Unraveled, Week 44/2025

Last week seemed to crawl by and this week seems to be going by in a blur; it's already Wednesday! Kat is back, so it's time to link up with all the Unravelers.

Today I've got some finished socks to share:

These are for my sister-in-law (my brother's wife) for Christmas. Her feet are the same circumference as mine, which makes the stitch count easy, but quite a bit smaller -- 9 inches long compared to my 9.75 inches. At the moment, she has the smallest feet of anyone I knit socks for, but that's mainly because I haven't knit socks for any of my niblings yet (it seems rather pointless when they're so likely to grow out of them so fast). I used my regular plain-vanilla recipe for these and 77 g/336 yds./307 m of Knit Picks Felici in the colorway Painted Hills. I started both socks in the same point in the stripe sequence -- conveniently, both socks started withs the dark blue -- but must've gotten off a little on the foot of the second sock because there's a little more red on one toe than the other. Do I care? No. Will the recipient? She's unlikely to even notice. She also loves getting hand-knit socks, so I know she'll be happy with these. And I love that I now have only two more skeins of Felici left in my stash (unless there's some in there I don't know about), which are already being turned into socks for my other sister-in-law.

It's been another good week of reading, thanks in large part to some shorter audiobooks:

I think many of you have already read and enjoyed Is a River Alive? already; I know I'm a bit late to the party. The author reads this work that examines how rivers have shaped our world and how we humans have exploited, polluted, and restricted them to our peril. Detailing visits to rivers in Ecuador, India, and Quebec, he details the plight of these three rivers and their impact on the surrounding ecosystems, all the while making a case for recognizing the "aliveness" of rivers as a way of asserting their rights to exist, thereby saving them. He's an excellent writer and a great narrator, and as a longtime proponent of environmentalism, I thoroughly enjoyed it (though I'll admit there's a lot that went right by me as a result of reading with my ears rather than my eyes). I gave it 4 stars.

When we first meet Dawn, the narrator in Love Forms, she is a pregnant 16-year-old in Trinidad being smuggled by boat to Venezuela to a home run by nuns where she will give birth and then give up her child to adoption. We then meet her 42 years later, when she is a divorcee with two grown children in London looking back on her spotty memories of that experience and trying to find the daughter she gave up. This novel from the Booker Prize longlist takes a hard look at the hard choices we make for ourselves, at family relationships that can be damaged by those hard choices, and at how we -- particularly women who are mothers -- look at our own identity. It's a quiet book with a lot of introspection, but I like that sort of book. I also learned more about Trinidad and Venezuela, two places with which I am unfamiliar, and a novel that teaches me something is always a good thing. I gave it 4 stars.

The Hero of This Book is a work that challenged me. It is labeled a novel, and in it, the narrator, a writer of fiction, is taking a trip to London less than a year after the death of her mother, who loved the city, and reflecting on their relationship as she explores places her mother had visited or would have enjoyed. She recounts episodes in her mother's life and her childhood, and she repeatedly states that she promised her mother she would never make her a character in one of her books or write a memoir about her. And yet it feels very much like a memoir of grief, and many of the details of the narrator's life match the life of the author. I suppose that, in a way, it's a commentary on the fact that all writers draw on what they know, what they have lived, what they have experienced, to a degree. Unless you are inventing an imaginary world with its own rules, it's hard for pieces of your world to not find their way into your work. So the question is, then, how much of this book is truth and how much is fiction. I gave it 3 stars.

Finally, Dayswork, though it's not described as such, felt like a novel of the early pandemic to me, those strange days when we were all stuck at home and on our computers way too much, leading many of us to fall down rabbit holes. For the narrator, that particular rabbit hole is Herman Melville. In between her ordinary tasks of daily life, she reads anything she can find about the famous writer of Moby Dick, which leads her to follow the trail to other writers and biographers who similarly fixated on Melville. Again, this is a novel, but it feels very much like it could be a true story -- after all, the authors are husband and wife, and who's to say that this sort of thing didn't happen in the first couple of months of lockdown? I found it an interesting read from an academic standpoint but not especially compelling. I gave it 3 stars.

