anymore and so the more shocking actions of the later book didn’t land as closely. It’s an interesting attempt, but I think that Tender is the Flesh did the “cannibalism as dehumanization” thread more justice.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley – Re-Read. A strange and inconsistent creature – McKinley’s one urban fantasy experiment did not actually land the logistics and plot of an urban fantasy, but the vibes are dreamy and weird and I love that.

What I’m Reading
Fabric of Civilization – no movement

Chalice by Robin McKinley – Sunshine made me crave more.

What I’ll Read Next
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (eventually)
Animorphs – I enjoyed these books and recently tumblr has tempted me into finishing the series.

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Wednesday Reading Meme for April 8 2026

2026-04-09T00:46:26Z

Personal update: I have indulged – I got a Kobo ereader to replace my somewhat elderly Kindle Paperwhite. It has BUTTONS - actual, physical buttons! It’s so nice and the lighting is good, and I am at last free from the Amazon ecosystem. On the downside, a good deal of the fic that I have saved for myself the last few years in ebook form was transmitted to the Kindle as emailed attachments, and so I have a new part time job of saving and converting all of those and sending them to the Kobo.

What I’ve Read
Gaudy Night – Dorothy Sayers – I finished this slowly, in writing, and I am glad I took the time. This book is a wonderful summation of the series, giving space for Harriet’s introspection and allowing her to slowly come to terms with her own growing trust in her own judgment. It’s full of allusion, jokes, and self-reflection. I often fall back on the metaphor of fiction as light striking a jewel – a skilled writer can draw out subtle meanings and highlight contrast by what facets are lit by the writer’s attention. By the end of this book both Harriet and Peter are illuminated. Wonderful book, glad I decided to give the series a proper and slow read-thru rather than just goof around.

Sidebar: I have an exacting requirement about English writers, which is that I want them to show their work – I want to see them thinking about what it means To Be English in their works, rather than taking their Englishness for a universal and inevitable norm, like gravity or light. In the case of Sayers, it often takes the form of thinking about time, about changes, about class, about academics, about social roles, about dignity and decency and what is or is not “done.” This book makes me see a vision of Oxford as Harriet Vane loved it, and I think that’s very worthwhile.

Busman’s Honeymoon – Dorothy Sayers – I am glad I picked this up so soon after Gaudy Night! They are very close in time. This book is fascinating because the beginning frame is an epistolary section from Peter and Harriet’s friends and family about how happy they are to see them married, the middle of the book starts as a sort of cozy “murder in a locked cottage” mystery, and then the ending is a gradual examination of what it costs Peter, as a human being, to send another person to be tried and executed for their crimes. It’s book about marriage, and figuring out how to be in a life together with someone else, with all their scars and foibles, and how to do it honorably, without pulling them into being your plaything. It’s moderately incredible and also tonally complex in a way that Sayers’s earlier detective novels just wasn’t. Honestly, great and nothing like I was expecting.

The Orb of Cairado by Katherine Addison – I didn’t know this was a murder mystery, and I think that works because the main character didn’t know either, until he was well into it. It’s short and sweet and mostly complete, and delves into a bit of the social reaction to the reign of Emperor Edrehasivar VII aka, Maia the protagonist of the first novel in this series. Orb does not stand up on its own without that book, and I suspect it does not stand up without the Witness for the Dead novels, and since I have read all of those multiple times, I don’t mind. I am not sure if this book is a cash grab from Addison or an attempt at a palette cleanser, but I can't tell if its successful because I can't tell why she wanted to write it. I also don’t think it holds up well against Sayers (unfair comparison, who could??) and I would not have read them so close together if I had known it was a murder mystery.

Sidebar: This is the third time Addison/Monette has linked being a gay man with murder, that I know of. I rather wish she were a little inclined to ponder if there’s something there, there.

Honorable mention – not a novel, but this excellent fic based in Much Ado About Nothing made me very happy – Reprise by Perennial - https://archiveofourown.org/works/26980378

What I’m Reading
The Fabric of Civilization – Virginia Postrel. The deeper we get into this book, the more interested and niche the information gets. I had some background in textile history – New England children all get a visit to a fabric mill and a maple sugar shack as mandatory field trips, and we also got a background in the Bread and Roses textile workers' strikes in school – so I think I am perhaps unusually versed for the average person on the history of textiles up to and immediately into the 1800s. That said, this was the first time someone really explained the mechanism that punch cards looms DO to make the punch cards impact the cloth, and that alone was worth the price of admission. I was listening to the audiobook but switched to the digital text when I realized I was missing the PICTURES.

What I’ll Read Next
Sunshine (Robin McKinley, a re-read)
Catching Fire

Knitting reflections – I just got the notice that the next Sock Madness pattern is a heel-up pattern, not unlike the Hyrde Sokker I recently did for fun. https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/hyrde-sokker I really enjoy this style of heel-up, in the round sock, as I find it has a comfy padded heel and a high instep without too much fussing. My first pair were these Nordwand socks, one of the few times I am pleased I was briefly on TikTok. https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/nordwand-socksI’m kicking doing this round just because I do actually want these socks for my own. https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/whisky-ahoi

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Wednesday Reading Meme for March 25 2026

2026-03-26T01:14:23Z

What I’ve Read

The Historian By Elizabeth Kostova – This Dracula novel has a fantastic trick which is telling an epistolary story that nails the fun of reading a story thru someone else’s voice and then returning to the main character’s narrative to go “Oh, my god, they had no idea of the danger they were in!” And that trick is a trick I enjoy a great deal! I don’t know that I enjoy 700 pages of it! Overall, while the narrative is the journey we take with the characters, this journey felt extended beyond the needs of the story or my personal pleasure, and ended in a kind of disappointing splat. I can see why it made a splash – It’s not badly written, and the layered epistolary vibe is pretty great for the first half of the book! But that’s not how you kill Dracula, Frank.

My Real Children by Jo Walton – Ok, I just read this in a fever dream on a plane but I really liked it. The story is a well-told life of a woman named Patricia- specifically, two different lives that branch off from each other in 1949, when she makes a single important personal choice. But, as an elderly woman with dementia, in a nursing home, she remembers both lives and both worlds and both sets of children that she has, different as they are from each other. In one, she lives a life of joy and love in a private oasis from a world gradually falling into violence and instability. In the other, she’s snatching tiny moments of personal peace inside a miserable life, but the world is gradually getting brighter, kinder, and more peaceful. It’s a carefully composed book and I enjoyed both stories really well! I will probably have to re-read it to talk about cogently for book club. Jo Walton has always done a great of seeding her world building naturally throughout the stories she writes, so I think this story will reward re-reading.

The Scales and the Sword by foolish_mortal (Restricted link - https://archiveofourown.org/works/773326) – The Hitcher (1986) fic – So, getting into Talamasca fic led to me finding this extremely homoerotic and murdery film, and then the fic about it has been very interesting. The movie is basically “nice heterosexual boy with a car is stalked by hot murderous stranger with a fixation on him.” It’s great, if you like murderous strangers with a fascination that leads them to toy with their food. The film shows the nice boys slow slide into feral violence, which seems to the murderous stranger’s aim – making this nice boy more like himself. The movie would be much more dull if it were more straight. This story is an AU where our nice boy is… less heterosexual, and the murderous stranger is introduced to him under different circumstances. They dance around each other for a loooong time in a flirtation that gradually becomes more explicitly sexual as the story goes on. Think Hannibal.

What I’m Reading
Hemlock and Silver by T Kingfisher – Kingfisher loves an older lady with an area of expertise, and in Anja’s case, that’s poison! It’s Kingfisher, I know it will be good.

What I’ll Read Next
The Fabric of Civilization – audiobook, the library will pull it back soon.

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Weekly reading meme for March 18 2026

2026-03-19T01:07:28Z

I am keyboardless, forgive my brevity.

