Unraveled, Week 12/2024

I have to admit that I woke up this morning very confused about what day it was (I blame the strange dreams I was having overnight), but I am now certain that it's Wednesday, which means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers!

I've been very focused on my Hitchhiker the past couple of days, as it's simple enough that I can work on it while I'm in a meeting or reading many, many pages of names of graduating students (the longest list I've had so far was 42 pages). I'm now at 36 teeth and can tell that I've reached the last of the three strips of fiber (if you look closely, you'll see two sections where there's a small bit of orange between reds; that's where the strips of fiber were joined when I spun the singles).

I'm definitely in the home stretch on this shawl and feel pretty confident that I will finish it before we go home. My skein of yarn weighed 119 g when I started, and I'm now down to 28 remaining. I'm hoping I can get to 42 teeth, but it's really not that important.

Reading has been quite good this week, even though I haven't had as much time for it as I'd like the past couple of days. I've finished two books.

Disappearing Earth is one I've had on my TBR for a while and happened to find available from the library when I needed a new audiobook. This book has a really interesting structure. It takes place over the course of the year, with each month as its own chapter, on Russia's remote Kamchatka peninsula. It opens with the abduction of two young girls, and each chapter that follows is almost a short story focused on a different woman. Initially there doesn't seem to be a connection between the characters, but all of them are tangentially related in some way and all are tied together by the common struggles of women everywhere -- motherhood, strained relationships, work, etc. There's also quite a lot of interesting study of issues more unique to the location, such as the underlying tension between native peoples and Russians, frustrations with capitalism versus the more familiar former Soviet system, and the impacts of climate change. I really enjoyed it and gave it 4 stars -- and I'm looking forward to reading an ARC of the author's new book.

I went even further into back list for my other finish with Brideshead Revisited, which I wanted to read before it's discussed on Novel Pairings later this month. I'd never read it and though I know I'd seen one of the movie versions years ago, I remember being distracted while watching and thus not making much sense of the film. This book was a bit of a slow start for me, but I was hooked about halfway through. I'll admit as a late-20th-century American woman, a lot of terminology about Oxford was lost on me, but I don't think it really mattered all that much in the long run. The writing is excellent, and it was a nice break to read something that is set at least partially during a World War that isn't really about the war at all. I gave it 4 stars as well.

I'm currently reading The Berry Pickers, which I only started yesterday but am already about a third of the way through and am really enjoying. I don't imagine it will take me very long to finish. In addition to the ARC of Julia Phillips's new book, I also have another one waiting for me by Elif Shafak that sounds really intriguing.

What are you making and reading this week?