Unraveled, Week 44/2024

Thank you all for your kind words about my fall. I decided it was probably wise to get my foot checked out, so I have an appointment at the local urgent care center this morning. Please keep your fingers crossed that it's just a sprain!

It's Wednesday, though it feels like it's been a week already with all that's been going on here. Still, it's time to join Kat and the Unravelers to talk about crafting and reading!

I've been giving a little attention to all three of my current WIPs in a regular rotation, but my main focus has been my sweater. It's the largest and probably slowest, so I'm trying to work on it a little every day. On Friday night, I pulled it out to start the colorwork (I'd reached the requisite length under the arms earlier in the day) only to realize that I hadn't yet wound the contrast skein for the body yet, so I had to wait until Saturday to do that. Then it took me a good hour on Saturday to get the first round done because the floats in that round were so long that I opted to use the ladderback jacquard method to deal with them and apparently had trouble counting to four reliably not once but twice. I'm off to the races now, though, and am about a third of the way through the body chart.

While my first skein of main color is getting smaller and smaller, I'm starting to wonder just how much of that contrast yarn I'm going to get through. Will I even get to the start of the transition to to the burnt orange? I've already decided that once I get to the end of the chart, I'll continue in the contrast color to add length, if needed, but there's a distinct possibility that I'll end with quite a lot of contrast yarn left. That's okay, but it would be a little sad if that pretty orange didn't get to play with the other colors. I'll just have to keep knitting and see what happens!

Reading was quite entertaining last week! I finished two new books:

Playground is Richard Powers' latest. I am still thinking about The Overstory after reading it years ago, and this newest novel was on the the Booker longlist, so I preordered it on Kindle. The writing and the stories sucked me in, even though I was a little confused at the beginning. A lot becomes clearer as you continue to read. As in The Overstory, there are several narratives that eventually overlap in this book. In Montreal in the late 1940s, Evelyne Beaulieu gets thrown into a pool by her father to test an early version of SCUBA and finds her calling under the water. In Chicago in the '90s, two teen boys from completely opposite backgrounds forge a friendship created over board games. And in present day Makatea, an atoll in French Polynesia, the dwindling population faces a decision that has profound implications for the future of their island. The book deals with so many topics -- artificial intelligence, race relations, colonialism, parent/child relationships, illness, the environment, friendship, art -- that it's amazing that it's not a 1,000-page book. Even the title has multiple meanings. I really enjoyed it, though I was left with a number of questions when I finished. I gave it 4 stars.

I am often drawn to women's stories and their perspectives on notable historical events, so I was intrigued by the description of Hill of Secrets, a novel set in Los Alamos during the Manhattan project and was interested in the possibility of learning what it might have been like for children and spouses of the scientists to live in a place where so much is secret. I cannot comment on how authentic the author's portrayal of the setting was, but it was certainly convincing to read, and I did get a sense of the tension surrounding the whole community -- for the scientists who were sure if their experiments would work, for the families who knew something important was happening but couldn't talk aobut it, and for the whole community living through a time of war. Ultimately the stories of the main characters show that all humans are flawed: We all make mistakes, we all grapple with the morality of our actions, and we all keep secrets. There were times when I felt like the narrative was heading a little too far into romance novel territory. While I have no problem with romance, I didn't really want that level of explicit content in my historical fiction. Still, it was entertaining and fast moving. I gave it 3 stars. Thank you to NetGalley and Brilliance Audio for providing me with a complimentary audiobook in return for an honest review.

I technically finished a third book in the past week, a reread of Emma via Craftlit, but I have read it several times before and my views on it haven't really changed.

I'm currently trying to finish up How to Be Both for discussion on Saturday; I started This Strange Eventful History, probably my last title from the Booker Prize longlist for this year, on Monday; and yesterday I got The Third Gilmore Girl (on audio) from the library.

What are you making and reading this week!