What I've Read

After the Storm by perennial - This beautiful fic is Don John and Hero from Much Ado About Nothing, in an alternate universe where John revenges himself on Claudio by marrying Hero. Long and slow, this fic look at who John might be if given enough rope, and who Hero might be if she didn't have to marry that credulous shithead.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/31038242

Swordheart by T. Kingfisher A sweet romance, a little too long. Doing some lifting to set up the following books in the series.

The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison - A reread for me for xing bookclub!

What I'm Reading Now
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - This is fine? Not sure if I am reaching for the orientalism or if the book is just doing that, but the key problems are repetition and repetition. 700 pages of, Dracula is around still and he's a dick.

What I'll Read Next
My Real Children Jo walton

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Wednesday Reading Meme for March 11 2026

2026-03-11T23:41:35Z

Weekly reading journal for march 11 2025

I am! On! Vacation! Muahahahahaha.

(Happy 11th of March to the few, the happy few, Due South fans out there!)

What I Have Read
Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers - I finished this is a fevered rush on a plane, so take my review with a grain of salt. This was fun, it was sincere, it was unpretentious, it was a good time! I wish there had been a little more substance to the ending as the emotional core of Cameron's journey, but I am not upset by it! I did call the main revelation but not all of it! And I'm not sure what I would recommend this book for, exactly, but I had fun.

Chivalric Academia by OldShrewsburyian This fic! Is a delight! The writing is just a pleasure to read - funny and clear, gently ironic and sincere by turns. It's a Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth modern day academic AU where they are both new faculty at a small college. She hates him, he gets his handcut off, they fall in love. Brienne is written with such absolute conviction and commitment, Jaime is always dancing between hiding in the shadows and baring his soul in stupified awe of her. Wonderful, go read it especially if you like Dorothy Sayers. https://archiveofourown.org/works/57674458

Daniel Molloy's Incredible Showstopping World-Famous Model Train Extravaganza for Children and Easily-Awed Vampires (Please Knock) by
Ariaste - I read this bc Ariaste is now posting the sequel as a weekly fic. Its wonderful and porny and like Chivalric Academia, involves people who want to be together figuring out how to make it work.

What I'm Reading
Sword Heart is still slow because it is so so sweet and tender.

What I Will Read Next
The grief of stones
My real children

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Wednesday Reading Meme for March 11 2026

2026-03-11T23:41:15Z

Weekly reading journal for march 11 2025

I am! On! Vacation! Muahahahahaha.

(Happy 11th of March to the few, the happy few, Due South fans out there!)

What I Have Read
Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers - I finished this is a fevered rush on a plane, so take my review with a grain of salt. This was fun, it was sincere, it was unpretentious, it was a good time! I wish there had been a little more substance to the ending as the emotional core of Cameron's journey, but I am not upset by it! I did call the main revelation but not all of it! And I'm not sure what I would recommend this book for, exactly, but I had fun.

Chivalric Academia by OldShrewsburyian This fic! Is a delight! The writing is just a pleasure to read - funny and clear, gently ironic and sincere by turns. It's a Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth modern day academic AU where they are both new faculty at a small college. She hates him, he gets his handcut off, they fall in love. Brienne is written with such absolute conviction and commitment, Jaime is always dancing between hiding in the shadows and baring his soul in stupified awe of her. Wonderful, go read it especially if you like Dorothy Sayers. https://archiveofourown.org/works/57674458

Daniel Molloy's Incredible Showstopping World-Famous Model Train Extravaganza for Children and Easily-Awed Vampires (Please Knock) by
Ariaste - I read this bc Ariaste is now posting the sequel as a weekly fic. Its wonderful and porny and like Chivalric Academia, involves people who want to be together figuring out how to make it work.

What I'm Reading
Sword Heart is still slow because it is so so sweet and tender.

What I Will Read Next
The grief of stones
My real children

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Wednesday Reading Meme on a Friday - March 6 2026

2026-03-07T00:16:41Z

Reading Journal for March 6 2026

What I’ve Read
And Other Poison Devils by Twig (https://archiveofourown.org/works/77727411) This one requires a little explanation.
So, last October, AMC did a new show in the Anne Rice cinematic universe that they’ve been building with Interview with the Vampire and The Mayfair Witches called, in full, Anne Rice's Talamasca: The Secret Order. I don’t recommend it – the show is weirdly heterosexual for a Rice-inspired tale, and for a spy story. They really do not delve deeply into the implication of having an untrained telepath as our main character. The show is so generic they literally named the main character Guy.

But! To you, dear reader, I am kinder than to myseI am a completionist and also a Bill Fichtner fan, so I watched Anne Rice's Talamasca: The Secret Order. It’s not great. It spends a great deal of time setting up Guy, and then all the payoff is for other characters who were introduced somewhat haphazardly. However, the extremely specific Guy has some great slashy scenes with The Vampire Jasper – it’s classic handsy male actors making intense eye contact from four inches apart, and it appealed to enough people that there is a little fandom built up about it, myself included. THIS FIC is fantastic – it picks up a number of threads the show dropped and weaves them into a compelling personal narrative of a young vulnerable man who falls into the hands of a powerful older man and dedicates himself to his cause – and of course, unlike the canon, it’s well written and they fuck. Great work, Highly recommend as well Twig’s shorter work, The Hunter and the Gun (https://archiveofourown.org/works/75005866) which is closer to canon and also deeply fun.

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik – The final book in the Scholomance series, about how the main character takes down magic capitalism from the inside. It’s wonderful payoff on the world building of the series, and good character work, and my god, Maw Mouths are just so much more horrible on the re-read than they are the first

What I’m Reading

Sword Heart by T Kingfisher - an excellent fantasy romance. What if Geralt of Rivia was assigned to protect a busty older woman with shitty relatives?
Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers -Static

What I’ll Read Next
My Real Children Jo Walton
Sunshine Robin McKinley

Work in Progress
I finished my Sock Madness qualifier socks after the deadline, but with enough done to be a cheerleader. I think I'll call it a win!

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Wednesday Reading Meme for Feb 25 2026

2026-02-26T01:41:54Z

What I’ve Read
The Last Graduate – Naomi Novik – Book 2 of the Scholomance – This series rules. In some ways, total wish fulfillment (of the Superman, “What if you had the power to save everyone*?” variety) and yet the execution really works for me. And, as all good series do, it delivers on promises made in the first book that you didn’t even know were being set up. I have only read this series once, each book as it was published, and I am happily reporting that they are even better read in quick succession. I love El Higgins and would go to war for her.

What I’m Reading
Apparently Sir Cameron Needs to Die – Static.

The Golden Enclaves – Naomi Novik – Scholomance 3 – Stuff gets objectively better and also subjectively so much worse. Fascinating expansion from the microcosm of the Scholomance itself and its limited borders to the actual whole world of magical people all fucking about and being human. Great stuff.

What I’ll Read Next
My Real Children Jo Walton
Sunshine Robin McKinley

Work in Progress Wednesday
Sock Madness 20 ! Nearly done with Sock 1, have worked out enough of the difficulties that I think sock 2 will be a great improvement! The rough part of Sock Madness is that I don’t usually have time to fit the sock to my own foot very well, so I’m probably going to have to play Cinderella with someone else’s feet.

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Wednesday Reading Meme for Feb 18 2025 (and a WIP!)

2026-02-19T03:32:01Z

What I’ve Read

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher – Another Sworn Soldier spooky mystery with a creepy cave and inhuman intelligences. I liked it, but I don’t think it’s as interesting as the first two. I’ll probably re-read to see if I continue to hold that opinion later. Kingfisher is always a good re-read.

