Unraveled, Week 40/2026

It's Wednesday -- time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers!

On Monday evening, I finished up the dark charity hat and wove in the ends. And when I went to take a photo of it yesterday morning, I discovered an error in the ribbing. Oh well! I didn't see it at first, and I'm betting whoever ends up with the hat won't, either.

Obviously this hat still needs to be blocked (which should help with the wrinkly top), but it's done and used all but a couple of grams of yarn -- yarn that turned my fingers black while I knit with it, so the hat will be soaked by itself and rinsed.

It was so satisfying to use up a skein of sock yarn so quickly that I've decided to do it again. I'm using another skein of Socks That Rock, in the colorway Pepe Le Plume, to knit a Chit Chat Hat (Ravelry link). At the moment it's only a very partial Ruthie big, but it's knitting up quickly:

I noted last week when I had a low (for me) number of book finishes that I was close to finishing several that were in progress, so you're probably not going to be surprised when I tell you that since last Wednesday I've finished six books. As there are so many, I'm going to try to keep my reviews brief.

Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson (digital)

My rating: 4 stars

Harry Flynn, a former journalist turned war correspondent turned POW, has been enlisted in the massive effort to put on the Festival of Britain, designed to raise people's spirits and patriotism after the end of WWII. He works with an eclectic group and enjoys meeting and drinking with the many attractive women employed by the festival. But when one of them goes missing after a date with him, he becomes a prime suspect in her disappearance and must try to figure out why it appears he's being framed. There are many threads that rather brilliantly come together in the end, with many amusing characters met along the way.

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan (audio)

My rating: 2.5 stars

I'd never heard of this book until it was one of the choices for Molly summer reading assignment this year, and I was intrigued on curriculum night when her English teacher described it as a modern retelling of The Scarlet Letter. I'd say it's a mash-up of that and The Handmaid's Tale, with a little science fiction mixed in. In this dystopian society, those convicted of crimes are genetically changed to become a color associated with their crime. When Hannah Payne wakes up, she is the red of a murderer -- because the abortion she had is now considered a murder. She refuses to identify the father (the married preacher of their evangelical church), and has to reckon with the tenets of the religion she was taught her entire life. It was an interesting premise, but I think it failed in the execution a bit, with things working out just a little too well for Hannah given the harsh society the author created for her.

Restoration by Ave Barrera, translated by Ellen Jones and Robin Myers (paperback)

My rating: 3 stars

This was the final book I read for this round of my postal paperback club, selected by Katie. A woman in her 20s who is studying architectural restoration is hired by her sometimes-boyfriend to restore the long-neglected house of his recently deceased great-uncle, a famous photographer who taught him. As she moves through the house, the reader gets snippets of the life of the woman who used to live there, and both stories are interspersed with scenes of the modern couple recreating old photographs. It's creepy and weird and mysterious -- pretty appropriate for October. I enjoyed it but was still confused when I finished.

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez (digital)

My rating: 4 stars

This is the book that kept getting put aside for library borrows, so I was happy to finally finish it. Olga has a successful business as a wedding planner and has a busy life with her big Puerto Rican family, including her congressman brother. But she still bears the scars of her abandonment by her mother, who left the family to join a group of revolutionaries. When she meets Matteo, a man with some issues of his own, can she let down her guard and let him in? And when she realizes, amid a family crisis and a devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico, that she's no longer happy with her life, does she have the courage to make a major change?

Tell Me More: Stories about the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say by Kelly Corrigan (audio)

My rating: 4 stars

I started listening to the podcast Kelly Corrigan Wonders very near the beginning, in the midst of the pandemic. She's a great interviewer who talks with people doing really interesting things, and she brings a lot of her own life in. This fairly short book of essays wasn't entirely new to me, as many of her family stories were familiar. But there is comfort in that, and as a middle-aged woman with aging parents and a teenage daughter, her point of view and reflections are very welcome.

Wool by Hugh Howey (audio)

My rating: 4 stars

Despite this book's name, it's not a novel about yarn crafts (though there is a brief passage about knitting!). This dystopian tale is set in a world where the outside is toxic people are living in siloes built into the earth. When someone does something that violates the silo's laws, they are sent outside, with a wool cleaning cloth, to clean off the sensors that show the outside world and then, shortly after, they die. When the sheriff asks to be allowed out, following in the footsteps of his wife a few years ago, he is replaced by Juliet, a woman who had been working deep in the silo's mechanical floors near the bottom. She soon realizes that there is something that those in charge are hiding from the silo's inhabitants and that the just society she thought she was raised in may not be so just. It was a compelling, propulsive read, as evidenced by the fact that I got through a 15-hour audiobook in just three days. I very well may read the rest of the triology, too.

What are you making and reading this week?