Unraveled, Week 34/2023

Wednesday again, already? Yes, it is, which means it's time for my weekly link-up with Kat and the Unravelers!

I have to confess that I actually started this post on Tuesday evening because today is going to be a long day with too many (at least in my opinion) meetings. I have a Zoom meeting with the rabbi search committee at 8, then my regular work team meeting at 9, then an in-person full synagogue board meeting at 6:30 this evening. And it's a running day for me. I predict I will be falling asleep very quickly tonight!

I've been mainly spinning the past couple of days and have three finished bobbins of singles ready to be plied, but I did put in a bit of work on my current pair of socks when we went to the baseball game on Monday night. It was hot and humid, so I actually didn't knit until we'd been there for maybe an hour, and then I proceeded to mess up the start of the heel flap and had to rip it out Tuesday morning. But I'm back on track now and will be working on that flap during my first meeting of the day.

Fortunately, reading has been going very well, and I've finished four books in the past week.

The best of the bunch has to be Ann Patchett's latest novel, Tom Lake. This is technically a pandemic novel, but there's none of the anxiety or uncertainty of the early days in this book. Rather, the pandemic is a device to get all three of the main character's adult daughters to return home to the family's cherry farm in Michigan, and as the four women work to bring in the cherry crop, the mother gradually recounts the story of her brief career as an actress and the time she spent doing a summer stock production of Our Town with (and falling for) an actor who would go on to be world famous. This is a story the daughters think they know, but as we learn along with them, there are surprises along the way. It's a quiet, comforting story that is largely about love, family, and finding home. I gave it 5 stars. And though I read with my eyes this time, I fully plan to reread it with my ears soon!

I was all caught up on my podcasts by the middle of last week, so I went looking for an audiobook to keep me company on my daily workout. Jacqueline Winspear's memoir came up on my radar a while back and I'd had it favorited in Hoopla, so I borrowed it. This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing deals with her childhood and her parents' lives before, during the war, and it's very clear that she's drawn a lot from all of their lives in the Maisie Dobbs books. There are familiar places and names as well as some stories that were clearly the inspiration for some plot points. The author also reads the book herself, something I always enjoy in an audiobook. It was an easy listen, and I gave it 4 stars.

I finished that audiobook quickly enough that I had time to listen to another, and I got through all of The Anomaly in just two days. This is a fairly recent work (it was published in August 2020), but I had never heard of it until it was mentioned on the What Should I Read Next Podcast, likely because it's a work in translation. To describe this book in any detail would give too much away, so suffice it to say that it's about a handful of people whose only link is that they are all on an Air France flight to New York that gets caught in a wild storm, and in the wake of it, there's a seemingly unexplainable phenomenon that happens. The military, intelligence agencies, scientists, religious leaders, and even philosophers are called in to try to figure out what happened and how to deal with it. It's unusual and very clever, and it was definitely something intriguing to listen to. I gave it 4 stars.

Yesterday I finally got around to reading Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, which I'd purchased (on Kindle) when it first came out and had been planning to read for a long time, but something else kept coming up. I would also classify this as a pandemic book, but again it's not so much about the pandemic as it is about the author's struggle to find herself in the midst of the pandemic. I didn't love this one like I did Wintering, but I really enjoy May's writing and find it soothing. I also found that her shift in focus to nature and the world around her is very reflective of how I dealt with my anxiety in those early COVID days, and that was reassuring. I think this is worth reading, particularly as it's a very fast read at only a little more than 200 pages, but if you only have time for one of her books, go for Wintering. I gave this one 3 stars.

I'm currently tackling the titles on the Booker Prize longlist, with four hard copies arriving from Blackwell's last week. At the moment, I'm in the middle of Pearl and am enjoying it, though I haven't managed to get through too much in any given sitting because it's been what I've been reading before bed.

What are you making and reading this week?