Unraveled, Week 28/2025

It's Wednesday! Kat isn't hosting an official link-up this week, but I try never to skip an Unraveled Wednesday if I can.

First, thank you for all of your reassurance about Ruthie and the Mister on Monday's post. I'm happy to report that the past two days, he's gone down in the morning, successfully gotten her harness on, and taken her out for a walk. He's fed her whenever he's around at her meal times, given her extra treats, and joined me for the last walk of the day. I expect it'll be rough for a day or so, until she realizes that he's all she's got while Molly and I are away, but I'm feeling better about things, particularly now that he's putting in the effort. (In all honesty, even if we weren't going away, it's important for him to be able to do all the stuff involved with Ruthie. Inevitably there will be a day when I'm sick or hurt and can't take her out, and he needs to be able to do so then. So we're just preparing for that inevitability.)

I don't have a huge update on my knitting because everything is pretty much as it was on Monday. I managed to take a very bad photo of my two WIPs yesterday afternoon, with horrible overhead lighting, and though I was able to improve it a bit on my phone, it's still nowhere near accurate:

I've now gotten through two increases on the body of my Midsommarkrans, and though I haven't touched the hat in several days since I decided to try to finish the tank, I did do a bit of knitting on it over the weekend and have 21 g of yarn left (I'll start the crown when I have 10 g remaining).

It's been a humid and occasionally stormy week here -- in fact, I got soaked walking home from the office yesterday morning -- so the afternoons have been great for curling up for nap (Ruthie) and reading (me). I finished two books in the last week:

I've long been a huge fan of Geraldine Brooks's fiction, and I was on a long wait list at the library for her memoir Memorial Days when it was a Kindle deal and I decided not to wait. Before she was a novelist, Brooks was a journalist, as was her husband, Tony Horwitz. On Memorial Day in 2019, Horwitz was in Washington, D.C., as part of a book tour when he suffered a fatal cardiac event on a sidewalk. This book, told in chapters that alternate between 2019 and three years later, recounts the first days after Horwitz's death and Brooks's journey to a remote cabin on an Australian cabin in an effort to fully process her grief. Her writing, as in her novels, is exquisite, even when she is writing about her very darkest days, and somehow she manages to turn a memoir into a study on mourning and how different cultures do it. It should be a sad read but instead is a moving portrait of how to face tragedy and find reasons to keep going. I gave it 5 stars.

I suppose it was a week for sad books because my other finish was a truly heartbreaking read. Tali Girls was translated into English in 2023, though it was written earlier. Set in Afghanistan beginning in 2002, it tells the stories of three girls living in what seems to be an idyllic rural village as the Taliban is rising to power. What follows is devastating, as their dreams of education, marriage for love, and a life other than one of endless servitude are crushed in a society where illiteracy is high, the patriarchy is fully in power, and corruption is rampant. There were moments in this book that were incredibly hard to read, but it was also very worthwhile, in my opinion, for a look into a society about which Westerners really know little. I gave it 4 stars.

I'm still reading The Map of Love, though I have less than 100 pages left to read, and this week I've started Challenger on audio and The Secret Chord -- the last Geraldine Brooks novel I have to read to have read all of them -- on Kindle.

What are you making and reading this week?