I'm still working my way through The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and Celestial Bodies, though I'm well past the halfway point on both, and I've now added The South to the mix after getting it from my holds from the library just yesterday. I'm not trying to read all of the Booker Prize-nominated books this year, but there were several from the longlist that intrigued me that I put on hold before the shortlist was announced, so I still intend to read them.

What are you making and reading this week?

Fall Color

And just like that, it's Monday again. We had a nice weekend, though the weather was strange. On Saturday, it was warm and sunny, more like summer. I took advantage of the sun on Saturday to take a 6-mile walk, and the Mister went for a bike ride. On Sunday, it was still warm, but then it got windy and rain came through. It held off until after our brunch yesterday for my father's birthday; we were inside, but it's always such a pain to get a bit dressed up and then get wet going to and from the car.

It's supposed to get cooler again this week, more like normal fall weather, and though we should be seeing the leaves changing color and some are, a lot of the trees in the neighborhood have just dropped their leaves because of the lack of rain. So I am making up for it with a very bright new cast-on:

One of the special challenges for the Pigskin Party this month is a pink challenge in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It'd also been a while since I last knit a charity hat, so I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone. I had this bright pink skein of Fibernymph Dye Works tweed DK in my stash and the pattern (Ravelry link) already in my library, so all I had to do was wind the yarn and cast on. It's been a little slow going because of the ribbing and the cables, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to finish it up by the end of the month.

My other colorful project -- my sister-in-law's socks -- are getting close to being done, too, so perhaps it will be a multiple FO week!

I'll leave you with a puppy pic because I don't have any other knitting photos to share. This is from Saturday afternoon, when Ruthie took a long nap. She would like you to know that although she was naughty and slipped her harness again on Friday night (thankfully staying to our street and away from traffic until we could lure her into the house with a cookie), she was a very good girl on Saturday and Sunday, when she slept in until 6:45 and 7:05, respectively!

Have a good start to your week and see you back here on Wednesday!

Tesselation

It's been a while since I had a real FO (a pair of socks doesn't seem all that impressive to me), so it feels good to finish up the week with one!

Pattern: Tessella by Alina Appasova (Ravelry link)
Yarn: Lorna's Laces Solemate (55% Merino/30% rayon/15% nylon) in Reno, 103 g used, and lolodidit Everyday Sock (75% Merino/25% nylon) in Tea on the Green, 83 g used
Needles: US 5/3.75 mm
Started/Completed: September 7/October 14

As you'll see from the completion date, I did actually finish this before my Unraveled Wednesday post went live, but I'd set it to publish at 6 a.m. and only finished binding off right before bed, so I figured I'd just leave it. 

This was a lot of fun to knit. It'd been a while since I'd worked mosaic knitting, so it took me a little bit of time to reacquaint myself with how to read the charts plus account for the increases. As far as the shaping of the shawl, it's very similar to a Hitchhiker, though the increases are placed a bit differently. But once I grew used to the construction and could intuit how the color patterning worked, I didn't really need to refer to the charts other than to count my repeats of each one.

The only modification I made, if you could even call it that, was to add most of an additional repeat. A pattern repeat in this pattern is three repetitions of each chart; I managed 2.5 more of Chart B. The pattern does explain how to enlarge it, and the way it's written, you can do half of a chart without it looking strange. I knew I would not have enough of the darker color to work those final six rows, so it worked out just fine. And this shawl is plenty big. To give you an idea (because why would I actually measure it and make it easy?), here it is laying out to dry -- on two drying racks:

The yarns I used for this shawl both came home with me from Nashville. The lighter color, from lolodidit, is really a light fingering, at 463 yards/100 g, so I'm not surprised that I have more of it leftover. The variegated Lorna's Laces was, fortunately, overweight to begin with, so I have a few grams remaining even after using 103 g in the shawl. It was generously sized at 425 yards/100 g, but it was noticeably thicker than the light tonal green.

