Once Upon a Time: A Fan Community

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. 

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