Unraveled, Week 22/2024

I just love it when the week feels like it's just beginning and it's already Wednesday! That means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers to talk about making and reading.

Yesterday I spent another fairly useless morning at the office, at least as far as actual work. I did add a couple of stripes to my current sock and read about 50 pages of a new book. But in the evenings I've been working on my Rift tee, and it's starting to look like an actual garment now:

This top is designed with a split hem; the front and the back are currently on the same needle though not yet joined. The pattern says to make the hems the same length if you want the top to be reversible, but as I'm really only likely to have the v-neck in the front, I am probably going to make the front ribbing a bit shorter than the back. Once I've joined the two pieces and am working in the round, I'll start alternating skeins. You can see that there's a bit of pooling in the completed ribbing for the back, but it's subtle (actually, I think it's probably more noticeable in the photo than it is in real life). Even so, things will just be easier all around to alternate.

It's been another good week of reading, with three books finished even with a busy weekend.

The first feels a bit like cheating, because I'd consider it more of a short story or a novella and it was only about 2 1/2 hours long on audio. Eastbound was actually published more than a decade ago but did not come out in English until last year. It tells the story of a young Russian conscript on a trans-Siberian train who decides to desert and the French woman he meets who helps him, despite not speaking his language or knowing anything about him. There's quite a bit of suspense and a number of tense moments as we wait to see if he'll get away. I really enjoyed the writing though have to note that the narrator made me think the woman's name was Elaine because she was mispronouncing Hélène. I gave it 4 stars.

Before we left on our trip, one item on my to-do list was to finish reading Kairos because I did not want to take a hardback book with me. The book just won the International Booker Prize for this year. I bought a used copy from Thriftbooks and ended up with a former library copy that had a "Romance" genre sticker on the spine. This was a puzzling categorization to me, because while the story does follow an affair between 19-year-old Katharina and Hans, a married man more than three decades her senior, it did not read like a romance book to me. It's set in the last years of the GDR, and the relationship ultimately has a lot of parallels in the dissolving Communist state. While I enjoyed the writing, I thought the relationship between the two was quite troubling. Hans seems to enjoy holding power over Katharina, and ultimately I found their relationship to be rather emotionally abusive. He makes her feel guilty for what he perceives to be her indiscretions even as he is cheating on his wife -- and not for the first time. I gave it 3 stars.

My travel reading was pure comfort: an ARC of Elizabeth Strout's forthcoming Tell Me Everything. Strout's novels are always such comfortable reads; usually not much happens in terms of plot, but reading her books is like spending time in a small town and returning to characters who feel like old friends. And many of those old friends reappear in this new book. Many readers will be delighted that Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge finally appear together, swapping stories about people they've known or met and pondering some of life's great questions. But the main focus of this installment of life in Crosby, Maine, is Lucy's walking partner Bob Burgess. He takes on the case of a man under suspicion of killing his mother, a woman reviled by many, and as he's working on it, he's also working on some challenges in his own life. There are funny moments and sad moments, but overall the novel is one that celebrates the humanity of all the characters, reminding us that we are all broken in some way and we are all deserving of love. I gave it 4 stars. I received a digital ARC of this book from Random House and NetGalley in return for an honest review. This book will be published September 10, 2024.

As to what I'm reading currently, at the moment, it's two physical books! While Chelsea and Sara of Novel Pairings are reading Les Misérables this summer as their big book, a group of us decided we'd instead like to read A Suitable Boy, one of the books mentioned in The Reading List (which I reviewed last week). This book is almost 1,500 pages long, but Mary was nice enough to break it down week by week so that we know how many pages to read each week to finish by Labor Day. I have only just started but am enjoying it so far. And yesterday I started Small Island, which is the next title we'll be discussing in our study of older winners of the Women's Prize for Fiction (it won in 2004).

What are you making and reading this week?