Unraveled, Week 44/2025

Last week seemed to crawl by and this week seems to be going by in a blur; it's already Wednesday! Kat is back, so it's time to link up with all the Unravelers.

Today I've got some finished socks to share:

These are for my sister-in-law (my brother's wife) for Christmas. Her feet are the same circumference as mine, which makes the stitch count easy, but quite a bit smaller -- 9 inches long compared to my 9.75 inches. At the moment, she has the smallest feet of anyone I knit socks for, but that's mainly because I haven't knit socks for any of my niblings yet (it seems rather pointless when they're so likely to grow out of them so fast). I used my regular plain-vanilla recipe for these and 77 g/336 yds./307 m of Knit Picks Felici in the colorway Painted Hills. I started both socks in the same point in the stripe sequence -- conveniently, both socks started withs the dark blue -- but must've gotten off a little on the foot of the second sock because there's a little more red on one toe than the other. Do I care? No. Will the recipient? She's unlikely to even notice. She also loves getting hand-knit socks, so I know she'll be happy with these. And I love that I now have only two more skeins of Felici left in my stash (unless there's some in there I don't know about), which are already being turned into socks for my other sister-in-law.

It's been another good week of reading, thanks in large part to some shorter audiobooks:

I think many of you have already read and enjoyed Is a River Alive? already; I know I'm a bit late to the party. The author reads this work that examines how rivers have shaped our world and how we humans have exploited, polluted, and restricted them to our peril. Detailing visits to rivers in Ecuador, India, and Quebec, he details the plight of these three rivers and their impact on the surrounding ecosystems, all the while making a case for recognizing the "aliveness" of rivers as a way of asserting their rights to exist, thereby saving them. He's an excellent writer and a great narrator, and as a longtime proponent of environmentalism, I thoroughly enjoyed it (though I'll admit there's a lot that went right by me as a result of reading with my ears rather than my eyes). I gave it 4 stars.

When we first meet Dawn, the narrator in Love Forms, she is a pregnant 16-year-old in Trinidad being smuggled by boat to Venezuela to a home run by nuns where she will give birth and then give up her child to adoption. We then meet her 42 years later, when she is a divorcee with two grown children in London looking back on her spotty memories of that experience and trying to find the daughter she gave up. This novel from the Booker Prize longlist takes a hard look at the hard choices we make for ourselves, at family relationships that can be damaged by those hard choices, and at how we -- particularly women who are mothers -- look at our own identity. It's a quiet book with a lot of introspection, but I like that sort of book. I also learned more about Trinidad and Venezuela, two places with which I am unfamiliar, and a novel that teaches me something is always a good thing. I gave it 4 stars.

The Hero of This Book is a work that challenged me. It is labeled a novel, and in it, the narrator, a writer of fiction, is taking a trip to London less than a year after the death of her mother, who loved the city, and reflecting on their relationship as she explores places her mother had visited or would have enjoyed. She recounts episodes in her mother's life and her childhood, and she repeatedly states that she promised her mother she would never make her a character in one of her books or write a memoir about her. And yet it feels very much like a memoir of grief, and many of the details of the narrator's life match the life of the author. I suppose that, in a way, it's a commentary on the fact that all writers draw on what they know, what they have lived, what they have experienced, to a degree. Unless you are inventing an imaginary world with its own rules, it's hard for pieces of your world to not find their way into your work. So the question is, then, how much of this book is truth and how much is fiction. I gave it 3 stars.

Finally, Dayswork, though it's not described as such, felt like a novel of the early pandemic to me, those strange days when we were all stuck at home and on our computers way too much, leading many of us to fall down rabbit holes. For the narrator, that particular rabbit hole is Herman Melville. In between her ordinary tasks of daily life, she reads anything she can find about the famous writer of Moby Dick, which leads her to follow the trail to other writers and biographers who similarly fixated on Melville. Again, this is a novel, but it feels very much like it could be a true story -- after all, the authors are husband and wife, and who's to say that this sort of thing didn't happen in the first couple of months of lockdown? I found it an interesting read from an academic standpoint but not especially compelling. I gave it 3 stars.

I'm still working my way through The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and Celestial Bodies, though I'm well past the halfway point on both, and I've now added The South to the mix after getting it from my holds from the library just yesterday. I'm not trying to read all of the Booker Prize-nominated books this year, but there were several from the longlist that intrigued me that I put on hold before the shortlist was announced, so I still intend to read them.

What are you making and reading this week?