Latchkey by Goldkirk – Long and self-indulgent Batfam fic focus on a young Tim Drake. None of the bad things have happened yet – Jason Todd makes friends with Tim, and Tim’s parents are awful and he’s rescued. The writing is good and there’s probably more I can say, but it just makes me feel content to see someone recovering from a bad situation.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh – A magical school story (NOT my thing) where the main character is an intelligent administrator and instructor who’s also a 38 year old woman in a slow rolling life crisis (TOTALLY my thing.) Honestly, this is a great book and the only failure of the work is mine – I have no tolerance for the kind of Potterstalgic Anglophilia that permeates some magical school stories, and so I would have never read this book if my book club hadn’t suggested it. I am not immune to foolish choices. It’s legitimately good and puts enough work into showing the foulness of English hierarchical society that I could actually trust Tesh to not brush over it. I really enjoyed the main character’s sheer unrelenting busy-ness and the complexities of running a larger school appealed, and the way the school kind of eats her until something breaks.

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (Scholomance Book 1) – Also an author I trust to look at a magical school and then take a hatchet to the hierarchical bullshit built into it! This is a re-read and I enjoyed it a great deal. This book is about capitalism and hierarchy and aristocracy and all the ways El Higgins grows to realize that she’s rather build something new than choose a safe path. Book club picked this series, and the Incandescent, because we tend to do better with a quarterly book club meeting and we need something meaty and complex. These books are going to make a fascinating set of comparisons. This book has zero teachers in it.

What I’m Reading

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik (Scholomance 2) – This book is doing numbers on my head in the scarcity mindset compared to the last book. El finally gets her hands on some RESOURCES and it changes the whole game and also I fully related to how resentful she is of the past ages she spent scraping by. One of the best elements of this book series is El going from an outsider with no leverage and a deep fear of incurring debts she can’t repay, to the linchpin of a vast network of people willingly supporting each other for the good of it. She’s not there yet, but she’s laying down the foundations. It’s wonderful.

Apparently Sir Cameron Needs to Die – so far, so good. Cute and funny, more horny than I realized. Do people like sprayed edges on a book? I find them oddly smelly, and it’s a glue-bound paperback, so it feels a bit like putting your money on a nice paint job for a beater car.

What I’ll Read Next
Viriconium

Wednesday Work in Progress – Happy Sock Madness to all who observe! I have one third of a sock done and I am starting the other before I settle down and do the colorwork heel that is currently intimidating me. The qualifier pattern is called Newspaper - - and while it’s not actually that hard to knit if you’ve got good colorwork technique (and I do) the heel style (flap and gusset) is not my preferred mode and I have to secure myself a few hours to really dig into it. Hopefully I can get far enough that get a substantial amount done over the weekend.

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Wednesday Reading Meme for Feb 11 2026

2026-02-12T01:44:46Z

What I’ve Read
The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein – I think I get why people love this book so much. Rowan the steerswoman feels like a very centered and clear kind of person. Her calling has a purity to it – to find and share knowledge – and that seems like the kind of philosophical and moral outlook that could be catnip to the right reader. And here I am! Just, the final chapters of this book are just a conversation where she tells someone the truth, and it changes the world. Moral dilemmas, sneakiness, and a rising suspicion that we are living not in a fantasy world, but a science fiction one where some people are keeping secrets.
Her books are a bit hard to get a hold of but you can buy them via the links on her website, here https://www.rosemarykirstein.com/

Fanfic round up - Cover of Knight by ErinPtah is just part of an ongoing story of the Disney/Marvel Moon Knight tv show spinning off to cover how our superhero community would handle someone who has multiple personalities. This is part of a long and ongoing series of fics that cover Marc Spector figuring himself and his alters out. It's fun and charming and I think I will read more.

What I’m Reading Now
City by Clifford Simak – This is a book that came up in last year’s Arisia’s discussion about old classics. The short stories in this ‘fixup’ novel are linked together by interstitial reflections from an academic dog, who is reflecting on the stories as the surviving literature of a post-human earth where dogs are served by self-building robots, but no one can confirm that humans ever existed except as a literary trope. The stories are weirdly prophetic and some are didactic, but, they are making interesting points about the knock-on effects of future technology in small bites, which charmed me. The first story posits a world where the trend towards suburban living, already changing cities in Simak's lifetime, pushed to the point where everyone in the US lives on 20 acre private wilderness retreats and commutes to work by private plane.
(I have a habit of starting a book on vacation, loving it, and then immediately forgetting I started it when I get home. Trying to break that cycle.)

Latchkey by goldkirk – Tim Drake is semi adopted by the Bats pre-death of Jason Todd, and it’s episodic and charming and indulgent.

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfish – The library had this, and so far, I am enjoying the oddness of the thing greatly. It is however a little too spooky for bedtime reading. It was on my To Read list for last week, tho, so we are trending in the correct direction.

What I’ll Read Next
Monks Hood – Ellis Peters
Master of Poisons – Andrea Hairston
Frankenstein
The Brightness Between Us -Eliot Screfer
The Husky and His White Cat Shizun – Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou (I picked this up after seeing that it was beloved by a fic author whose work I recently enjoyed but I have no idea what I am looking at here)
The Craft of Lace Knitting by Barbara Walker
Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country by Emily Tesh
Viriconium by John M Harrison

I also bought some books!
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
Apparently Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers (who I follow on Tumblr)

The Glass Pearls
To Ride a Rising Storm
Elisha Barber

Necromancy book club picked The Scholomance Series to read - Naomi Novik

Other things!
I have decided to try Sock Madness year 20 with a friend. It's a speed knitting competition - you get free patterns for socks, and you must knit two socks according to spec. It's a good balance of technical challenge and friendly competition - I'm nowhere fast enough to get in the running for the actual prize, but merely participating gets you access to all the patterns for free after the actual race is over. It's been a good stretch of my skills in the past - I had viewed it as leveling up! And maybe I don't actually use the socks that much, but I can give them out to people who are sock worthy.
https://www.ravelry.com/groups/sock-madness-forever

I watched If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, which is a anxiety-inducing character study of a woman who is figuring out, under fairly harrowing conditions, that she is really fucking things up in her life. It's like watching a coyote decide to chew its leg off to get out of a trap, only the trap is a child with complex medical needs and also your own personality flaws. Really good - Rose Byrne deserves the Oscar but I know she won't get it.

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Wednesday Reading Meme for Feb 4 2026

2026-02-05T01:42:46Z

What I’ve Read
Cinder House by Freya Marske – Oh, this is a very satisfying novel. I love a book that starts with the protagonist dying and ends with her happy ever after. I don’t want to spoil too much – not because it’s a mystery, even tho there is a mystery solved inside it – but also because I think the unfolding story is very good on its on merits and different enough from the folk talk and most tellings of it to be worth a fresh approach. Marske does a fantastic job of making the haunted house’s relationship with sensation, from the point of view of the house, feel actually sensuous and alluring. I admit that the resolution is a little clever, but so satisfying that I wasn’t upset to see that I’d called the ending.

Unrelated – I watched The Ugly Stepsister (Emilie Blichfeldt, 2025) which is a body horror take on how the Cinderella myth works for the step sister who cuts off parts of her feet to try and fit the glass slipper. Yes, they absolutely do that, it’s gory as fuck – and it’s absolutely merited because this film is about showing a vulnerable girl destroying herself for patriarchal approval. It’s utterly beautiful in every scene, using a dreamy filter for much of the film, including the scenes where our ugly young woman dreams of infecting herself with a tapeworm so that she loses weight. I cannot recommend this film enough, and it was fascinating to watch with Cinder House so recently in my mind.

Incandescence by serpentinerose - https://archiveofourown.org/series/5440201 – A Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein (2025) fic with Victor/Creature teased out for all the wildly unhealthy possibilities. The prose is lush, the references are classical, and my id is well-fed.