This shawl was a lot of fun to knit, and it only took as long as it did because my knitting time on it was limited. I would definitely knit it again, and I think it'd be great for handspun because you can end it pretty much anywhere when your yarn starts to run out. I very well may knit another; next time, I'll try two yarns with greater contrast.

We've got a pretty boring weekend ahead, with the only plans on the calendar at the moment a brunch on Sunday for my dad's birthday (his birthday was this past Wednesday). I feel a bit like I've got a long weekend because Molly has a noon dismissal today and the day off on Monday for parent/advisor conferences, so I won't have to do the mid-afternoon school run. I'm hoping she'll get her homework done early in the weekend so she can relax; it's been a rough week for her. It's been a long week for me, too, so I'm hoping I can get in some extra rest as well. Ruthie has not been barking early in the morning much this week -- dare I hope she'll let me sleep in on the weekend? Fingers crossed!

Unraveled, Week 42/2025

Good morning! It's Wednesday again, and although Kat is away this week and there's no formal link-up, I like sticking to a schedule.

Here is where my WIPs stand:

As of Tuesday afternoon, when I took this photo, I had one repeat of Chart B left on my shawl (each pattern repeat is three repeats of the chart). By the time you're reading this, I'm hoping to be further along and may well have finished, but the rows are so long by now that I'm counting on needing another day to get through those last dozen of them. And then, of course, I'll have to weave in ends and block. I'm fairly certain that I will have an FO to share by the end of the week, however, and that will mean I can also turn my attention back to the socks for my sister-in-law. I've been ignoring them for the past several days while I focused my attention on the shawl, but I'm nearly ready to start the heel flap on the second sock and don't expect to need much more time to finish up the pair.

Reading this week has a study in extremes -- two very short audiobooks and one long digital book.

Coming from the Booker Prize longlist was Universality, a very short novel (I listened to all of it in less than 24 hours) that packs a punch. Like the author's first novel, I suspect this is one I'm going to need to reread with my eyes because so much went by so fast in the audio. This starts out with article written about an event at a farm owned by a banker during COVID lockdown in which a member of an anarchist group is seriously injured with a gold bar. But is that really what happened? The story is reexamined through the point of view of various people involved directly or indirectly in the incident, and these alternate points of view show just how much power can be held in the written word. There's also a lot here that probably went over my head because it's focused on the UK and British views on race, class, money, etc. As with the earlier book, I was impressed by how much heavy stuff could be crammed into such a brief novel without having the feeling of being overwhelmed. I gave it 4 stars.

My next finish was one I'd been waiting for from the library for a while, and it was worth the wait (and the time it took to read when work kept getting in the way). Katabasis is the third R.F. Kuang novel I've read and my favorite so far. As was the case in Babel, there's a strong element of magic in this one, principally that it's a field of serious study ("Magick") and the scholarly focus of the main character, Alice Law, who determines that, following the death of her Cambridge advisor, she must go to Hell to find him and find some way of bringing him back to life, if only so that she can achieve her goal of having a career in academia. She is horrified to discover that her fellow advisee, Peter Murdoch, has done the same thing, and now both of them have to navigate the courts of Hell to find their advisor. In the process, they discover much more about themselves. I love that Kuang, in her typical genius way of skewering a particular segment of society, make Hell resemble a college campus, turning this into a truly funny work of satire of academia. But it's also clear how smart she is in how much actual knowledge of math, philosophy, physics, religion, language, and classics she weaves throughout the narrative; frankly, sometimes I didn't feel smart enough to understand the book! It's funny at times, sad at times, and at times goes on a little too long, but I really enjoyed it and felt it had an especially satisfying ending. I gave it 4.5 stars.

