Unraveled, Week 36/2026

Did anyone else wake up yesterday and think it was Monday? Apparently a lot of my neighbors were also confused about the day because they already had their trash out, forgetting that when there's a holiday on Monday, trash pickup gets pushed back a day, so ours isn't until Thursday this week.

Today, however, is Wednesday, which means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers. And it's the first day of the NFL season, which means it's also the first day of the Pigskin Party and I can cast on my new sweater. I had a pretty good feeling about getting stitch gauge on my swatch, but I was astounded when I measured once it was dry and saw that I'd gotten both stitch and row gauge -- for only the second time, I think, in my entire knitting career!

As a reminder, I'm planning to knit a long-sleeved Seashore Stroll (Ravelry link) with this yarn, a blended merino from FatCatKnits that I spun (unbelievably) a decade ago. I think this will be a great fall/spring (and maybe winter in Florida) sweater, so I'm excited to get it on the needles.

I've finished four books since this time last week:

The Artist and the Feast by Lucy Steeds

My rating: 4 stars

In the summer of 1920, Joseph, a young British journalist, arrives in Provence at the remote house of the reclusive French painter Edouard Tartuffe to interview him. But Tartuffe wants nothing to do with him until his niece and housekeeper, Ettie, convinces him that Joseph could serve as a model for his next painting. As Joseph lives with the two for the summer, he and Ettie are drawn to each other and begin to learn about each other's secrets and painful pasts, but there's still something mysterious about Ettie and her painter uncle and why they've hidden away from the rest of society. This book raises questions about the value of art and who is allowed to create it -- and how who creates art determines its value to the wider world. I picked this up at Vera's recommendation and enjoyed it, though it does have its faults (some of which Kym pointed out in her review).

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

My rating: 2.5 stars

I'd had this book on my TBR for a while but was moved to read it when it was mentioned last week on the What Should I Read Next? podcast. The premise sounds promising: A British explorer, following the many stories of the legendary city of El Dorado, determines to find it deep in the Amazon rainforest. After several failed expeditions, he sets off again with his teenaged son and his son's best friend -- only to vanish. Grann, a journalist who not only did the research but attempted to follow in the explorer's footsteps, chronicles the expeditions and the general fascination with finding the fabled City of Z, which may or may not have existed. But I found it hard to stay engaged with the narrative and frequently didn't remember names, and frankly there were many things related to the Amazon expeditions that were really hard to listen to, as they involved a great deal of illness and physical suffering. I kept with it only because I didn't have anything else queued up and also wanted to know if there was any great discovery in the end, but there was no particular resolution, and I wouldn't really recommend it. (Also, what is with audiobook narrators reading dates as cardinal numbers rather than ordinal?)

The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian

My rating: 4 stars

I put this new release on hold based on Carole's recommendation. At the end of the summer of 1978, teenage golf phenom Mira is getting ready to head to her freshman year at Yale when one of the practice shots she's taken at her family's golf club somehow goes through the net meant to stop it, hitting a caddy (and her former classmate) in the head and almost instantly killing him. Everyone agrees at first that it was a terrible accident, but then authorities start taking a closer look and Mira comes under suspicion, especially when her earlier instances of recklessness are viewed in light of the fact that she's been carrying on an affair with a much older married man. Mira tells the story, revealing that now, many decades later, she is a successful novelist writing her first memoir. She is brutally honest about her questionable behavior as a teen while also exposing the double standard applied to women versus men at that time. I have to admit that I felt a bit icky at the beginning of the book, namely because a male author was writing a certain way as a teenaged female narrator, but I'm glad I stuck with it. I wouldn't necessarily call it a thriller, but there is a bit of a mystery to be unraveled about what happened and who was responsible, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy

My rating: 4.5 stars

Sometimes you pick a book at random because it's available from the library and you get really lucky. This was one such book. Beth Macy, a journalist and nonfiction writer probably best known for Dopesick, grew up in Urbana, Ohio, where her family struggled with her father's alcoholism and persistent poverty, but thanks to a Pell Grant was able to go to college, eventually moving on to bigger cities for her journalism career. But when she returned to her hometown in 2020 as her mother was dying, she found a drastically different city, both economically and politically. This book is part personal memoir and part exploration of how so many smaller American cities have changed, especially in the last decade. She interviewed family members and former classmates who had turned to far-right politics and conspiracy theories. She spoke with teachers, counselors, and social workers about high rates of truancy and falling graduation rates. And she spoke with scholars about the trends across the country, noting how a decline in the availability of reliable, fact-checked news sources has corresponded to a rise in distrust of the media in general and a growing acceptance of what we might call "alternative facts." There is a lot to unpack here, but I never lost interest or the thread, and in fact I might want to read it again on the page (I listened to Macy read the audio to me). I found it to be well written, well researched, and really fascinating -- and also disheartening. If you like this sort of book, I'd recommend it.

I am currently reading Shy Creatures in print, House on Endless Waters on my iPad, and The Girl Who Wrote in Silk on audio via Hoopla. What are you reading and making this week?

Pre-Weekending

Phew, it's been a long week! Single-parenting is a lot easier now that Molly is self-sufficient (for the most part), but doing all the school runs and cooking and cleaning up all the meals and walking the dog and working full time and donating blood on top of all that, all while dealing with an extreme heat advisory has been a lot, to say the least. It's a good think we have a long weekend coming up without any big plans!

The Mister was due to get back from his trip very early this morning (I'm writing this post on Thursday) and will be working from home today, once he gets up. My office is closing at 2. Molly has school as usual but obviously is done mid-afternoon. I think we're all going to be looking forward to a nice dinner out tonight for our belated anniversary celebration.

