Unraveled, Week 26/2023

I am getting this post up a little early this morning because I actually have to go into the office for a meeting at 9 (when the new big boss wants to meet in person, you go in) and work on the road I normally walk along to get there means I have to take a detour, so I figured I'd make things easier for myself by getting a head start on typing. I have no idea if Kat is hosting a link-up this week for Unraveled Wednesday, as she'd said she was going to take a little blog vacation, but I'm still checking in on crafting and reading here!

I have been very focused on spinning the past week and have finished the first bobbin of singles for my three-colorway combo spin:

and have started on the second (this is Woodland Stream):

Apologies for the bad photo; we have a combination of fog and smoke here today.

I am spinning my default singles, which means that the finished three-ply yarn should be in the range of fingering weight. Obviously for a fairly fine finished yarn, that means the singles are even finer, so this is somewhat slow spinning. I'm trying to finish this project as quickly as possible, but we're also headed into a spinning-heavy time of year -- that would be Tour de Fleece, which coincides with the Tour de France and begins July 1 -- so I anticipate that it very well could be a finished yarn by this time next week. We'll see!

I've also made some progress on my current sock WIP, as it came with me to dinners all weekend:

These socks were originally intended to be for my mother, but after seeing the full stripe sequence, I don't think they're her colors, so now Mo will be getting them. I have plenty of other options for my mom in the stash.

It has been an excellent week of reading, with three great finishes!

Happiness Falls is a book that is impossible to classify when it comes to genre. It's a mystery. It's a family drama. It's a pandemic novel. It's a work of philosophy. It's a political book about disability and society. It's a study of identity. It's an examination of nature vs. nurture. It's a work of cross-cultural and social commentary. Regardless of how you describe it, it's a compelling and well-written read. It's a book that I couldn't put down once I got started. It's a book that made me laugh and cry. It's a smart and emotional story of a family dealing with the mysterious disappearance of their father in the middle of the pandemic and the revelation that their nonverbal son and brother may be capable of more than they realized. The characters are three-dimensional and complex, people you will come to care about and root for. More than anything, this book tells the story of the love between members of a family. I gave it 5 stars -- highly recommend!

I received a digital ARC of this book from NetGalley and Random House in return for an honest review. The book is due to be published in August, and if you're quick, you can enter the Goodreads giveaway for a hard copy (just click on the link to the book above and look under the cover image for a link to the giveaway).

If you've read Jesmyn Ward's novels, then you know how her writing is simultaneously gorgeous and devastating. She has previously written about how this country has failed people of color in more recent times, but in her newest work, she goes back to one of the ugliest eras of its history. In Let Us Descend, she takes us back to the South before the Civil War and gives the reader an unflinching portrait of life as an enslaved person. In her portrait of Annis, a young enslaved woman, Ward shows the suffering but also the humanity and gives the reader an idea of how it was possible for so many to continue to willingly live each day and find some hope for the future even as they were starved, beaten, and worked to death. I gave it 5 stars, and I do recommend it, though be aware that it's a hard read for many reasons.

I received a digital ARC of this book from NetGalley and Scribner in return for an honest review. This book is expected to be published in October.

It had been a while since I last listened to a Maisie Dobbs mystery, in part because the audiobooks disappeared from Hoopla for a while, but they're back now, so I listed to the 15th in the series, The American Agent, over the course of a few days. This one had everything I love about the series -- a case that kept me guessing interspersed with scenes from Maisie's personal life -- set against the backdrop of the London Blitz. Things are starting to come together, and knowing that there are only two more books in the series that I have still to read, I have a general idea of where things may be going. This was a great listen while I was running -- 4 stars.

I'm currently reading Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, which wasn't originally on our schedule for the Kingsolver-along, but so many of us were picking it up right now that we've decided to make it our next book to discuss. I'm about a third of the way through it and am enjoying it -- particularly the part I recently read about shearing and skirting the fleeces of a flock of Icelandic sheep!