Unraveled, Week 43/2023

It's that time again -- time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers! And this week I have a finished project to share:

I completed these socks for my sister-in-law on Monday evening, and they've obviously not yet been blocked (I don't think socks need to be blocked, for the record, but I do it for socks I'm giving as a gift, so that they're both clean and look nice). My SIL has rather large feet -- 9 inches around and 9.5 inches long -- so I stuck to shortie socks so I'd be sure I had enough yarn. In the end, this pair took 87 g of my skein; for comparison, a pair for me, with a 7 inch leg, usually uses about 85 g.

After finishing those up, I finally gave in to my urge to spin again and got back to work on my Southern Cross Fibre project. At this moment, I have 11 bags of fiber to spin, all from this year (though only seven of those are club shipments -- the remaining four were prizes). I decided to continue working my way forward chronologically and pulled out February's shipment, Rock Art on South African Superfine. Here is what the fiber looked like:

I decided to try something I learned about in my spinning class at SSK over the summer -- spinning marled singles by holding two pieces of fiber and drafting them together. This is supposed to give a tweedy effect when the yarn is plied. So I broke up my fiber into a bunch of smaller strips and am combining them more or less randomly. I'm spinning all my singles onto one bobbin and will ply from both ends when I'm done.

I have not done as much reading as I would have liked in the past week because of work, but I finished two books (both of them last night and both from the Booker longlist).

Old God's Time follows retired police detective Tom Kettle as a visit from some younger detectives forces him to reflect on his life and his work, particularly on some rather ugly cases of physical and sexual abuse on the part of Catholic priests. While I think this book was well written, I also found it very confusing. There's a bit of a rambling quality to it, and on top of this, it's hard to know what is real and what is Kettle's dream or imagination. I was never sure if the things he was experiencing were actually happening or not and whether this uncertainty was due to his senility or just what he wished his reality would be, and as a result I just couldn't figure out what had really happened in his past. I gave it 3 stars.

All the Little Bird-Hearts is a slightly unusual book in that it doesn't have a very dynamic plot -- it's about Sunday and her teenage daughter, Dolly, and their interactions with the couple who move into the house next door to them -- but it does provide a somewhat unusual perspective in that Sunday, the narrator, is autistic, and thus the entire story is seen through the lens of how she understands what is happening. I really valued getting this idea of what it must be to be inside the mind of an autistic person (notably, the author's bio indicates that she, like her main character, is autistic). Sunday struggles to understand and be a good parent to her daughter while doing things in her own way to maintain her sense of equilibrium. It's a beautifully written book. I gave it 4 stars. [Note: This book won't be published in the United States until later this year, but you can buy it now from Blackwell's. If you're so inclined to order it, you can click over to Blackwell's using my affiliate link in the sidebar.]

I've now got two titles on the Booker longlist left to read, and they're sitting on my nightstand in the hope I can get them read before the winner is announced next month. Currently, though, I'm working my way through the audio of The Lacuna. I've got about five and a half hours left, but I'm listening at 1.75x speed, so probably only 3-4 hours of actual listening time. That may take me longer than I'd like, though, because I just got sent another big report to edit for work and I have a board meeting tonight. At least for the latter I'll have some knitting to work on!

What are you making and reading this week?