Unraveled, Week 35/2024

Weeks that start with a Monday off feel simultaneously long and short, and this one is no exception. It's also back to school week! Mo is now officially a high schooler (no, I don't know where the time went, either).

She got to ease into the start of the new school year with a half day on Monday, which seemed a little ridiculous to me, but I don't make the schedule. Yesterday was her first day of classes. She's taking geometry and physics in addition to French, history, and English, plus she's taking glee club (choir) and clay/ceramics as her electives. It should be an interesting year! One extra-nice thing about school this year, at least from my perspective, is that lunch and snack are now included with tuition, so I don't have to pack her lunch (or remind her to pack her lunch) or clean out a lunch box every day. Apparently the roll-out of getting everyone through the lunch line didn't go so smoothly yesterday, but I'm sure it'll get better very soon.

It's Wednesday, which means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers and to update you on my making and my reading.

I've spent quite a bit of time the last few days working on this, which looks like it could be a hat with cat ears for an adult but is, in fact, a newborn sweater. I have knit this pattern enough that I didn't read the instructions carefully and actually knit past where I needed to on the body, so I had to pull out my needles, reinsert them into the knitting where I should have stopped, and rip out several stripes' worth of knitting. Fortunately this sweater is small enough that what was ripped did not represent too much time. I have departed just a bit from the pattern in that, after I bound off the ribbing for the body, I kept the last stitch live and immediately picked up around the fronts and neck for the body ribbing. The pattern doesn't have you do this until the very end, but I didn't see the need to add two more ends to weave in on such a small piece.

I have also put in some rounds here and there on my Malabrigo hat; I've been thinking of it as my work project because I can knit on it while I'm reading something for or at work.

The camera is washing out the yarn quite a bit here -- in real life, it's much more vibrant! I'm thinking this might make a good hat for my middle nephew, who has a big noggin, so it may get put away with the holiday gifts instead of going into the charity pile.

Reading has been good, thanks to a bit of quiet at the end of last week and an extra-long weekend.

After setting it aside for a couple of weeks while reading several library books, I finally got back to True Biz late last week and focused on finishing it. The story is set primarily at a residential school for the deaf in a Rust Belt town in Ohio and focuses on three main characters: February, the headmistress of the school, who is a CODA (child of deaf adults); Austin, who comes from a very well-known deaf family in the town; and Charlie, a new student at the school whose mother insisted on her getting a cochlear implant that she hates and who has never really been around other deaf people. The book has a lot to do with these individuals and their lives at the school and with their families, but it also has a good deal to say about Deaf culture and how American society has dealt with deafness in its history. This was a book I appreciated reading with my eyes because the chapters are interspersed with instructional material about American Sign Language, articles about the history of the deaf in American society, and other documents. I gave it 4 stars.

This past week also marked a big reading accomplishment: I finished A Suitable Boy! There's technically still this week left in our original reading schedule, but I really wanted to find out how it would end (and also wanted to have some time to read another book for a discussion in early September). This book follows the members of four families -- the Mehras, the Kapoors, the Khans, and the Chatterjis -- over the course of about a year and a half in the early 1950s in India, not long after Partition and independence. The title refers to one of the overarching themes, that of Mrs. Mehra trying to find a suitable husband for her younger daughter, Lata, but the book follows so many different plot lines and deals with quite a lot of serious subjects: Indian politics, religion, caste, generational differences, colonialism, colorism, prejudice in all its forms, and of course the usual drama around love and marriage. It is rare for me to find a book that makes me both laugh and cry and that keeps me entertained for nearly 1,500 pages, but this book did! I gave it 5 stars, and I'm sad that I'm finished because I got so used to reading it almost every night before bed this summer!

Finished just yesterday afternoon, The Seed Keeper tells the story of Rosalie Iron Wing, who was raised by her father until his untimely death and then placed by the state in with a white foster family. We follow her as she marries a farmer, has a son, and then returns to the cabin where she lived with her father as part of an effort to reconnect with her identity and to the Dakota culture from which she was separated as a child. Through it all is a connection with the earth and a respect for nature, and we learn of the history of the women in Rosalie's family, who kept seeds as sacred objects because of the power they have to feed us and to connect us with those who came before. I gave it 4 stars.

Now I am reading Enlightenment, a release from earlier in the year that is on the Booker Prize longlist, and The Road Home, the next book to be discussed among those of us reading past winners of the Women's Prize for Fiction.

What are you making and reading this week?