What I’m Reading
The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein – I’m about 80% thru and it’s really great work. I am finding the prose just perfect – it gets out of its own way and still manages to give me a great line every now and again. Really enjoying this! I am surprised that I didn’t hear of it before, because literally every time I have posted about it, someone NEW comes to tell me how much they enjoyed the book. Another point in favor of going to cons – people will evangelize about their favorite little known books

What I’ll Read Next
Oh, god, I have so many library books out
Monks Hood – Ellis Peters
Master of Poisons – Andrea Hairston
Frankenstein
The Brightness Between Us -Eliot Screfer
The Husky and His White Cat Shizun – Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou (I picked this up after seeing that it was beloved by a fic author whose work I recently enjoyed but I have no idea what I am looking at here)
The Craft of Lace Knitting by Barbara Walker
Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country by Emily Tesh
Viriconium by John M Harrison
What Stalks the Deep by T Kingfisher

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Wednesday Reading Meme - On Thursday! Jan 28 2026

2026-01-29T22:02:24Z

I was on a train when I would normally have posted this, but I am now happily in a hotel with time and wifi!

What I've Read

Untamed – Anna Cowan –A romance I picked up because a friend got the arc for another upcoming book, The Duke, and she loved it. Untamed is doing some very queer het - there's a lot of crossdressing and playing with the intimacy that is allowed by presenting as two women. The writing really works for me - it's quite firmly in favor of respecting the reader's intelligence to put together how someone feels from their actions and context. Also I truly believe these two leads are devastatingly horny for real intimacy with each other. Really interesting, not super realistic re sexual mores of the times, and I'd recommend it.

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance – Foz Meadows. A re-read of a favorite. I really enjoy how this book simply lets a bad situation get worse and worse until one character reaches a breaking point.
The relationship builds from seeing someone at an absolute low point. I should follow up with the sequel - I read it befire but too far apart.

Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins - Second Hunger Games book, and really invested in showing the damage that the victors survived and then making them suffer again! Things fall apart. Ends in an unclear cliffhanger - I never read the third book so I will be soon moving into the realms of the new.

Attempting the impossible - ariaste A kidfic! https://archiveofourown.org/works/24707737 I think this works because canon already gave Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian an adopted son, so this just extends that to the point of absurdity. I love the Jiang Cheng POV as he tries to figure out how to have a relationship with his brother.

What I'm Reading

The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein - This is dancing on the edge between scifi and fantasy and I'm fascinated to see where it will land. Good writing, interesting characters, someone has set fire to the inn and the moon is a fairy tale. The hell is going on here.

The Alpha's Warlock by Eliot Grayson - A very formulaic marriage of inconvenience werewolf/warlock romance. I'm finding the writing extremely blunt, to the point of exhaustion - I simply don't buy that THIS character is THIS aware of his own emotions and can put them into words. I may stick with it in case something shakes out?

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper - I fear I may be too old to appreciate this story about a Chosen One Who Is Literally Eleven. It is a lovely period piece about how much freedom a boy that age had in England in the 70s, tho. The audiobook will certainly be recalled before I finish it but I may continue in paperback.

What I'll Read Next

Cinder House by Freya Marske - i own this?? How did i forget to read it??

I try to read more Black American authors for February (Black History month) so I think Andrea Hairston will be on my list - her reading at Arisia was clear and bright and funny and good good writing.

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Wednesday Reading Meme Jan 21 2025

2026-01-22T02:46:26Z

What I’ve Read
Sunrise in the East by wroth_and_ruin – aka “that Hobbit/Pushing Daisies Sentinel/Guide AU crossover that nobody asked for and nobody wanted but you're getting anyway.” https://archiveofourown.org/works/1319923 – This is a fic where I really enjoyed each chapter on its own, but I feel like it did a better job setting up questions than answering them. I think the author got either bored or maybe intimidated One of the key ones is, why is Thranduil choosing Ned over an immortal life? A key element of this story is that elves are immortal, men are not, and sentinels do not outlive their guides. So, there’s a great chapter where Ned, transplanted from a world without elves, realizes the immortality that Thranduil is giving up and runs to tell him they can’t complete their bond (aka fuck) because Thranduil will literally die when Ned does. And well, instead they have a confrontation about how Thranduil is actually devastatingly horny for Ned, and the chapter ends. And yes, they do pick up the thread later, sort of, but without any of the actual weight behind it – Thranduil apologizes that Ned wasn’t told, Ned does not actually get into his concerns that he’s going to literally kill his immortal destined lover…. Like, I don’t necessarily want the trite answer that that Love Conquers Death or whatever – but I would like Ned, who lost both his parents while still a child, to point out – Thranduil would be leaving his son alone, and a king. Like. There are reasons why a person might do choose death over immortal life! But you should HAVE that conversation. Ultimately this fic, being a fanfic, works for me because it’s indulgent in several modes that I really enjoy, and I can forgive the plotty mistakes because of what it is.

What Manner of Man by St John Starling – What a fascinatingly strange book! Apparently this was written serially and with some plot points decided by polls on the author’s patreon – I think this explains some shifts in focus over the course of the book. There is much to recommend here – this book is erotica and mystery in the recovered letters and journal entries of a repressed gay Catholic priest who goes to a remote island to enact an exorcism at the request of … basically Dracula? The early book is full of sexual repression and yearning and erotic dreams that haunts and hound our dear young Father Victor Ardelian, and I really enjoyed the character’s internal tension between his sense of divine purpose and intense horniness. The first 70% of the book is great on this!

I found the ending did not live up to the promise of the early stages. Sadly, the book did not quite commit to making Creepy Island Dracula as terrible as original flavor, and the longing and the pining get wiped away as Father Ardelian undergoes a super speed conversion to secular humanism and rejects his religious up-bringing in favor of… a vampire? A strict accounting of the plot would probably make this book seem more coherent as a horror story but the erotic and religious focus of the first half of the book were most compelling to me, and they dropped off by the end of the book, where much of the plot of the book is carried forward in the point of view of characters who are perfectly nice but…, I didn’t spend a lot of time inside their minds as they unpick the tangled mess of their desires from their morals. I think this falls apart for me because the author (or perhaps the poll voters!) were not as compelled by process of slowly untwisting the knot of wanting to save the vampire’s soul from wanting to fuck him. Eh. It makes damn sense but it doesn’t compel me.

The Artist’s Way – Julie Cameron – finished it! Found it very helpful to build some self-care habits for my creative self, which has been quite good. As I stated in the past, I was doing this on Easy Mode on purpose, and I think I would like to revisit in a few months.

What I’m Reading
Catching Fire – Suzanne Collins – By god, this book is excellent to read immediately after the first one. About half of the book is just handling the fallout of the last book, and it’s awful and great.

Untamed – Anna Cowan – Came up in a Discord book group combo, I am about 10 pages in, Kit seems very rude and kind of fun, her sister’s marriage seems incomprehensible, the Duke is unclear!

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance – Foz Meadows. A re-read of a beloved book. I think that I had picked up Sunrise in the East after watching Hellboy II because I was finding the fanfic reminded me of a lot of “arranged marriage with cultural differences” fic that I had read in the Hobbit movie fandom. This book does some of that really really well, and grounds the stakes in personal relationships AND politics.

What I’ll Read Next
No Idea!

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kitewithfish @ 2026-01-19T17:03:00

2026-01-19T22:04:16Z

I am post- Arisia 2026* and I have come out of it with book recs and it was fascinating and I’m so so interested in sharing them with you and I’m tiiiired.

Some books and things that were mentioned in the panels I went to!

