Unraveled, Week 46/2023

We are halfway through November -- how did that happen? Obviously the days are going faster as they are getting shorter. It is Wednesday again, which means it's time to check in with Kat and the Unravelers.

What I'm working on should come as no surprise; I've been entirely monogamous with my shawl. But I am also hopeful that I will finish it today, even if it means playing a game of yarn chicken.

I started weighing my main color yarn after each pattern repeat to get a sense of how many more I can fit in. I'm hoping I'll just manage two more after this current repeat (and I'll be switching to the final mini skein of the gradient after this repeat). I've got two work meetings and a board meeting to knit through today, so we'll see how much I'll manage to get done. Even if I don't finish today, I'm confident this will be off the needles before the end of the week.

I haven't touched the hat I shared last week since then, though I did knit through a workshop last Wednesday afternoon and got a couple of inches of the body knit. I plan to take it with me to the performances of Mo's school musical (I have promised to attend all three).

While my knitting hasn't been too exciting, my reading probably makes up for it, with four books finished since this time last week.

I mentioned last week that I was rereading The Night Circus because Mo is reading it for English class and I have enjoyed reading what she's reading in more recent years. I also adored the book on my first read but found I didn't remember a lot of the details. While I don't think this reading experience was as magical for me as the initial reading was (I remembered just enough that each reveal wasn't that surprising), I still thoroughly enjoyed it. Mo seems to be liking it, too, though we've had several conversations about how much more enjoyable it could be for her if she wasn't forced to read it for school and how having to do assignments related to the book takes some of the joy out of it. I bought a Kindle version of the book some time ago when it was on sale and also bought The Starless Sea, which I hope to reread soon as well.

I stayed up late on Saturday night to finish The House of Doors, the very last title I had left to read from the Booker Prize longlist. This novel is based on real events and features some real-life characters, including Willie Maugham (aka W. Somerset Maugham), who visits an old friend in Penang in the early 1920s as part of a trip in Southeast Asia to search for stories to inspire his writing. In his friend's wife, Lesley, he finds a source of inspiration as she shares her stories from a decade earlier, when she became acquainted with Sun Yat Sen and attended the shocking murder trial of a female friend. This book was a bit of a slow burn, and I didn't really get hooked until after the halfway mark. But the writing is beautiful and the history fascinating. I preferred The Garden of Evening Mists to this work but still very much enjoyed it and gave it 4 stars. I'm also excited to have read all of the Booker-nominated titles this year -- ahead of the prize announcement to boot!

With the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and my conflicted feelings about it, I've been seeking more perspectives, and so I was very interested when Sara Hildreth of Fiction Matters mentioned in one of her newsletters that Minor Detail was available for free from Libro.fm. She listed it as a work that gave a Palestinian perspective, so I signed up and downloaded it and listened to it over the course of Saturday (it's a short book, only about 4 hours). Unfortunately, I didn't much care for it. I was prepared for the difficulty of the material, but what didn't work for me more specifically was that I didn't see the point of it other than to paint Israelis as cruel. I also thought the writing was unnecessarily repetitive. I'm not sorry I read it, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. I gave it 2 stars.

In need of another audiobook, I went in search of something relatively short that was available from the library and ended up with the memoir I'm Glad My Mom Died. Those of you without current teenage daughters probably have no idea who Jennette McCurdy is, but I was familiar with her because Mo has watched the two Nickelodeon shows she appeared in quite a lot. I also knew she declined to be in the iCarly reboot, but I didn't really know why. This memoir is heartbreakingly honest about it; in short, she was forced into acting by her mother, who also physically, emotionally, and sexually abused her for years, though McCurdy was completely unaware of those facts until much later in her life because she was so sheltered by the outside world. This is a hard book to read and one I would not necessarily recommended to most readers, but I certainly appreciate the strength and bravery it took to write it and to reveal very, very personal details. I can say it made me feel much better about my own parenting! I gave it 3 stars.

I'm currently reading The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (my magical free copy!) and Stealing, which was a Kindle deal a couple of weeks ago that I was excited to see after Margene recommended it in one of our Sunday Zooms.

What are you making and reading this week?