Unraveled, Week 41/2025

I can tell that it's going to be another long week because I woke up yesterday thinking it was Wednesday and it was only Tuesday. But I've checked and today is actually Wednesday, which means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers.

I haven't made much progress on my knitting projects this week, mostly because I've been busy with work, but I also opted to spin and read one evening. Still, here is your weekly update photo of my shawl:

And I've added a little to my sister-in-law's socks, or rather the second sock of the pair:

Reading has been a little better, thanks to shorter books. I've finished three this week.

One of the nice benefits of being a member of NetGalley (other than, of course, getting to read books before they're published) is that sometimes publishers will reach out to you and ask you to read one of their books that they think you'll like. That happened to me recently with This Is Not About Us. I'd so enjoyed Allegra Goodman's Isola that I was interested to read more of her work, plus the description of the book made it sound right up my alley. This book is labeled "fiction" rather than a novel, and that's because while it's not quite interconnected short stories, it feels like a series of vignettes that are all connected. The story begins with three sisters, the youngest of whom is dying. In the wake of her death, there is an incident involving a homemade apple cake that causes a rift to form between the two surviving sisters. The rest of the book takes the reader through the repercussions of this estrangement as it has an impact on the other members of the family, who are at all different stages of life. There are births, bat mitzvahs, midlife crises, and divorces. There are holidays and normal days. But family is what ties all these stories together. The characters feel real and the situations relatable, though perhaps that's largely because the experiences of this Jewish family felt so familiar to me. It's never happened in my family, but I could easily imagine an estrangement happening because of food! I really enjoyed my time with this family and gave it 4 stars. Thank you to Random House/The Dial Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published February 10, 2026.

When I was ready for an audiobook over the weekend, I went back to my Hoopla bookmarks and decided to listen to another Kevin Wilson. Now Is Not the Time to Panic is set in a small town in Tennessee in the mid-90s. Sixteen-year-old Frankie feels like she doesn't fit in until she meets Zeke and the two of them decide to create a mysterious work of art with a strange saying and post it all over town. Before it became a thing on the Internet, their poster goes viral, leading to unforeseen and even tragic results. Twenty years later, Frankie finds that her role in the panic has been uncovered and has to face the fact that a long-kept secret will be revealed. While this book wasn't as outrageous as Nothing to See Here, it is a bit of leap to accept that photocopies of a poster could lead to full-on satanic panic. Still, it raises some interesting questions about art and ownership, and it certainly gives a very realistic portrait of the discomfort of adolescence. I gave it 3 stars.

Finally, I revisited a book I read quite a long time ago. I first read Mrs. Dalloway in my senior year of high school for my AP British literature class -- in fact, for this reread, I pulled out the very same copy I used in class (and inside was a bookmark on which a classmate and I had exchanged notes about our college decisions). I didn't remember much of it, but I think I probably made more sense of it then, when it was discussed and analyzed as we read. The brilliance of the stream-of-consciousness narrative is still there, but I think the fact that I read this at night right before going to sleep took away from my enjoyment of it. I would like to read/reread more Virginia Woolf, and this seemed like a logical place to start, but I think my expectations of her were higher than the actual reading of it. I gave it 3 stars.

I am currently trying to get through Katabasis as fast as I can (does anyone else feel immense pressure when they have a library book with a long wait?) and have just started Celestial Bodies for the women in translation book group Mary is leading.

What are you making and reading?