Moonwise Greer Gilman (out of print, may be on the internet archive) but part of a series that the author hopes to continue (I sense publisher problems)

Gillian Daniels is getting a book out! Jenny Will Eat You Now

Noble Train of Artillery

Carol Berg The Spirit Lens

Kingdoms of the Elfin by Sylvia Townsend

Out of the Dark David Weber

The Glass Pearls Emeric Pressburger – the panel that recommended this was interesting, as one of them mentioned that this book is full of the author’s memoirs of his youth in Hungary before he fled the Nazis and lost his family, disguised in the story as memories stolen from a Jewish victim of a Nazi war criminal. Pressburg was also a writer for film and some of them seem engaging.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (movie)

There is no Antimemetics Division qntm

BLIT (short story) by David Langford in Different Kinds of Darkness

Dark is better Gemma Files

The Moment of Change Rose Lemberg (one story in particular but I didn’t actually log it with the title of the book)

Andrea Hairston – The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays (This sounded very funny)

Jane Yolen Wizard Hall

Elisha Barber by E C Ambrose (also publishes as E Chris Ambrose)

Virconium M John Harrison

M.R James – various ghost stories

Rosemary Kirstein – Steerswoman

The Stones are Hatching Geraldine ……

Cemetery of Forgotten Books - Wikipedia

Library of the Unwritten Aj Hackworth

The Book of Joan Lidia Yukanovitch

Wearing the Lion – john Wiswell (however, did not enjoy Someone You Can Build a Nest in, but it showed promising elements)

Nothing in the Basement – Romie Stott

Press Enter John Varley

Tony Tulathimutte – Rejection

Brent Weeks The Way of Shadows

Christopher Moore A Dirty Job

St Joan of the Stockyards – Bertolt Brecht

*Arisia is ongoing, but I am not.

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Wednesday Reading Meme for Jan 14 2026

2026-01-14T22:20:04Z

What I’ve Read
Novel Length fanfic!
Super/Bat - The Long Hangover by CoffioCake – a comics-focused Super/Bat fanfic with a very delightful level of identity porn! “Clark knows he should take a break: His powers are on the fritz, he feels like shit, and Batman’s treating him like a liability. But Gotham's villains seem to have it in for Metropolis' Big Blue Boy Scout and Clark won't just wait around for answers. Batman might be the world’s greatest detective, but Clark Kent is one of the Daily Planet’s most tenacious reporters. This is definitely a job for Superman.” https://archiveofourown.org/works/5912137

Hannibal/Will Graham - Falls the Shadow by littlesystems - https://archiveofourown.org/works/23577121 Hannibal/Will Graham fanfic. “AKA an AU where Bedelia is Will’s psychiatrist instead of Hannibal, Will makes a series of increasingly questionable life choices, and no one should ever take Bedelia’s advice. Ever.” - A very indulgent fic where Hannibal and Will get a chance to meet under more romantic circumstances.

Sidebar: So I write this on Tuesday, a day after I applied a latte to my aging human body after 2pm and screwed up my sleep pretty drastically last night. So drastically, in fact, that I left comments on fic I was reading at every thirty minutes from midnight to 2am. Since caring is sharing, in no particular order, here’s some of the fic I read Monday night/Tuesday morning!

Fandom: Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy II The Golden Army
I got into a headspace about old Guillermo del Toro movies and ended up re-watching it. (Fun!) One thing I enjoy with del Toro is that he often carries character-types and themes from film to film, so that Nuada from Hellboy II and Nomak from Blade II and Quinlan from The Strain and The Creature from Frankenstein are all characters that shade into each other. It feels very fannish to me – wanting to play with similar characters in different scenarios.

I found some fic focusing on Prince Nuada Silverlance, the villainous and thinly veiled survivor of colonialism becomes genocidal threat dude from the second movie, pairing him with the fandom bicycle of John Meyers, Agent Rookie Who Needs Exposition from the first Hellboy movie. (They never meet in canon.) Not going to lie, some similarities to Thorin Oakenshield here – the quest to save a kingdom in the face of certain ruin, a quest that kills him? Not the same but not different! (Sidebar: I was hoping to see more fic of Abe Sapien/Nuada from the Hellboy II fans. In the film, Abe’s paired with the other twin, Nuala, and the twins have a psychic bond type thing that means they suffer each other’s wounds. It just seems like a trio pairing would make sense here!)

-To Swallow My Desire And Choke On It by Skelettoine – and sequel Bury me to the sound of your name - https://archiveofourown.org/series/4520452

-it’s all going To End in Spears by psychomachia https://archiveofourown.org/works/76350796

-One of these things by obscureshipyard - https://archiveofourown.org/works/31634057

Fic from other fandoms, in which people make very poor choices about their sexual partners for extremely human reasons:

Mo Dao Zu Shi fic - so low i can't see the high road (on my knees) by Anonymous (Restricted) - https://archiveofourown.org/works/33068710 – Very niche and fucked up pairing in Mo Dao Zu Shi modern au. What do you do when your best friend and foster brother from childhood, your first love and the one who you thought you’d spend your whole life with, shows up with a boyfriend? Jiang Cheng decides the answer is: Fuck his dad.

Batfamily - (you kept me like a secret) i kept you like an oath by gatheringwool - https://archiveofourown.org/works/43038276 A well written fucked up Bat Family fic -In Jason Todd’s POV - about the night where it is revealed that he and Bruce have been having sex since Jason was twelve. It goes as well as could be expected. Mind the warnings.

What I’m Reading Now
Sunrise in the East by wroth_and_ruin – aka “that Hobbit/Pushing Daisies Sentinel/Guide AU crossover that nobody asked for and nobody wanted but you're getting anyway.” I read this at the recommendation of a friend years ago and it is charming and holds up to multiple re-reads. https://archiveofourown.org/works/1319923 This fic is fantastic if you like horny slow burns and cultural differences and Lee Pace.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins – The second Hunger Games book. - Paused, bc hearing about fictional police crackdowns in Panem was… not doing it for me this week.

One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters – Book two of the Brother Cadfael medieval mysteries. 75% ish

What I’ll Read Next
I want to read some physical books I have around

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kitewithfish @ 2026-01-07T22:21:00

2026-01-08T03:23:24Z

Annual thoughts: Traditionally, I have used the first Wednesday of the year as a bit of a place to reflect on the reading I have been doing. I had had a few goals in the last few years – read 100 books a year, read more nonfiction, read more broadly – and I think those goals have been pretty good for my reading habits!

This year, I want to focus this year on reading more complex books, and so I’m lowering the “total number of books” goal to down from 100 to 80 books. I also hope this will help with the nonfiction reading and the vague goal of reading more older books. I read just a few nonfiction books this year, only 6, but I really think they were fantastic choices, and I’m going to try and lean into that more this year. I think there’s good context out in the world that I need to get into.

I also had a number of books suggested over the course of Arisia 2025 that I would like to actually sit down and read! They are here, if you are curious: https://kitewithfish.dreamwidth.org/479961.html

What I’ve Read
Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett – I have been slowly reading thru the Night Watch thread of Terry Pratchett, and this was very good. I know this was a re-read, but god knows how long ago it was. I liked this one, and the general message of (non) human decency and bonds among fellow watchmen was emotionally fulfilling while the book itself was very funny. Recommend!

I skipped the Wednesday Reading Meme posts for the last few weeks, so if you are interested in what I read that last two weeks, it’s in a round up post here! https://kitewithfish.dreamwidth.org/492482.html

What I’m Reading
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins – The second Hunger Games book. About 30% in, and, well, recent evens make this feel like a good book to be reading about empires and power and violence and effective resistance not being something a sixteen year old girl can manage on her own. I think there’s a bit of a fashion of expressing annoyance at love triangles, but I think Katniss being torn between these particular two boys makes perfect sense. They are each decent and good people working in very different molds, and honestly, I can see how awful it is that Peeta’s earnest kindness is made into a snare against Katniss’s rebellion by the Capitol. This book is simply written but it never thinks the reader is stupid, and I respect the hell out that.

One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters – Book two of the Brother Cadfael medieval mysteries. Great so far – I do not know a lot about the civil wars of the 12th century, so I am likely missing some details but I generally trust the book to actually get me what I need to know. Ellis Peters, who is actually Edith Pargeter, has a deft had for women characters even if Cadfael is the lead, and I think that I will continue to enjoy these books for some time!

What I’ll Read Next
Playing it by ear.

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2025 Reading Reflection

2026-01-04T02:18:58Z

Year End Reading Meme for 2025

How many books did you read this year? Any trends in genre/length/themes/etc?
102!
Themes - eh, mostly sci fi, fantasy, and history.

