Unraveled, Week 42/2023

Kat is on vacation this week but was kind enough to make sure there's a post and link party for us Unravelers, so here's my midweek update on what I'm making and reading.

I'd really hoped to have a finished pair of socks to share this morning, but I just ran out of time last night. The good news is that I will have a finished pair before the day is over because I only have a toe to finish (and some ends to weave in, but I would have left those for today even if I had finished last night -- my eyes are officially too old to weave in ends in black yarn at night). I will note that I knit pretty much the entire foot of the second sock yesterday, so it was not for lack of trying that I didn't finish.

Reading has been good again this past week, and I've been thankful that work has been quiet enough that I've been able to get a lot of reading time in! I've finished three books in the past week.

Several readers whose opinions I admire recently raved about Day, Michael Cunningham's forthcoming novel, so I had to request it from NetGalley and was so pleased when I was approved. This book gives a slice-of-life view of a family by following its members on the same day on three consecutive years: 2019, 2020, and 2021. Those years alone tell us that the pandemic is going to play a role in the narrative, but I wouldn't call this a pandemic novel. This is a beautifully crafted character study, and the pandemic serves only as a device to amplify the already complicated family dynamics at play. Somehow Cunningham manages to paint a beautiful and complete portrait of a handful of characters and the family they make up even though we only see three days of their lives. These characters feel intensely real and their struggles all too familiar. I was surprised by how much I felt for them despite knowing them for only a brief period of time. I gave it 4 stars. Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review.

I found myself in need of a short-ish audiobook over the weekend, and in browsing what was available from the library came across A Living Remedy, a memoir by Nicole Chung. I had read and enjoyed her first memoir, and this one very much feels like a continuation. The first book is about coming to terms with her identity as an Asian adoptee of white parents; this one is about her relationship with those parents as an adult and about coming to terms with their deaths. It's sad but also very relatable, and Chung finds a way to write about the hardest parts of her life in a way that is quite moving. I gave it 4 stars.

While I did not manage to finish my sock last night, I did manage to finish The Fraud, Zadie Smith's first foray into historical fiction. This book is based on real people and real events, though some of them seem wild enough to be fiction. Our main character is Eliza Touchet (pronounced "Too-shay"), the housekeeper and cousin-by-marriage of the prolific Victorian writer William Ainsworth, a friend and contemporary of Charles Dickens. Their relationship is complicated, to say the least, and the book takes us through its many decades. At the same time, we learn about the most sensational court case of the time, that of the Tichborne Trial, in which a man claimed to be the long-lost (and believed to be dead) descendant of and heir to the Tichborne estate. Also involved is a formerly enslaved man named Andrew Bogle, who swears that the claimant is legitimate and who fascinates Eliza. There's a lot going on in this book, and it jumps around quite a lot in time. I found the first half to be a bit of a slog, but by the time I reached Bogle's story/history, I was in it. I think Smith has quite a lot to say about society and women's roles in it, about what is considered to be the truth, and of course about class and colonialism. I'd also say we could have a long discussion about just which one of the characters is the titular fraud. I gave this one 4 stars as well.

I'm currently reading All the Little Bird-Hearts (it's not a long book, but I'm reading it before bed and thus don't manage very many pages at a time) and am hoping to start The Lacuna for the next Kingsolver-along discussion.

What are you making and reading this week.