Unraveled, Week 8/2026

Happy final Wednesday in February! I don't know about you, but I'm happy to see this month come to an end -- I often say that January is my least-favorite month and February is a close second, but only because it has chocolate. While we haven't gotten the feet of snow that the Northeast has, we have gotten some more and some colder temperatures to boot, so I'm looking forward to the retreat of both of those things that March usually brings.

Today, as per usual, I'm joining with Kat and the Unravelers with an update on my making and reading. Rather than unraveling this week, I've done quite a lot of finishing. First, there's the hot pink hat:

I'm pretty tickled by the fact that this was knit with yarn that is technically bulky but it weighs only 37 g! It's gotten a bath and is now drying. I'm still toying with the idea of turning it into a pattern, but I think the sizing would be limited by the way I've worked the decreases.

I also finished my cowl and wound in all the ends on Monday night (thank goodness for my reading glasses!). It's likewise drying from its bath, but you'll see it soon. In the meantime, I've turned back to the socks that I started on January 1 and have long neglected.

I'm now through the gusset decreases and well into the foot, and I'm fairly confident I can finish this one and its mate relatively quickly. The only reason they've been on the needles so long is because I've barely worked on them. I knit on them on the plane home from Florida, during the weekend we traveled to Chicago in January, and maybe a bit when we've been home, but otherwise my attention has been on other things.

The improvement of the weather last week meant that I was able to get outside to exercise again, and that meant more time to listen to podcasts and audiobooks, so I've got three finishes this week.

I'd never heard of Mona's Eyes until we were in a Barnes & Noble in Florida and I picked it up off a big display to read the blurb. It sounded interesting, but I didn't want to buy a hardback book only to have to pack it to bring it home, so I waited and found the audiobook on Hoopla. The book tells the story of 10-year-old Mona, a Parisian girl who briefly goes blind. The doctors aren't sure what's wrong with her or whether she'll keep her sight, so she is to keep coming back for tests and also go see a psychiatrist to help her deal with the fact that she might be going blind. Her beloved grandfather, charged with the responsibility of taking her to the psychiatrist, resolves instead to take her to one of the museums each week to focus on a single work of art, thereby filling Mona's head with some of the beauty in the world. Each chapter thus focuses on that piece and its artist as well as the life lesson the grandfather believes it holds for Mona. I had mixed feelings about this book. I took AP art history in high school and minored in art history in college, so I loved the deep focus on works of art created across centuries. But I also felt that the plot itself was thin and a bit far fetched, really only there to serve as a way for the author to show off his extensive knowledge of art (his full-time profession is in academia). Audio probably wasn't the best way to read this book, either, given the highly visual medium being discussed, and I found myself googling some of the works of art that I was less familiar with (I've heard that there are images inside the dust jacket of the hardcover). Overall, I didn't regret reading it because it took me back to my days in class and in museums, but I wouldn't recommended it to someone who isn't an art history nerd like me. I gave it 3 stars.

My second audiobook of the week was Gilead, in preparation for next month's Read With Us Zoom. I'd previously read this book back in 2021 and didn't like it all that much at the time, finding it too "churchy" for my taste. For my reread, I though listening might be a good way to approach it from a different angle, and I did like it a bit better this time, perhaps because it felt less like reading a sermon and more like having a conversation. It's a quiet novel, in which John Ames, a minister in his 70s, has learned that his heart is giving out, so he writes a long letter to his 7-year-old son, who he knows he will not get to see become a man and to whom he wishes to leave some thoughts and reflections and hopes. I still found the book to be overly religious for my taste, but this time around I focused more on the fact that, at its core, this is a book about a man facing his own mortality and wishing he had more time with his son. That perspective shift made me like the book a bit more on the reread, bumping from 2 to 3 stars for me.

Finally, the big finish for the week: Anna Karenina. It took me a little more than a month to get through this one, but I read it slowly, averaging about 5% a day (I read it on Kindle), as a buddy read with Katie. We'd set out to read some big Russian classics together a couple of years ago but needed a break after War and Peace and Doctor Zhivago. This last tome was my favorite of the bunch. Anna is still a young woman, married to an older man and with a young son, when she falls in love with the dashing Count Vronsky, embarking on an affair that will bring her love but also a life outside the standards of society. In stark contrast is Kitty, a younger woman who also believes herself to be in love with Vronsky but who, when rejected by him, eventually finds true love with Levin, with whom she builds a partnership based in love and mutual respect. My belief is that the point of the book was for the reader to compare the two women and draw conclusions from how their lives turned out; naturally, as it was written by a man, my assumption is that the author wanted readers to choose to believe that Kitty is the virtuous example women should follow. But Anna, though she annoyed me, presents a worthwhile question to ponder: Why should a woman have to choose between being happy and being accepted? As was the case with the other Big Russian Books, I thought this one was a bit overbloated with side characters and side stories that didn't add anything to the main narrative, but they didn't stop me reading -- nor was I troubled by knowing Anna's fate from the get-go. I really enjoyed it, and I also enjoyed rewatching the 2012 movie now that I knew the full story. I gave it 4 stars.

What are you making and reading this week?