Unraveled, Week 45/2022

Good morning, friends! And I do mean GOOD morning -- we woke up to some very happy election results in Pennsylvania. I know the news isn't good everywhere this morning, but I'm feeling much less anxious this morning.

It is Wednesday, which means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers!

I am continuing to work on my Recalibrate, though it hasn't seen a ton of attention the past couple of days. I have finished my first side stripe and determined that I can knit 10 rows on each side with one mini skein, so my next step will be to pick up along the other side of the front and back strips. I also cannot seem to get the color of those strips to be accurate no matter what I do. I played with things in this photo, but in real life it's a bit more green. Oh well!

The reason this hasn't gotten a lot of attention so far this week is because during the day I've been focused on spinning. I'm expecting my holiday fiber minis set to be mailed next week, and I realized that I should really get a move on if I want to finish up my combo spin before that arrives. I did manage to finish up the second bobbin of singles yesterday.

The orange bobbin is the one I just finished, and it looks to me like it might be a bit fuller than the first bobbin, but it'll all get evened out in the plying.

I'm hoping to soon have another project on the needles because I received some yarn in the mail on Monday (which I had to retrieve from our next-door neighbor's stoop because our mail carrier keeps delivering my packages to the wrong address -- who knew it was so hard to deliver to the right house on a street with only 10 houses?!).

The yarn on the left will be wound and cast on first, as it's going to become a hat pattern to match the recently finished cowl. Debbie of Murky Depths Dyeworks was kind enough to send me these two skeins for the new sample, which (obviously) will have just two colors. I'll probably actually end up knitting two hats, with the colors reversed. The yarn on the right is the Pigskin Party exclusive colorway from Fibernymph Dye Works and it was a surprise colorway, so I am delighted to have received it and love it. It came with two mini skeins as well, which I likely won't use with the main color but can add to my collection.

Reading has been going pretty well this week, and I finished three books.

First up was an ARC that I received from NetGalley and Flatiron Books in return for an honest review. The Nazi Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill is part history and part thriller. As the title implies, the Nazi plot to assassinate the three world leaders is a major focus, but the book also covers a lot of the diplomacy, the planning, and the espionage that occurred behind the scenes during World War II. I've read WWII-era books quite extensively, though quite a lot of them have been fiction and many have focused mostly on the Holocaust. This book gave me an entirely new perspective and taught me some new things. For instance, did you know that there was a Nazi special operations effort that freed Mussolini from his Allied jailers? I also got a much better picture of just how many Soviet deaths there were as a result of the effort to push back the Nazis on the Eastern European front. My one minor complaint about this book is that every single chapter seems to end with some sort of cliffhanger, which I think is a bit unnecessary when a book is nonfiction and covering historical events, but I suppose if you are someone who likes fictional thrillers and don't normally read nonfiction, this might be an inducement to keep you reading. I learned a lot and found it easy to read, which is something I look for in any work of nonfiction. I gave it 4 stars. (And if this book sounds interesting to you, there's a Goodreads giveaway for it starting tomorrow!)

I wanted something easy and happy after reading about war, so I picked a book I'd heard a lot about and bought when it was a Kindle deal a few weeks ago. A Psalm for the Wild-built is a sweet science fiction novella set in a world in which robots gained self-awareness and wandered off into the wilderness some time before. A nonbinary tea monk (someone whose job is to listen to people talk about their problems and brew them tea) sets off to try to discover why they don't feel fulfilled in their life and encounters a robot that is on its own journey to learn more about humans. I am not a big reader of science fiction, but really the only "science fiction-y" aspect of this story is what I've just described to you. At its heart, this is a story about self-discovery and friendship, and it's quite lovely. I gave it 4 stars.

Finally, I finished an audiobook last night. I have never read any of Sally Rooney's books, and so when I saw that Beautiful World, Where Are You was available from Hoopla (meaning no wait), I decided to give it a go. I did enjoy having someone with an Irish accent read the book to me, as it felt a little more authentic, but I found the book to be just okay. I enjoyed the writing but thought the characters were a little unrealistic, particularly in the e-mails the two main female characters wrote to one another. I also wasn't expecting such sexually explicit scenes (not that I have an issue with them per se, but it felt a little awkward to be listening to them while I was out exercising). I'd be open to reading more of her books but also not rushing to read them. I gave it 3 stars.

I'm currently a little more than 100 pages into The Marriage Portrait, which I am absolutely loving, and have just started A Little Devil in America ahead of the author's visit as part of the local speaker series I'm subscribed to.

What are you making and reading this week?