Unraveled, Week 44/2021

I am posting a bit later than usual because it's been a busy morning here. We woke up to the good news of an approved COVID vaccine for children and our city's first Black mayor being elected -- one of quite a few history-making candidates of color to win races yesterday. After Rainbow was almost late to school yesterday (because we got caught in some unexpected traffic), we made sure to leave a bit earlier this morning, and that gave me time to swing by Trader Joe's on the way home to stock up on some much-needed coffee. As soon as I'd gotten home and cleaned up the breakfast dishes, I headed out for my walk so I could be back in time for a 10 a.m. Zoom session for work.

Now that all of that is done, and I'm showered and dressed in a cozy sweater (it was below freezing first thing this morning!), it's time for my weekly check-in with Kat and the Unravelers.

I'm happy to say that there has been no unraveling here, and if all goes well today, I'll even finish up a project! I'm on the ribbing of my brioche cowl, with about 10 rounds left to go.

I tried to edit the photo to fix the colors, but they're still a little off. The last mini is less bronze and more of a mix of a golden orange and a rust-on-copper green. I've still got all the ends to weave in and the pattern to write up, but this is nearly done.

I've still been ignoring my Shifty pullover, but I'll get back to it soon. In the meantime, anticipating that the cowl will be off the needles before too long, I wound up two skeins of self-striping sock yarn from my stash:

Fibernymph Dye Works Bounce in Deep Fall (left) and Rhinebeck: Sweater Weather? (right)

These are both sock yarns, but I'm not planning on using them for socks! Everyone seems to be knitting the style of hat that's like two hats stuck together at their brims these days, so I'm going to knit a couple more (you may remember that I did one for charity a couple months ago). One of these will be for Rainbow, for a Chanukah present, and one will be for me.

Reading has been good this past week. I thought I had finished two books since last Wednesday, so you can imagine my surprise when I looked at my Goodreads record and found that it was actually twice that! These were all 4-star reads for me.

 

The Sweetness of Water is a debut novel from author Nathan Harris, and I certainly hope it's only the first of many books from him! The writing is this novel is absolutely exquisite. The story itself is a rather sad one, as you might expect given that it is set in the South shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War and that two of the main characters are formerly enslaved brothers. But as painful as some of the passages are to read, the novel as a whole made me hopeful and reminded me of the humanity that can be found even in the darkest of times.

 
After watching a local event featuring poet and author Elizabeth Acevedo last week, in which she recited an opening chapter of The Poet X from memory, I knew I had to borrow the book from the library -- in audiobook format, so I could listen to her read it. It's a short book (I think less than 4 hours), so it was a one-day listen for me but such a good one. At some point I will also borrow the ebook so I can see the words on the page, but I really think this is a book that has to be listened to. I fully intend to read her other work, and if you're a fan of Acevedo, you'll be happy to hear that at this event, she revealed that she is writing her first adult novel. She read an excerpt of it and it sounded amazing!

I read Kate Quinn's The Rose Code earlier in the year and had read The Alice Network previously, so when I heard The Huntress mentioned on a book podcast, I put it on hold. This is a work of what I'd call WWII vacation reading fiction. The main story line follows a group of Nazi hunters and takes place mainly in the early 1950s, but there are also some flashbacks to the war and the story of a female Soviet fighter pilot. The author's notes makes it clear that the book was inspired by the stories of real people, but of course what makes for a good read is a tidy plot line that wraps up neatly at the end. I enjoyed this, but it felt a little too neatly wrapped up, particularly the epilogue. If I'd edited this book, I would have left the epilogue out entirely.

Finally, just this morning, I finished listening to Tastes Like War, a memoir that is a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction. The author, the daughter of a Korean mother and American father, uses food to frame her reflections on a growing up with mixed cultural identity in a very white, conservative town in Washington State, what she knew and didn't know about her mother's family and how they survived Japanese imperial rule and the Korean War, and her mother's schizophrenia. Cho is a professor of sociology who focused on the role Korean women, including her mother, played under the imperialist structures of first Japanese and then American rule for her dissertation. In this memoir, she jumps back and forth in time, from her mother's death to her early childhood, to look at how food, culture, and trauma have shaped her life. It's a hard book but worth the read. 

Now I'm waiting for my hold to come through on Matrix (Libby tells me it will be "available soon"), and in the meantime I'm back to savoring The Madness of Crowds a chapter or two at a time and have started rereading The Westing Game, as Rainbow has just started reading it for English class. How about you -- what are you reading and working on this week?