I really enjoyed Sarah Moss's memoir earlier this year but had only previously read one of her novels, so this past weekend I listened to another. Ghost Wall follows 16-year-old Silvie, who is on holiday with parents in the north of England joining an experiential archaeology course. Silvie's father, a bus driver, is obsessed with England's ancient history and insists that she and her mother be as authentic as possible in this experience, which means eating only what they can hunt or gather and wearing clothing that people then would have worn. He is also harsh and demanding and physically punishes both women when he feels they've disobeyed him or embarrassed him. Silvie longs to escape her stifling home and gets a taste of what life might be like as a university student from her interactions with the students on the course, but it's made clear to her again and again that she is still under her father's control. It all comes to a head when her father and the course professor decide to reenact a human sacrifice. Will Silvie be a willing participant, and how far will her father go? It's a very well-written book that captures some very strong emotions in few pages (or, in my case, few hours of listening time). I gave it 4 stars.

I'm currently reading three books: on paper, Celestial Bodies, for our Women in Translation study; digitally, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny; and on audio, Is a River Alive? (which just mentioned the term "katabasis" -- don't you just love it when there are connections like that in your reading?!).

October Weekending

Don't weekends always go by too quickly? This one certainly did. I have to work today, but somehow it feels like partly a vacation day because Molly is off from school (in-service day), so I don't have to do the school pickup run, and it isn't a day I have to go into the office, so I'll take it.

Molly had a great time at her dance on Saturday, though she complained about her feet killing her yesterday. She gave me permission to share this photo, which we took when we dropped her off at the park across the street from her school (it's rather picturesque, as you can see, so her group of friends was meeting up there first to take photos).

The photo doesn't really show how pretty her dress was -- it had sequins and purple fabric flowers on it. She and one of her friends got ready beforehand and made their own bouquets.

We also had a nice visit with my aunt and uncle last night, though the scene was quite chaotic with two dogs, two little kids, and two "new" adults. Ruthie was a bit overcome and pooped in the house again (I think she was just overly worked up), so she had to be put on her leash and kept close to me while we ate. Next time, we'll leave her at home. The important thing was that we were able to be together, and my aunt was touched by our cards and presents. And there was cake!

I made a point to focus on my shawl this weekend because I'd really like to get it done, and I'm just about through the last repeat specified in the pattern. It's gotten bigger -- too big, in fact, to fit on my 40 inch circular needle without being bunched up.

I'm going to do at least one more repeat, but the ball of the darker color is dwindling, so I may not be able to do more than that. We'll see!

This week I'm hoping for a typical week without too much undue stress -- and I'm hoping my new reading glasses will arrive this week! Hope your Monday isn't too harsh. Be sure to treat yourself to a little something special if you need it.

Joy Bits

Today I'm taking inspiration from Juliann and sharing some things that have brought me joy this week.

The Weather
After more dry days and a good stretch with highs in the 80s, we finally got rain again on Tuesday. It never rained very hard for long but rather was a gentle on-and-off rain all day that was slow enough to actually absorb into the ground. We actually have a little green grass on our lawn! Sadly at least half of it is dead, so we'll do some reseeding and fertilizing this fall.

The rain also brought with it a cold front, and it was a brisk 41ºF when I took Ruthie out first thing yesterday. We are under a frost warning (or advisory? something) this morning, so I'll be getting out the wool socks and maybe even a sweater later.

New Shoes
I have been wearing Dansko clogs for more than two decades, since I first discovered them when I was in grad school and was spending a lot of the day on my feet when I was student teaching. These days, they're the fastest thing for me to put on when Ruthie needs to go out. It's been years since I bought a pair, so when I happened across a thread on Ravelry about there being a new knit print, I decided to treat myself.

Should you need your own pair, you can find them here.

They were pricey (the cost has gone up $40-50 since I last bought a pair), but I know that they last for years and they're good for my feet and knees.

