Unraveled, Week 37/2022

We've made it to Wednesday, dear readers, and in my neck of the woods, it's finally starting to feel like fall -- it's currently 58F outside! The weather this week is just about perfect, and I am enjoying my time outside immensely (even the slightly more intense run I did yesterday). As per usual, this morning I'm linking up with Kat and the Unravelers and here to share an update on knitting and reading.

Thanks to some quieter days at work (which I feel like I've earned after some very busy days the past couple of weeks), I am getting very close to having another finished sweater!

I finished up the back and joined the shoulder seams on Monday evening, and I started and completed the first sleeve yesterday. These sleeves are knit using short rows, and because I'm doing short sleeves, once the short rows are complete, I'm nearly done with them (there are about ten rounds of knitting before the ribbed cuff is worked). I picked up the stitches for the second sleeve before I set the project down for the night, so starting on the short rows on that one is atop my to-do list for the day. I think the second sleeve will be faster than the first because I now know what I'm doing and also will have my needle arranged so that things are slightly less fiddly. The collar will be the final bit, and it's only about eight rounds of knitting, so I think it will be pretty fast. And it looks like the weather is going to be perfect for wearing this over the weekend!

Reading has been (mostly) very good this past week, with four finishes.

Sharks in the Time of Saviors had been on my radar for a couple of years, but I finally got the kick to read it when Mary mentioned she'd just finished it on our Zoom a couple of weekends ago. It was perfect timing because I was in need of a new audiobook to listen to while walking/running and my library had it available with no wait. I have no doubt it was just as powerful a read on the page as it was in the ears, but I really appreciated the multiple narrators who knew how to pronounce the Hawaiian words/terms and who made the story really come alive. This is a sad family story with a bit of magical realism, and though it made my heart ache a bit, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I gave it 4 stars.

My next finish was the next selection for the Erdrich-along, The Plague of Doves. I'll admit that I struggled with this one for a while. For one thing, there are no familiar characters in this book, so I had to try to keep track of a bunch of new names, and that's made doubly hard by the fact that there are so many connections between so many characters. Central to the story (though for most of it in the background) is the mystery of the murder of an entire family save the baby, the vigilante justice that's meted out in reaction to the murder, and the generational trauma that results from these actions. I trusted Erdrich as always to bring the whole story together, and she did -- the answer to the mystery is revealed in the final pages. I gave this 4 stars as well.

In the category of "not so great" reading this week was Treacle Walker, which I wanted to read only because it's on the Booker Prize short list. Katie was kind enough to send me her copy, and I'll be passing it along to someone else. It arrived in the mail on Monday and I sat down and read it in about an hour that afternoon. I'm glad it only took me that long to read because I did not care for it at all. I got the basic gist of the story but spent most of that hour completely confused about what was happening and what people were saying. I suspect some of my difficulty is due to the dialect in which it's written, but I still feel like I need someone smarter than I to explain it to me. I gave it 2 stars.

Finally I finished a book I'd had tagged "to read" on my Libby app after hearing it mentioned on several bookish podcasts. A Place for Us is a saga about a Muslim Indian-American family that deals with the struggles of immigrants and their children to find themselves in a country that sometimes doesn't seem to want them and where their religion often sets them apart. Though it deals specifically with Islam and with the children's grappling with how observant to be, in many ways it's a universal examination of children becoming adults and defining themselves as apart from their families. I listened to this book, which was a good choice (in my opinion) given the many references to Islam and the religious practices of Muslims, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I gave it 4 stars.


I'm currently reading The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida as part of my effort to get through the Booker short list. I've only read a bit the past two evenings, so I'm hoping to find some more sustained time to focus on it.

What are you making and reading this week?