And then, there's a bearded fetus.

I went back to the pool this morning, after having been away for over a week due to being unwell, and then the sports centre's Christmas closure. It was almost completely empty when I started my laps, and had filled up massively by the end; this is a strange time of year, when I can never judge how other people are planning to fill their time.

( Another December talking meme prompt and response )

Other than the very low-effort books I mentioned in my previous post, I've read very little, although I am working my way through The Story of A New Name, the second book in Elena Ferrante's acclaimed Neapolitan quartet, and finding it as excellent as the first. This book covers our narrator's late teens and early adulthood, with that same mix of tightly observed specificity (the impoverished residents of a single block of apartments in 1960s Naples) and more universally relatable observations on the excruciating experiences of being a young woman.

I also read Motherland (Julia Ioffe), a memoir-history in the mode of Jung Chang's Wild Swans which follows the author's family through four generations of the twentieth century in what are now Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Being Jewish people in that part of the world during the Holocaust, World War II, and the Soviet Union's existence and collapse was obviously not easy, and Ioffe's various ancestors navigated these treacherous waters with ingenuity, resilience, and persistence. As well as being a family history, Ioffe attempts in the book to write a social history of 'Russian' women (inverted commas very much needed, because she has a frustrating habit of treating 'Russian' as synonymous with 'other regions of the Russian empire,' 'Soviet', and so on), from the birth of the Soviet Union to current times. Here, although she highlights some extraordinary people and episodes in history, I feel the book is weaker, because (other than the women of her own family), she focuses for the most part on elites — wives of Soviet leaders, Stalin's daughter, wives and mistresses of Putin and his oligarchs, Yulia Navalnaya, and so on — and although her thesis is that such women offer a sort of mirror into the changing society, I can't help but feel that they're not exactly representative.

And that's it in terms of reading for now. I picked up a couple of silly sounding romantasy ebooks, I've still got two Rosemary Sutcliff books out from the library, and Matthias returned from today's grocery shopping with an unexpected book gift for me, but I'm not sure how many of these I'll make it through before the year's end. In any case, my focus is still the Yuletide collection at the moment.