there's no place I'd rather be.

I've spent this morning at the pool, then fixing hooks to the living room wall from which to hang more string lights (the latest batch were made by hand in Shetland and each light is contained in a little glass, cork-stoppered bottle filled with tiny pieces of sea-glass), and now finally have a bit of spare time in which to write and catch up on Dreamwidth. It's a beautiful, crisp, clear wintry day, and I think Matthias and I will go out for a walk to take in the silvery-blue sky — and I might light the wood-burning stove for the first time this season.

Yesterday I had my final two classes for the year at the gym, which went well, as I was full of energy and determination. I've now been doing them both — power pump (basically lifting weights to music) followed by zumba (the cheesiest dances you can imagine, to the cheesiest music you can imagine; now that it's the lead-up to Christmas the trainer has added her warm-up routine set to a medley of Christmas songs that includes — I kid you not — an EDM-rap remix of 'The Little Drummer Boy') — for three years. The result of this is that I'm very strong, and my endurance and ability to dance in time with music without making mistakes (which have always been reasonably good) are satisfactory, but I still dance like a gymnast. I think I'm stuck with this for life. The hips don't lie, and in spite of it being twenty-plus years since I was a gymnast, some things never leave you, and therefore my hips don't move.

I also finally accepted reality and decided that (in spite of my usual track record) I will leave my contributions to Yuletide this year to my main assignment, plus the one treat I've already written. Usually I aim for at least four fics in the main collection, but I can't say that many of this year's prompts are really calling to me, and I don't think forcing things for the sake of arbitrary personal goals is going to result in decent writing.

That has left more time for reading, although the fact that I got so obsessed with one book this week that I reread it five times in succession (and then I reread it a sixth time yesterday) meant that I've only finished one other book this week: Night Train to Odesa (Jen Stout), a British freelance journalist's memoir of her time in Ukraine during the first year of Russia's full-scale invasion, and the various ordinary people forced to do extraordinary things (in the military, as civilian volunteers, in culture and the arts, over the border in Romania helping the first wave of bewildered and traumatised refugees) that she met. It's a well-told account covering ground with which I'm already familiar from other similar memoirs — raw emotions, injustice and atrocities, people rising with ingenuity, stamina and resilience to meet the moment because the only other option would have been to lie down, surrender, and cease to exist as free people of an independent nation — but I appreciated the features that made it unique. These included Stout's background (a journalist from Shetland who spoke fluent Russian and actually spent the first month of the war on a journalism fellowship in Russia — a surreal experience), and her familiarity with Ukraine (she had spent a lot of time there before, and has a particular love for Kharkiv city, and the frontline Donbas regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and writes about their landscapes, urban architecture and people with deep affection).

I'm also making my way — for the first time — through The Eagle of the Ninth (Rosemary Sutcliff). Sutcliff is a glaring gap in my reading, and I'm on such a Roman Britain kick that I felt now was a good time to remedy it. Her books seemed like an appropriate winter reading project (the elegiac tone, the stark, austere landscapes), and I'm enjoying this first foray immensely, and wondering why I never tried them before now! (I have a vague memory of being given one book or the other in childhood and finding the dearth of female characters offputting, and that initial impression is probably the culprit for it taking me this long to pick them up.)

( Another December talking meme response )

I hope you've all been having relaxing weekends.

I don't normally do standalone book reviews these days, but a recent read was so extraordinary, so overwhelming, and just so unbelievably good at what its author was trying to do that I found myself haunted by it even before I'd read its final page. I reread it five times in succession this week, unable to pick up anything else: that's how much it got its claw into me.

( More behind the cut )

Today's December talking meme prompt is from yarnofariadne, and it's a great one: favourite folktale or fairytale, and why.

I like folktales about crossing places, and moving between one state and another, and above all women transformed, and I feel a very intense set of feelings about the sea, so it probably surprises no one that my absolute favourite folktale of all is the story of the Selkie Bride, in all its variants.

It's a hard story, and a cruel story: at its heart it has such a monstrous violation — the selkie woman, trapped on land, in human form, and in marriage by a man who steals and hides her sealskin — and the resolution is cruel, too, since although the woman regains her freedom and her shapeshifting ability, she has to part with her land-born children as a consequence. (The touch in many variants of the story — that the woman's youngest child is the one to discover the hidden sealskin and innocently gives its existence and location away to the trapped mother — is just the final, brutal twist of the knife.)

(It feels gauche to link to my own fic here, but I've tried so many times to write stories that grasp at what it feels like for those children in the aftermath, standing on the shore, and my AO3 account has many variations on this theme, plus stories for other fandoms that are essentially 'woman has emotions triggered by, about, and near body of water.' It's my very, very favourite thing to write.)

What I love about this folktale in particular is how it's all about the relationship between people who live at the water's edge, and the sea that lives beside them, and about the way those watery tideline places have a sense of liminality and blurred boundaries, and that the beings of the sea, and the humans on land can sometimes cross over, in both directions. The sea sustains those coastal communities, but it can also be violent, unpredictable, and dangerous. It gives and takes, but remains fundamentally unknowable.

This week's prompt is my sneaky way of getting a two-for-one deal when it comes to Friday open threads plus December talking meme, and was suggested by morbane: talk about a book that changed the way you read books.

( My answer )

Do any of you have books that changed the way you read, for any reason?