What are your Top 3 books that you read this year?
The world is too big and full of books for just three!
Fiction:
Return of the King – yeah, yeah, we know, Tolkien is great, but like, I didn’t realize that this book was going to be so full of the heartfelt need to rest and respite after war and suffering and babe, I loved that. Excellent conclusion of the trilogy.
Lent by Jo Walton – The first half of this novel is a history of Girolamo Savonarola up to his death, and the second half of the book is about what happens after he dies. It’s phenomenal and weird and I loved it.
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed – I’m fresh off this one and I found it a fascinating look at memory from a cyberpunk future that almost and didn’t happen.

Nonfiction:
The Power Broker – yeah, this book was 50 years old last year and I read it and it explained New York and also gives a reasonable look back at how American politics developed. It's also just masterfully written and makes other books look lazy and slow about their level of research.
The Other Olympians – Michael Walters - My god, transphobia is literally just recycled Nazi bullshit. Literally, just, it’s Nazi rhetoric about gender roles! This book makes me so happy for trans people in the past and also women’s athletics and also I hate Nazis with new and enduring facets after I read this book. Why could you not just let people be happy, you fucking fascists.
The Revolutionary Temper – Robert Darnton – Slow history! Watch society slowly build up from thinking of their king as the ultimate source of justice to the ultimate impediment to justice. Love it.

What's a book you enjoyed more than you expected?
Conclave – a very simple thrillers style novel but really pleasant to read and added a lovely depth to the film.

Which books most disappointed you this year?
Into the Drowning Deep – because I had hopes. But the worst book I read and finished this year was Mercenary Librarians.

Did you reread any old faves? If so, which one was your favorite?
Misethere – I seem to be re-reading this one annually! I also re-read The Goblin Emperor and the Murderbot Diaries

What's the oldest book you read?
Persuasion by Jane Austen

What's the newest book you read?
Of Monsters and Mainframes

Did you DNF (= did not finish) any books?
The Familiar – Stupid love interest

What was your predominant format this year?
Audio, at 42% - which makes sense, my eyes are getting tired

What's the longest book you read this year?
The Power Broker – So long that almost all of it was read in 2024

What books from your TBR did you not get to this year, but are excited to read in 2026?
Hm, Pass – Maybe I will return to this question.

Did you reach your reading goal for this year (if you had one)?
Yup, and exceeded.

(Adding this question myself) What author did you read the most?
Dorothy Sayers! I read 8 books by her this year!

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Not Wednesday but still a Reading Meme!

2026-01-04T01:11:38Z

Not quite the Wrap Up for 2025 – I got busy the last few Wednesdays so I am making an effort to post about the books I finished before the end of the year!

What I’ve Read
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – Xing Book Club – This was blast from the past, and one that held up amazingly. The beginning was every so slightly slow but also set up the world very well. I felt like Katniss is weirdly charming – she has so little concept of the world as a trustworthy place or people as kind, and that calculation serves to save her life in the Hunger Games. The ending of this book, with her beginning to understand what her approach has cost Peeta, is wonderfully sensitive and ambiguous.

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter) – A very pleasant medieval murder mystery that is solved by a clever protagonist in favor of a humanist and quite funny resolution. Brother Cadfael is a well traveled Welsh brother in an English Benedictine abbey in 1138, when one of leaders of the order takes it into his head that they need the bones of a saint to make their abbey a really hopping spot. This book was published in 1977, and features a fairly liberal mindset towards the medieval caste system and a deeply humorous Welsh disrespect for the English. I picked this up as a break on the recommendation of oldshrewsburyian (over at tumblr, but I see there’s a DW name and I think it’s the same person!)

A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan – Oh, I really felt excited about the book that this wasn’t! I really thought there would be natural history in it! To be fair, the author’s interviews make it clear that she’s going for an Indiana Jones-inspired plot, and she’s very much accomplished that!

However, it’s not as funny or charming as Indiana Jones, and I would not pick up an Indiana Jones novel. The structure of the book impeded my enjoyment – the narrator is an elderly version of the main character writing her memoirs, but the main plot is a rollicking adventure where the younger character is doing field research in a rural foreign country and uncovering black market dragon schemes. This results in the author functionally interrupting the interesting plot and deflating the narrative tension to offer Her Humble Opinion on her younger self’s actions. If I needed distance from an unlikeable younger version of the character, this would be a good break. However, the older version of the character is snide, bigoted, defensive, and Not Like Other Girls. The effect is charmless and kludgey, and makes me lament that the young promising character we meet in the past grows up into this unpleasant arrogant person.

Anyone who reads my book ramblings on the regular will have picked up that I am vastly irritated when authors deflate their carefully constructed tension or have unsatisfying pacing. So, please feel free to try this book and see if it works for you.

Misethere by Astolat – I had to do a lot of rather stressful family socializing the last few weeks, so re-reading a past favorite! A wonderful story about someone too clever by half and the Witcher that loves him.

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Wednesday Reading Meme for Dec 17 2025

2025-12-18T01:19:26Z

What I’ve Read
The Fortunate Fall – Cameron Reed – A book worth reading! I really enjoyed the writing style and it felt like it was making interesting observations about life in this future fictional world that mapped onto our own in surprising ways. This book was originally published in 1997 and it feels shockingly modern in the same way that 60s Star Trek does – sometimes a keen eye can just see where things might go and map out options, even if reality did end up in a slightly different direction.

I haven’t seen a summary of the plot anywhere, so I will write a short one: Vague spoilers under the cut!

( Read more... )

I really liked it and I think it will actually unfold better on the re-read!

Into the Drowning Deep – Mira Grant – I think I can call it at this point: I am not for Mira Grant and Mira Grant is not for me. This book contains scenes that have action; it does not convey a feeling of action. It has scenes that contain horror; it does not convey a feeling of horror. The writing problems were on a scene level, as opposed to sentence or book level: Grant kept setting up scenes where vital and life-altering, even life-saving!, information would be almost revealed! But, then we pivot to another topic, interrupting the focus in the middle to add extraneous characterization or shift focus to something completely nonurgent, and never really getting back to the sharp punch she was winding up. The pacing got fucked. There was info-dumping about the wrong things, things that were not really relevant to the present situation! The cumulative effect was to make every character so wooden that even the ones that were deep and heroic slowly drained of all life after delivering extensive sidebars during life-threatening danger. I ended up complaining about this book at some length to a friend. I could have edited this book into something I adored and cut off about 25% of it. Since I had a similar, but not so pointed, set of thoughts about Newsflesh, I think this proves Grant is not for me. I heard good things about October Daye, but I hate the fey as a writing concept, so. Probably done here.

A Contracted Spouse for the Prizefighter by Alice Coldbreath (audiobook) – Audiobook romance by a favorite author. This is the third in a series that focuses on the lives of Victorian working class people in a variety of jobs. Our heroine, Theodora, wants to be on the stage doing the fun, risque musical hall act that she has been working on for years – but her stuffy family wants to be respectable and will not allow that kind of act in their theatre! When her sister elopes and her brother pulls her out of acting entirely to work as the family’s drudge, Theo runs off to a prizefighter turned music act manager as part of a deal – she’ll marry him and give him control over her 25% share of the family theatre so that he can get his foot in the door and expand his music hall to the larger venue, and he has to support her male impersonator career attempt.

These books suffer a bit on the male leads – they are kind of big sexy small time businessmen with a surprising amount of self-insight for the period (and for their nationality). The women are FANTASTIC. They are so interestingly weird and trying to find an interesting life for themselves – these are the kind of women who end up the poor relation receiving charity in other books set in these periods, and overall, it’s really nice to see them thriving in unconventional jobs or settings. I am a sucker for people marrying for pragmatic economical historical reasons and then finding out how much they like each other.

A flaw in these books is that they often throw in an epilogue about how the female lead is So! Happy! To be! Pregnant!, and I'm like, thanks, I'll be skipping that, byyyyye.

