Unraveled, Week 9/2022

Good morning and happy March! March 1 is the first day of meteorological spring, and yesterday felt decidedly springlike. The sun was out, the birds were chirping early, and I had to take my jacket off partway through my morning walk. For someone who runs cold, that's saying something. It's supposed to be nice again today, but apparently we may get another light dusting of snow overnight. Such is this time of year in Western Pennsylvania!

It's Wednesday, and that means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers and talk about making and reading. I have been fairly monogamous this week and have been putting in a lot of time on my Shifty. You may be able to see that I've made some progress just since Monday:

 

If you look closely, you'll see that the sweater has been impaled on the left side by a pair of needles. That's because those needle tips are holding a ball of yarn in place inside the start of that sleeve. I am knitting the sleeves concurrently, but I've reached the point on that sleeve where I need to use the second contrast color -- which I'm still using on the first sleeve. As soon as I change to the third and final contrast color on the first sleeve, I'll go back to the other one and catch up. I did have to do a little unraveling on this yesterday when I realized I'd skipped a round of knitting, but it was only a handful of rounds and was easily made up.

Reading has been a bit slower this week, but I've finished two books.

After reading Kat's good review, I went over to NetGalley and requested a copy of Elie Mystal's Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution, which I believe was published yesterday. First, I will say that to fully enjoy this book, you probably need to lean far left politically, because he does a lot of conservative bashing. That said, he gives a really interesting perspective on the Constitution given the context of when it was written, namely that the founders were white men intent on preserving their power, and thus the founding document of our democracy doesn't inherently protect the rights of all citizens. If you're interested in politics and constitutional discourse, it's worth the read. I gave it 4 stars.

Over the weekend, I was looking for a short-ish audiobook to listen to that was lighter in subject matter (I've been reading a lot of Hard Books lately) and came across Far from the Tree among my "to read" tagged books on the Libby app. I think I added this to the list after hearing about it on the What Should I Read Next podcast, though I'm not certain, and it wasn't until I started listening that I realized that it was a young adult novel. It does deal with some pretty serious topics -- foster care, teen pregnancy, adoption, addiction -- but with teenage protagonists, it never felt too heavy. The story deals with three half-siblings, two of whom were adopted at birth and one who has been in the foster care system his entire life, as they find and get to know one another and struggle with what it means to be family. I gave it 4 stars.

I'm currently trying to finish a fairly awful book that was an Amazon First Reads selection (only because I want to know how it ends).

What are you making and reading this week?