Unraveled, Week 29/2021

Good morning and happy hump day! I am feeling the need for lots of coffee today thanks to a loud thunderstorm that hit just as I was trying to go to bed last night. It's time for a weekly check-in with Kat and the Unravelers to talk knitting and reading.

I am happy to report that I completed 30 rows of my wrap yesterday, despite a coworker's best attempts to foil my plan by sending me two magazine articles to edit. I have discovered that I now have the pattern pretty much memorized (though I keep the pattern nearby to double-check, just in case), and I think that's making things much faster. I've also managed to work on it while reading, and that's been a real game-changer.

Also on my needles right now is a pair of socks (well, the first sock of the pair) that I cast on while I was sitting at the orthodontist with Rainbow on Friday. Thank you, by the way, to all of you who said you hoped she was doing better. She had a couple of miserable days, but she's now adjusted and is doing much better!

These socks are going to be this year's Christmas socks for my sister-in-law. The yarn is my favorite Fibernymph Dye Works Bounce, and it's in one of what Lisa is referring to as her Serendipitous Stripes colorways. Earlier in the summer she decided to have a fun day in the dye studio and play with colors without the pressure of creating repeatable colorways. So all the skeins she dyed are one of a kind and don't have names. I bought two of them in her first update, and I think she's planning on doing this kind of dye day from time to time in the future (and, actually, I see she has some in the shop right now!). This made the yarn even more fun to knit -- I could see what colors were in the skein, but I couldn't tell in what order they'd appear, and I definitely didn't see the skinny stripes coming! I'm not in any rush to finish these (especially not while I'm on deadline for the wrap), but it's always good to have a mindless-stockinette-in-the-round project on the needles for meetings or car rides or other otherwise tedious situations.

Reading is continuing to move along at a good pace despite work occasionally getting in the way. I have finished another four books since this time last week:

I'd borrowed No One Is Coming to Save Us from the library because it was purportedly a retelling of The Great Gatsby, but I found that connection to be tenuous at best. I honestly don't have a full grasp of what this book is actually about, even having read the whole thing; it's basically just a glimpse into the lives of a bunch of people who are related in one way or another and who are miserable. I think what bothered me most was what seemed like a complete lack of editing. There were a number of poorly phrased sentences that made for confusing reading, and someone (author or editor) did not seem to have an understanding of how to use commas correctly. I gave it 2 stars.

Bingo square: Retelling

Inspired in large part by the Novel Pairings podcast, I've been trying to go back and read some of the so-called classics that I never read, and one of the books on that list was Their Eyes Were Watching G-d. Chelsey and Sara really loved this one, and I thought I would, too. I also thought it would be a quick read (it's less than 200 pages long), but it ended up being a bit of a slog for me. I found the stark difference between the descriptive writing and the dialogue to be really jarring, and the latter was so hard for me to read and understand that it really took away from my enjoyment of the novel. I did love the penultimate chapter, which is really where all the excitement happens, though. I gave it 3 stars.

Bingo square: Originally published in the 20th century

Along the same lines of revisiting the classics, I pulled out my copy of The Crucible to reread; I'd originally read it in my junior year of high school, when the focus of my English class was American literature. But because it's a play, not a novel, I decided that listening to it was a better way to revisit it, so I borrowed the audio version from the library and listened to the entire thing while on my walk on Sunday and while cooling down after. The audio featured a full cast with some well-known names and was quite enjoyable. I gave it 4 stars.

Bingo square: Adapted for the screen

Like so many people, I binge-watched Bridgerton on Netflix when it first came out, so even though I already knew the story and the ending, when I needed a bit of fluff after all the seriousness of my recent reading, I picked up The Duke & I. Is it fine literature? No, but sometimes that's exactly what you need. I found this to be a refreshing and delightful palate cleanser, and despite the fact that it's more than 400 pages long, I found it to be a very quick read. I am not typically a romance novel reader, but I'm also not prudish about this kind of stuff, and honestly it was tamer than I expected (certainly much less explicit than the series!). I gave it 4 stars, mainly because it was so entertaining.

Bingo square: With a cover you might want to hide on the subway

Here's the current state of my bingo cards, which is making me very happy indeed:

You can click to embiggen, but it's clear that I have only one square left to fill to completely cover the first card, and one of the books I'm currently reading will do just that. That book is Beloved, which I am rereading. I first read it in high school, and the copy I own was a tie-in to the movie version, so it had to have been around 1998, so I am guessing it was during my junior or senior year. I remember really liking the writing when I read it the first time though also feeling like a lot of it was over my head. I am only a couple of chapters in so far on this second read, but I can already tell that I am going to understand more this time around.

I started a new library book yesterday, which is filling a square on my second card. The Heart was recommended by one of you friends (I can't remember who right now!) and also on one of the reading podcasts I listen to, and I'd had it tagged to read on my Libby app, so I snapped it up when I saw it was available yesterday. I'm not quite halfway through it and hope to get through the rest today because I also just got a notification that my hold was up on Infinite Country and have it waiting in my Kindle library.

What about you? How are your crafting and reading going this week? Got any good recommendations for my second bingo card?