Unraveled, Week 11/2022

This morning I'm simultaneously having two thoughts: "Yay, it's already Wednesday!" and "Ugh, it's only Wednesday?" It's been a very busy week at work and in life (lots of things happening in the evenings this week), and I'm hoping that today finally brings a bit of calm. For one thing, I need to pack for my trip and would prefer not to to have to do it the night before we leave, particularly as our flight is at 5:55 a.m. on Saturday!

Because there's a lot of work still to do, I'm going to try to keep this as short and sweet as I can. It is Wednesday, so that means linking up with Kat and the Unravelers and chatting about making and reading.

To give you an idea of just how busy things are, I finished up my brioche cowl on Monday evening during a board meeting, and I still have yet to fasten off the last stitch and weave in the two ends. But it's done!

It's also clearly in need of a good blocking! This will be more obvious when it's worn, but it's designed to be a close-fitting cowl that then spreads out to sit on the shoulders. As you can see, I played a bit of yarn chicken toward the end and was very relieved to have won that round!

Since then, I've started two new projects, both of which are small (well, one is small for the time being only):

These are both projects for Rainbow -- a pair of socks in some stash yarn from a number of years ago that I thought was just variegated but actually was dyed to form wavy stripes(!) and the start of a C2C blanket for her that will be crochets in striped strips and then joined to form chevrons. The blanket is using some sport-weight baby acrylic that my mother passed along to me several years go when she lost interest; once upon a time, she used to crochet baby blankets and buntings.

Reading time has not been very plentiful this week due to my busy schedule, and while I did finish two books in the past week, both were read over the weekend.

I had put Small Things Like These on hold at the library a long time ago when one of you mentioned it on your blog (maybe Bonny?). It's a very short book, a total of 70 pages in the Kindle version, so I read it in a couple of hours on Saturday, borrowing it from the library and returning it that same day. I did enjoy it, but it felt more like a short story than a novel to me, and I felt a little unsatisfied at the ending. I would have liked a few more chapters to find out what happened next. I gave it 3 stars.

I'd been wanting to read Dani Shapiro's memoir Inheritance pretty much since it came out, and after hearing her interviewed on a podcast last week, I decided to see if it was available from my library as an audiobook. Indeed it was, and narrated by the author herself. I really enjoyed this one, I think in large part because I really identified with the author's struggle to reconcile what she believed to be her Ashkenazi Jewish heritage with what she learned from her DNA test. There is something fierce about claiming Eastern European Jewish ancestry because so many tried to wipe us out; claiming that identity is an act of defiance. So I am not surprised that her revelation threw her sense of self-identity into such turmoil. I gave this book 5 stars and now really want to read more of her work.

I am currently in the middle of The Arsonists' City, which I am enjoying a lot, though I haven't found much time to get deeper into it. I also just got a notification that my hold on the ebook version of Assembly is ready for me; I want to reread it with my eyes because I know there's a lot I missed in the audio and want to be able to highlight. And I'm also still in the middle of A Spindle Splintered and would really like to finish that up before we leave!

How about you? What are you making and reading this week?