Unraveled, Week 24/2026

It's Wednesday today, but it's also kind of Friday for me, given that it's my last workday of the week. How nice to get to use it to talk about what I'm making and reading! As usual, I'm linking up with Kat and the Unravelers.

I've got another hat off the needles, though it still needs a good bath to get the stitches to settle down.

This photo, taken in natural light, is a better representation of the color. I added an extra half inch of length to this one before starting the decreases, and I was worried I was going to play another round of yarn chicken because the ball was getting pretty skimpy toward the end. The finished hat weighed in at 88 g and the remaining yarn at 6 g, so once again I had a pretty underweight skein. Thankfully it was enough to finish, but I'm really starting to wonder if this was a regular problem and part of the reason why the yarn was discontinued! This was the last of it in my stash, though, so I won't have to worry about running short again.

I've just cast on a pair of socks for my sister-in-law (either for her birthday in September or Christmas), and I pulled my bin of fingering skeins out to see if I could get inspired about what to knit next.

It's been another productive week of reading, with five books finished.

Ann Patchett is one of my favorite writers, so naturally I preordered her newest, Whistler, from her bookstore, Parnassus Books. (I like to support my local indie bookstore whenever I can, but ordering from Parnassus means I get a signed copy on the day it comes out!) If you're already an Ann Patchett fan, then this book is already on your radar and I don't have to tell you what it's about, but I will tell you that I loved it. It's beautifully written but also easy to read. The relationships between the characters are the focus, and you can feel their emotions and want to hug them all. And if you know about Ann Patchett's own life story, then you'll see a lot of her in the book, too. This is one of those books that, although it contains sad moments, just makes you want to smile the whole time you're reading it. Highly recommend -- 5 stars!

I had bookmarked Uncultured on Hoopla when I read the description and saw it was compared to Educated and The Glass Castle. Daniella Mestyanek Young was raised in a cult in which physical, emotional, and sexual abuse ran rampant and education of the world outside was severely restricted. She always knew that what was happening to her wasn't right and finally left the group as a teenager to go to high school and college in the United States. After college, she entered the military, only to discover that it had some eerie similarities to the life she left behind. This was a hard book to read in many instances, but I always find it inspirational to read about people, especially women, who are able to stand up for themselves and leave situations in which they are victims. I gave it 4 stars.

I adored A Ghost in the Throat, so when I learned via Katie's blog that the author has a work of fiction coming out later this year, I immediately requested it on NetGalley. Said the Dead is one of those books that's nearly impossible to categorize. Is it fiction? Is it memoir? History? Fantasy? All of the above? The person telling the story (at times described using the first person and at times called simply "the Reader") comes across a former mental hospital being redeveloped into condos. Exploring some of the grounds and buildings, she feels a strange connection, which leads her to seek out the archives of the institution. There she comes across the unusual history of Lucia Strangman, one of the first female doctors to work with the mentally ill, and becomes obsessed with her case notes. The Reader becomes so immersed in the stories of the women who Lucia treated -- so often committed to the hospital not because they were truly ill but because they were at the mercy of men in their life or because they didn't fit in with the society of the time or simply due to extreme poverty -- that she often neglects her own life and family. The narrative is interspersed with haunting images of Lucia, her family, and some of her patients, and throughout there is a mysterious commentary to one side that suggests that as the Reader is somehow watching the lives of these patients unfold, someone is watching her. There is a dreamlike quality to the book, and there's never a clear sense of what is real and what is fiction, but overall there's an immense respect for the many women whose names and lives were utterly forgotten in time. As soon as I finished the book, I wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again, certain there was so much I missed. I gave it 4.5 stars, rounded up. Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published September 22, 2026.

One of the challenges I'm signed up for on the StoryGraph is winners of what is now the Women's Prize for Fiction, so I decided to see what was available without a wait on audio on Libby from that list late last year. The Tiger's Wife came out 15 years ago, but as I had a 1-year-old then, it wasn't on my radar. This is a weird one to describe. It's set in an unnamed country in the Balkans and frequently refers to "the war," though it's never completely clear which war. Natalia is a doctor, on a trip with a friend to deliver medicine and vaccines to an orphanage, when she learns that her beloved grandfather, also a doctor has died. Over the next several days, she remembers the stories he told her of his childhood, where a deaf woman was believed to have had a relationship with an escaped tiger and was referred to as the tiger's wife, and of his encounters with "the deathless man," who appears when people are close to death to help ease their transition. I thought the writing was good but the story was bizarre, and I wasn't entirely sure what the point of it was. The lack of specificity also got a little on my nerves. I gave it 3 stars.

Finally, Molly had asked me to read The Memory Police, which she read for school toward the end of the year and wanted me to read so we could discuss it. This book was published in Japan in 1994 but was only translated into English in 2020. An unnamed narrator is a writer of novels who lives on a remote unnamed island where things are disappearing. When something disappears, so do the island residents' memory of that thing. But there are some people who still remember, and if they are discovered, the Memory Police take them away. When the writer discovers that her editor is one of those people, she decides to hide him in a secret room in her house, and he tries to help her recover her lost memories even as more and more things disappear. In the novel she is writing, a woman becomes romantically involved with her typing teacher, but one day she discovers that she no longer has a voice and has become his captive. The book gets really, really strange, but on a metaphorical level, it's an interesting illustration of how authoritarian governments can maintain control through fear and how easy it can be to acclimate to the loss of things that were once thought necessities. I gave it 3 stars.

What are you making and reading this week?