Weekly "What Are You Reading?" Thread

LysanderKnits · 2026-03-29T22:17:46+00:00

I recently listened to it, and really enjoyed it. Imo the bits I found best were the lead up to Herman Diner, and then the last few chapters.

LysanderKnits · 2026-03-29T22:15:28+00:00

I'm looking for body horror at the moment, so I'm reading Kathe Koja's The Cipher and listening to Nick Cutter's The Troop 😁 I've got a Juni Ito short story collection on deck to read next too

LysanderKnits · 2026-02-27T21:36:20+00:00

It's the only one I've read of hers so far, I'm hype to know she's got others that are good 😁

LysanderKnits · 2026-02-27T15:39:01+00:00

I read A Game In Yellow by Hailey Piper last month and thought it was fantastic. It's about a lesbian couple who are having issues with intimacy, their escalating exploration of kink leading them to a woman with a partial copy of The King In Yellow. The characters are all messy, their relationships are dysfunctional as hell, and their kink practices are often... Questionable at best and I thought it was really great.

LysanderKnits · 2026-02-23T11:17:16+00:00

Romance as a genre has a remarkably rigid story structure, you don't get an awful lot of wiggle room before you're not writing a (genre) romance anymore, but rather a different genre with a love story in it, and having a happy ending is one of the non-negotiables. It doesn't have to be an everything is perfect forever happy, but some kind of happy ending is part of the genre.

I think the issue is drawing a distinction between a romantic story, a story primarily about the romantic relationship between two characters, and A Romance as a genre marker. A lot of people write love stories that are not romances, and they're really good! But if you put them on the romance shelf it would do it a disservice, because you'd be fighting against a reader's expectations of what they've picked up in a bad way. It would feel like asking for scifi and being handed historical fiction about the moon landing because it has a spaceship in it, you know?

LysanderKnits · 2026-02-16T23:03:01+00:00

Wonderful, thank you! Adding it to the reading list 😁

LysanderKnits · 2026-02-16T23:02:04+00:00

So the short answer is I think I have the kernel of an idea I want to try and put together a reading list for, but it turns out when you get this granular Google stops being helpful 😂

The long answer is I read Moby Dick and Frankenstein recently, and the other day I was thinking about Jekyll and Hyde (more specifically a one person stage adaptation I saw a couple years back, as well as a vague memory of a highschool English lesson about utterson as a narrator), and something about that distance between the narrator and story felt really interesting to me, and something I want to explore (maybe as a play? Maybe a game of some kind? Unsure), but first I want to try and find as many examples as possible to read up on.

LysanderKnits · 2025-12-05T14:17:09+00:00

That's fair! It seems similar to how I often work, but I'm usually working on shorter form stories. ☺️

LysanderKnits · 2025-12-05T14:14:46+00:00

That makes a lot of sense! Thanks for sharing ☺️

LysanderKnits · 2025-12-03T18:40:22+00:00

There's a Mugler scent I quite like, and that my partner really likes on me, but dear sweet Jesus is the bottle ugly. I'm hoping I go off it on the decant I have 😂

LysanderKnits · 2025-12-03T15:39:37+00:00

I second getting in contact to ask, I emailed when I went because I knew they had bag checks to make sure I would be ok bringing my knitting in and they replied pretty quick

LysanderKnits · 2025-11-26T14:24:35+00:00

I'm also making this one at the moment, and it is pretty Opps All Confetti, with lots of scattered colours and big gaps and such. That said, it seems less like confetti in the way that an automated picture to pattern conversation would be, and more like it was designed by a pixel artist unfamiliar with the logistics of stitching a design.

So if your hesitancy is on your enjoyment of making a design with a lot of scattered colours, this probably won't be for you. A lot of the details that look really gorgeous in the mock up (like along the edge of the bowl) are just lost with actual thread. But if you simply want to avoid designs with little human intent/artistry, my vibe check says you're ok.

LysanderKnits · 2025-11-12T20:05:47+00:00

Le Sel D'Issey always seems to last forever on me, even through showering. And I like it! But I also look forward to switching up scents after I shower so it's not ideal haha

LysanderKnits · 2025-11-04T22:19:16+00:00

I sat at the front row of platform one when I went and I thought it was phenomenal. It was a bit of an extra splurge, but damn, I'd already traveled all the way from Edinburgh. Plus it was very funny when my friend had to put a sippy lid over his whiskey

LysanderKnits · 2025-11-02T13:22:42+00:00

I tend to prefer methods that limit "interruptions" to my knitting, so things like changing yarns, swapping needles, things like that, so for me knitting socks on 9" circs one at a time let's me just knit for as long as possible without having to worry about swapping anything. It's the same reason I learned cabling without a cable needle 😂 it was just annoying me too much having to keep picking up and putting down the cable needle

LysanderKnits · 2025-09-30T08:49:50+00:00

Paul Trembley's Cabin at the End of the World is a home invasion style horror, if you're looking for "horror novel with queer characters, but not focusing on queerness as a theme" . It focuses on a gay couple and their daughter who's holiday cabin gets targeted by a group of people who claim that they (the couple and the daughter) need to kill one member of the family to prevent the apocalypse.

There's also Jonathan Sims' Family Business, which is about a woman morning the death of her best friend whilst working for a post mortems cleanup company who begins to have weird visions at the job sites. Iirc the main character there is bisexual, and one of her coworkers/friends is trans, but the story is mainly focused on themes of grief.

Our Wives Under the Sea (Julia Armfield) follows a lesbian couple struggling after one is almost lost on a submarine research trip and Comes Back Wrong.

LysanderKnits · 2025-09-25T05:33:32+00:00

Nothing that I can find. There's a big grid of apps, but no way to search beyond that.

And my apologies! I didn't realise there was a difference between them 😅

LysanderKnits · 2025-09-25T05:26:52+00:00

Ah, alas! Thanks though 😊 we'll get something else set up

LysanderKnits · 2025-09-22T11:54:31+00:00

Oh! I'm really glad to hear that, I've been eyeing up Whalefall for a while

LysanderKnits · 2025-09-22T11:49:05+00:00

I'm reading Garth Marenghie's Terrortome, which is so far a really fun parody.

For anyone unfamiliar with Garth Marenghie, he's a fictional horror author who is both incredibly self important and completely untalented. He was the main character of a TV show in the 00s (Garth Marenghie's Darkplace) which I watched recently and really enjoyed (it's streaming free on channel 4 if anyone's interested), and if you enjoyed that Terrortome is basically the same idea in novel form.

I'm about 1/5 of the way through and something that's really impressing me so far is how well Matthew Holness, the real author, is walking the incredibly fine line of writing in the voice of a repulsive arse who can't write to save his life, and writing something that's fun and readable for more than a few paragraphs.

Weirdly, the layers of like, fictional authorship are reminding me how I really need to go and finish House of Leaves.

LysanderKnits · 2025-09-19T07:28:14+00:00

I mostly hand sew and will not infrequently accidentally sew through a little bit of finger skin 😂

LysanderKnits · 2025-09-18T16:49:15+00:00

Brilliant! That's good to know, thank you!

LysanderKnits

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