What I’m Reading

Guillermo del Toro: Cabinet of Curiosities – on hold. (This book is just obnoxiously large.)

Heated Rivalry: Started and promptly abandoned. Thanks, but no, thanks. I have Ovechkin/Crosby RPF fic at home, I will not be accepting the watered down version. The show is cute and distinct enough that I’ll continue watching but the idea of reading hockey fic that filters out the hockey.... not for me.

The Hunger Games – Book club pick! I’m finding that this book stuck in my head surprisingly well. I think I read thru the original series but bailed on the final book.

What I’ll Read Next
Natural History of Dragons

comments

Wednesday Reading Meme for Dec 10 2025

2025-12-11T03:17:14Z

What I’ve Read
Persuasion – Jane Austen – I was sick this week and re-watched the 1995 adaptation and, as often happens, lead to me returning to the book. The movie is wonderful, the book is wonderful, I was comforted by the world that Austen builds and writes in. I think this one is growing on me to the point it passes Pride and Prejudice now for me. I just love Anne Elliot, I love Wentworth, I love the whole stupid bunch of all the young people in a flurry of attraction and engagement bouncing off each other like superheated particles.

The Books of Magic – Neil Gaiman – Yeah, that guy. I picked this up because I had come across an article talking about the unacknowledged influences that JK Rowling (yeah, that guy) had on Harry Potter – and the dark haired working class boy with dumb glasses and a magical owl, getting introduced to the secret world of magic by a stranger, seems like it very well might have been in her mind when she started writing Harry Potter. (This series is from 1990). However, this book is largely a retrospective of magic characters in DC Comics thru the lens of a new character, Timothy Hunter, who could be “the greatest magician of his age” as he gets the guided tour from several magical trenchcoat guys from DC’s vault. It feels like themes that have been done before by better people. The charm of the comic-specific retrospective relies on Gaiman’s skill at re-working existing comic characters into the brief cameos they get in the story along with existing myths and legends. My opinion is that Gaiman did this better and more gracefully in Sandman, but, I am inclined to be far less charitable towards him because of his whole fucking shitshow of a personality. I recalled reading this book and thinking it was good – but I realize now that I was thinking of the continuing series that came after this by John Ney Rieber and Peter Gross, and that certain key moments are simply the work of other writers. (Also, I didn’t like the art in this series except for book three, so, there’s that.) I don’t feel like I can entirely rule out my suspicion that Rowling had seen or read this series before she wrote Harry Potter, but I also can’t prove it and I’m not willing to take the law suit. In short, I think it can be skipped unless you are particularly interested in DC Comics magical characters.

What I’m Reading

The Fortunate Fall – Cameron Reed – Static, due for book club next week.

Into the Drowning Deep – Mira Grant – about 70% and while I made a comparison to Michael Crichton last week, I think that was perhaps too generous. I’m not losing interest in this book so much as I get frustrated with the scene-level pacing. Multiple scenes have seemed like they are building up to punchy scientific revelations!Only to have decidedly unurgent exposition pop up in the middle and drag out the scene, taking the delicious tension with them. It ends up taking the steam out of my excitement to have it happen so often. I can’t really give details without spoilers. But, for example, our intrepid scientist who is on a mission to discover the deep sea creatures who killed her sister are real and dangerous, uses her scientific subskill (which has been described before) to discover that her ship’s about to face an immediate threat! And in the middle of that action, the narration of the book picks up on how she’s typing really hard and throws in a flashback to let the reader know that the main character has actually broken the keyboards on several of her laptops this way! Now, that detail is good character work! I like it! It just doesn’t belong in the space between the set up and payoff of her big discovery because it let the tension out of the scene like a balloon – you should have popped that balloon for a big bang, but it’s just farted it all away. I remembered this being a frustration with Mira Grant’s Newflesh book, so I feel like this is a writer/reader mismatch – she’s clearly doing all right for herself in getting her works published! She loves to tell you about how things work. But it keeps interrupting the action, and I’m getting fussed.

A Contracted Spouse for the Prizefighter by Alice Coldbreath (audiobook) – Audiobook romance by a favorite author. This is the third in a series that focuses on the lives of Victorian working class people in a variety of jobs. Our heroine, Theodora, wants to be on the stage doing the fun, risque musical hall act that she has been working on for years – but her stuffy family wants to be respectable and will not allow that kind of act in their theatre! When her sister elopes and her brother pulls her out of acting entirely to work as the family’s drudge, Theo runs off to a prizefighter turned music act manager as part of a deal -he’ll get a share in her family’s much larger theatre and she’ll get her chance on the stage!

I often find the structures of historical romances less grating to my brain than modern romances – something about the stronger patriarchal structures makes the genre less silly to me. Modern women can simply not get married and have a perfectly fine life – historical women leads have to figure this shit out and fast. (This is like monarchy – makes for a great drama, I’d rather it only appear in fiction.)

Guillermo del Toro: Cabinet of Curiosities – on hold. (This book is just obnoxiously large.)

What I’ll Read Next
Natural History of Dragons
The Hunger Games
The Grief of Stones
heated rivalry, since the show is all the rage

comments

Wednesday Reading Meme for Dec 12 2025

2025-12-04T01:54:46Z

What I’ve Read

The Invention of Love – Tom Stoppard – I read this along with a bookleg recording of the 2000s Broadway production, which is amazing. It’s a deeply compassionate and reserved play that I deeply enjoyed. A friend of mine said this was a foundational work for them, and I absolutely see how. It’s the story of AE Hausman, particularly thru his relationship to the Classics, and the story weaves past and future together thru the Young Housman having conversations with his Old Housman self. I really enjoyed the unexpected appearance of Oscar Wilde, whose trial happened during Hausman’s post-university years.

What I’m Reading

The Fortunate Fall – Cameron Reed – The 1996 cyberpunk book is just deliciously weird. Like, so much weirder than I expected. Also, gay! The book was recently re-issued under the author’s new name.

Into the Drowning Deep – Mira Grant – Ten years ago spooky deep sea mermaids killed everyone on a research mission sponsored by Not The Discovery Channel. Our main character’s sister died, and now she’s going to be able to use her research to figure out what happened for herself. I am slowly working thru all the tentpoles from Be the Serpent, a finished podcast that I deeply enjoyed, and this is one of them! I find Mira Grant to be rather like Michael Crichton in her commitment to Doing the Research on how various elements of her characters’ scientific work remains. I feel like this should be scarier but that might be just the beginning of the book. Grant, like Crichton, has a very visual and cinematic style, and sometimes that works for me and sometimes it does not.

Guillermo del Toro: Cabinet of Curiosities – on hold.

What I’ll Read Next
Natural History of Dragons
The Hunger Games
The Grief of Stones

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Wednesday Reading Meme for Nov 19 2025

2025-11-20T02:17:00Z

What I’ve Read
Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison – finished this re-read literally today! I had actually re-read this earlier this year, when my book club had finished The Goblin Emperor and I needed more. You can find that review from July 2025 here (https://kitewithfish.dreamwidth.org/486536.html), but what stuck with me was this line “Both books are from the perspective of a person who wants to make the world better and kinder, and is actively working to do that, to the extent of their means.” I stand by that – this is a world with problems recognizable to us and likewise, full of people trying to help make life better. It’s also got a fascinatingly beautiful subtle romance that starts with our main character looking at the second cup for his tea that the waiter brought him and wishing he could share the honeyed spoon with someone -it’s such a sweet longing and it runs thru the book so softly that I only noticed it when I re-read it properly.

Alien Clay – Adrian Tchaikovsky -Oh, I loved this! It’s very alien, and very weird, and yet Tchaikovsky builds the story like an argument, point by point until you’re nodding along and like, oh, of course, what else could this have ended as. It’s weirdly inspiring and wonderful and also could be a body horror movie with great ease. It’s quite decent!