Weekend Plans
Tonight, we're going out to dinner with my in-laws. Tomorrow is Molly's homecoming dance (she's just going with friends, no date), which means that the Mister and I can have a date night. And on Sunday, my aunt and uncle from Michigan are coming to visit on their way down to Florida for the season, and we're having a big family dinner because Monday is my aunt's 80th birthday. This is the aunt who taught me to knit and likely is responsible for my love of reading because she sent me and my brother a book every week when we were little kids. There will be lots of good food and good company!

Finally, this sweet girl has been challenging this week, but she always brings me joy:

No, mom. I'm not ready to go to bed yet.

Have a great weekend, friends, and be sure to look for joy!

Unraveled, Week 41/2025

I can tell that it's going to be another long week because I woke up yesterday thinking it was Wednesday and it was only Tuesday. But I've checked and today is actually Wednesday, which means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers.

I haven't made much progress on my knitting projects this week, mostly because I've been busy with work, but I also opted to spin and read one evening. Still, here is your weekly update photo of my shawl:

And I've added a little to my sister-in-law's socks, or rather the second sock of the pair:

Reading has been a little better, thanks to shorter books. I've finished three this week.

One of the nice benefits of being a member of NetGalley (other than, of course, getting to read books before they're published) is that sometimes publishers will reach out to you and ask you to read one of their books that they think you'll like. That happened to me recently with This Is Not About Us. I'd so enjoyed Allegra Goodman's Isola that I was interested to read more of her work, plus the description of the book made it sound right up my alley. This book is labeled "fiction" rather than a novel, and that's because while it's not quite interconnected short stories, it feels like a series of vignettes that are all connected. The story begins with three sisters, the youngest of whom is dying. In the wake of her death, there is an incident involving a homemade apple cake that causes a rift to form between the two surviving sisters. The rest of the book takes the reader through the repercussions of this estrangement as it has an impact on the other members of the family, who are at all different stages of life. There are births, bat mitzvahs, midlife crises, and divorces. There are holidays and normal days. But family is what ties all these stories together. The characters feel real and the situations relatable, though perhaps that's largely because the experiences of this Jewish family felt so familiar to me. It's never happened in my family, but I could easily imagine an estrangement happening because of food! I really enjoyed my time with this family and gave it 4 stars. Thank you to Random House/The Dial Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published February 10, 2026.

When I was ready for an audiobook over the weekend, I went back to my Hoopla bookmarks and decided to listen to another Kevin Wilson. Now Is Not the Time to Panic is set in a small town in Tennessee in the mid-90s. Sixteen-year-old Frankie feels like she doesn't fit in until she meets Zeke and the two of them decide to create a mysterious work of art with a strange saying and post it all over town. Before it became a thing on the Internet, their poster goes viral, leading to unforeseen and even tragic results. Twenty years later, Frankie finds that her role in the panic has been uncovered and has to face the fact that a long-kept secret will be revealed. While this book wasn't as outrageous as Nothing to See Here, it is a bit of leap to accept that photocopies of a poster could lead to full-on satanic panic. Still, it raises some interesting questions about art and ownership, and it certainly gives a very realistic portrait of the discomfort of adolescence. I gave it 3 stars.

Finally, I revisited a book I read quite a long time ago. I first read Mrs. Dalloway in my senior year of high school for my AP British literature class -- in fact, for this reread, I pulled out the very same copy I used in class (and inside was a bookmark on which a classmate and I had exchanged notes about our college decisions). I didn't remember much of it, but I think I probably made more sense of it then, when it was discussed and analyzed as we read. The brilliance of the stream-of-consciousness narrative is still there, but I think the fact that I read this at night right before going to sleep took away from my enjoyment of it. I would like to read/reread more Virginia Woolf, and this seemed like a logical place to start, but I think my expectations of her were higher than the actual reading of it. I gave it 3 stars.

I am currently trying to get through Katabasis as fast as I can (does anyone else feel immense pressure when they have a library book with a long wait?) and have just started Celestial Bodies for the women in translation book group Mary is leading.

What are you making and reading?