What I’m Reading

Guillermo del Toro Cabinet of Curiosities – with Marc Scott Zicree. I am enjoy this, as it mostly appears to be a person writing with breathless adulation about how much he enjoys being in Guillermo del Toro’s house and looking at the weird stuff he’s got. I’m here for it, mostly!
The Artists Way – Week 6 – Sense of abundance – eh.

What I’ll Read Next
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed - xing book club
Next Earthsea book?
No clear idea, honestly, I would take a suggestion!

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Wednesday Reading Meme for Nov 12 2025

2025-11-13T01:06:21Z

What I’ve Read
Literally nothing!
Which was kind of an interesting experience. I did this as sort of a “see what bubbles up when you’re not filling your head with words” and some stuff did! Can’t call it unmixed, but not without merit.

I found the experience a bit like going to the abstract wing of an art museum. At first it's all, Why are there no landscapes? Where are the people? Who is an allegory in these blobs of color? What does the vague square here Mean? But you go and you gaze slowly into the washes of color and the suggestions of a shape and it seeps into your brain that that’s sufficient to be Art. You float on a formless tide, dreaming without concrete shapes, synthesizing the Art inside of you. It stabilizes and you stop wanting someone else's allegory. You know what that blob means, what that vague square is saying to you and you alone.

Then you step out and go out into the portraits gallery. You are assaulted by the grounded, constructed, firm, Realness of all the other Art. It overwhelms you. Why can I see this man's actual nose. Whose horse is that.

In the space I was not filling with words by other people, I did a lot of Feeling My Feelings (exhausting but do recommend) and writing (exhausting but exhilarating) and also puttered very productively around the house, accomplishing many a small and valuable task (comforting and rather nice).

What I’m Reading

The Artists Way – Week 5 – Sense of Possibility
Alien Clay – very early on – We are getting into the big scifi questions.

What I’ll Read Next
Witness for the Dead Katherine Addison
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
Next Earthsea book?

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Wednesday Reading Meme for Nov 5 2025

2025-11-05T18:30:59Z

What I’ve Read
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers (audiobook, narrator Ian Carmichael)
Ok, this is the kind of book that almost makes me love the English, tho they do not deserve it. Dorothy Sayers wrote this book, and it’s such a careful look at this one small town in this one backwater place with one magnificent church in it with a set of also magnificent bells. Both this and Murder Must Advertise have a reputation in the Sayers fandom (such as I am aware of it) as being The Weird Books – where you just have to follow Sayers into her latest obsession and trust that you’re going to get an exciting story out of it on the way. And you do! It honestly felt like it has some spiritual overlap with Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, about the women who provide so much support and life to the little parishes around England. This is set thirty years earlier and with a far more rural view, but man, it does have those careful little inside views of an English parish. Do I understand anything more about English style change ringing? Only the barest crumb! Did I enjoy myself? I had a wonderful time!

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove
I feel I should recant my opinions from last week. I was irked by the audiobook narrator, who, I admit now, had the thankless task of attempting to narrate a book that starts in binary. I have seen a better light. Here’s the story:

I talked to a friend (thank you, bookclub gods, for nerds who read fast) and expressed my woes about how the book was slow and dumb and not scary and I didn’t care about any of the people who were dying and the genre mashup was not working for me because the book couldn’t decide if people know about specific monsters from literature (Dracula is in this book, did I mention?) or not (the space computer did not believe in werewolves) – and she said, “I don’t think it’s trying to be scary. I think it’s camp.”

And lo, in retrospect, it was pretty clearly camp. Not serious, and not scary, and one of the monsters is a mummy named Steve and the creature called Frankenstein is an art project gone wrong and the werewolf is gay. It’s fucking camp. I’m glad my friend reeled me back in, because I actually had a wonderful time reading this book and I feel moderately unstoppable riding that high.

What I’m Reading

The Artists Way – Week 4 – AKA, the week where you are supposed to not read anything and see how you fill the empty space that you had previously taken up in your life by reading and generally distracting yourself with things. It’s been a day. I hate it. I hate it so much. I walked up to a little free library with delight and said, “FUCK, I can’t read any of these!” to the delight of my amused spouse. I have also had three very meaningful conversations, taken a nice walk with my spouse in the windy fall day with deliciously crunchy leaves, cleaned and refilled several of my fountain pens, changed out the annoying keycaps on my work keyboard for better ones from my stash, bought replacement HVAC filters, and wrote a long tantrumy letter to a friend. So. Uh. It might be working.

What I’ll Read Next
Witness for the Dead Katherine Addison
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
Next Earthsea book?

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Wednesday Reading Meme for Oct 29 2025

2025-10-29T22:10:54Z

What I’ve Read

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs by Marc David Baer – As I wrote in more detail last week, this book is a really great overview of the Ottoman Empire, in the opinion of someone who knows very little about the Ottoman Empire. Baer’s style felt approachable and clear and made a point of grouping developments both thematically and in a clear timeline.

I will concede, I felt more positively about the book last week, but that’s not a writing failure. The latter half of the book is a downward slide from religious tolerance and multicultural assimilation into a larger Empire (good or bad, it did allow upward mobility!) to an ethnic and religious paranoia of the non-Turkish elements of the failing state. The book’s coverage of the Armenian Genocide was, in fact, both horribly clear and quite personal and made me very very sad.

I again recommend this book and if anyone has other books that look at the Ottoman Empire’s history, I would like to read them!

Murder Must Advertise - Dorothy Sayers (narrated by Ian Carmichaels, thank you again anon donor of audiobooks!) – Hilariously funny and also deeply goddamn bleak. It does a very compelling job of showing Wimsey’s doublemindedness while he’s undercover – at times, he truly thinks of himself as Mr Bredon, advertising copywriter in a quirky little office, and occupies that role with humor and warmth. Then he has to come back to being Lord Peter Wimsey, investigating the death of a young man at that same office, and knowing that he’s likely to do real damage to at least one person involved in a real and dangerous criminal ring at the advertising firm. The tension is well structured and given breaks of humor around the office, but has clear stakes for individual people we meet who are harmed by the crimes the scheme is covering up.

( Spoilery reflections on the ending of this book and on The Unfortunateness at the Bellona Club )

What I’m Reading

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove – I tried the audiobook – I really did! But the main narrator was much too annoying to continue. (I’d mention them by name but this appears to be an ensemble audiobook with several narrators and I can’t tell which one this was.) The book is unfortunately for a book club – I would have bailed by now, if it were up to me, just because the pacing is so glacial. It’s trying to do Murderbot and failing to make it fun.

A key failure is the description impedes the pacing. When you come across our Computer Main Character doing a normal thing in an unusual way because they are a computer, not a human, you get a description of how that action is completed in computer-y way. And the first time, that’s great. But. You get that same description over, and over, and over. As a result, instead of grabbing the reader swiftly and towing them excitingly thru realizing, gasp! your ship is full of CORPSES! Then the WEREWOLF attacks! - the text plods. Pauses. Observes. Describes. And then plods again.

This is rapidly proving to be the sort of book I would read ONLY via audiobook because the text is too irksome, but the audiobook sucked! The narrator is very very English and very very irksome. So on I plod, reading a book that doesn’t trust me to remember that computers are different than people.

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers – I almost mention this book in self defense against the accusation that I’m bored by Of Monsters and Mainframes because I only like sexier and dumber writing. (No one has made this accusation, other than the hobgoblins of my mind.) This is an English countryside murder mystery that doesn’t get to the discovery of the body until our main character has been introduced to the little town via their New Year’s Eve change ringing performance that involves 8 men ringing church bells for nine hours in precise mathematical permutations. It’s fascinating, and compelling, and I don’t actually care that I’m not able to perfectly understand everything that’s happening, because the book’s momentum is taking me forward at a satisfying clip. The people of the town are interesting, and there’s a blatant self-insert of Sayer’s childhood self in a precocious little teen who wants to be a writer. (I love her.)

What I’ll Read Next
Witness for the Dead Katherine Addison - for next week, I have read the first half, I should get on this!
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
Next Earthsea book?

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