I'm still in a weird in-between place in my knitting; I don't want to cast on anything too big because my next imaginary internet points thing starts next Wednesday, but I also don't want to be without knitting, so I'm working on strange things. If the mittens weren't finished by last night, they will be soon, and in the meantime I'm knitting a strange little hat with some fingering-weight singles that I thought were non-superwash but aren't (I was planning to knit up a piece of fabric to felt) and so I pivoted:

This will never be a full Ruthie.

What has become the brim is double-knit using just a single strand. The idea was that I'd knit up a tube, felt it, and then cut it open to make a little holder for scissors, darning needle, etc. But now that I know this won't felt (or at least not easily), it's become a baby/child's hat. I moved to bigger needles and joined the other end of the skein so I'm working double stranded, and I'll try to use up as much of the yarn as I can.

While I can't cast on for my next sweater until next week for it to count, I did wind the other skein and plan to swatch this weekend.

I spun this yarn back in 2016, originally intending to knit a different sweater with it, but it's been hiding in the stash ever since. I've got just a little less than 1,500 yards of it. The size of the sweater I'm planning to make specifies 1,345 yards, so I think I should be fine (especially because I'm pretty sure that's a padded estimate). The yarn is fingering weight, so I think it should make for a good fall/spring sweater.

The heat is finally supposed to break this weekend, and I'm looking forward to being outside without melting. Other than our dinner reservations tonight, our only plans at this point are a haircut for Molly tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps we'll do some grilling for Labor Day or attend the local parade! Or perhaps we'll just hang out, which would be just fine with me. Do you have any plans? Whatever they are, I hope you enjoy them!

Unraveled, Week 34/2026

Good morning and happy Wednesday! Today, as usual, I'm joining up with Kat and the Unravelers for an update on my making and my reading.

I'm happy to report that the first pair of to-be-felted mittens has been completed and the second pair has been cast on, this time starting with the cuff:

I am knitting the largest size this time around, so even though I still had some of the burnt orange yarn remaining, I thought I'd use a partial skein with a bit more yardage in it just to be sure I wouldn't run short. That purple crocheted square next to the knitting is a swatch. Ruthie has a habit of pulling apart the padded bedding in her crate and removing the stuffing, so I thought I'd use up some yarn by crocheting and then felting a piece of fabric. I've got a bunch of 50% alpaca/50% wool yarn that used to be sweater (surprise, surprise -- it stretched out, so I frogged it) and that I know felts very well, so I'm going to felt up this swatch to determine how big I need to make the real thing to get it the size I want.

My current hat in progress also has surpassed a half Ruthie:

It's been a slower reading week for me, but I've finished two audiobooks (both fairly deep backlist) and one ARC.

I had an infant when Unbroken was published, so it's not surprising that it didn't cross my radar at the time. I think it took the movie coming out (which I haven't seen) for me to become aware of it. This is a hard story to read, as it tells in excruciating detail of the atrocities that prisoners of war in Japan were subjected to in the second World War, but knowing about the cruelty and privations makes it all the more remarkable that anyone survived it. The story of Louis Zamperini is especially notable given that he lived the rest of his life without the modern-day psychological treatments we now have to deal with trauma and PTSD. The book was well written and clearly very thoroughly researched, and while I hesitate to call it a delight to listen to because of the heavy subject matter, having the late Edward Hermann read it to me made it much easier to digest. I gave it 4 stars.

I was likewise late to the Jackson Brodie series but have enjoyed the other Kate Atkinson books I've read, and I finally got around to reading Case Histories. I think what Atkinson really excels at is character -- you get to know so much about her characters and they come so alive even though she doesn't tell you all that much. I know how much skill that takes. I thoroughly enjoyed this first book and plan to work my way through the series. There were some loose ends and I had some trouble keeping some characters straight, but I never lost interest. One pet peeve: The narrator kept mispronouncing the name of Jackson's sister. Otherwise, the narration was quite good. I gave this one 4 stars.

Finally, the ARC: I was invited to review Elif Shafak's forthcoming novel In One Brief Moment All Eternity. This is an unusual novel, as in some respects it reads like a creative biography of Gustave Flaubert, the 19th-century writer best known for Madame Bovary. But Shafak makes it clear in her author's note that although many of the details were based in fact, this is, rather, a fictionalized account of Flaubert's life and his dedication to literature above all else. The most creative aspect of this book, though, isn't that bending of genre but that different moments in his life are narrated by women, from his mother and sister to lovers, friends, passing acquaintances, and even a city, a camel, and his most famous character. The novel reads like a work from Flaubert's time, with a richness of language and a slower pace that are so often lacking in more modern works (and happen to be two things I love). While Flaubert faced adversity and dark times throughout his life -- failure to live up to his father's expectations, the deaths of his father and sister, war, illness, etc. -- he remained dedicated to the power of literature to uplift and give life meaning. And that is very much what was behind Shafak's thinking in writing this book, at a time when we are facing war and conflict, climate change, and uncertainty, as she notes: "Literature cannot stop wars or heal hurts, but without it, without stories, we each would be so much lonelier." I gave it 4 stars. Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published January 12, 2027.

Finally, I want to say that I was saddened to hear of Dolly Parton's passing yesterday. I'm not a country music fan, but I've long admired Dolly for philanthropic work, especially what she did to get books into the hands of kids. Molly and I both thought that a great way to remember her would be to make a donation to her Imagination Library. Maybe you think so, too?

Unraveled, Week 10/2026

Hello and happy hump day! I am bracing for some strong storms coming through later today and hoping I can still squeeze in a run before the rain starts. But first, time to join in with Kat and the Unravelers!

I had a delightful birthday, in part thanks to all the lovely messages you left on my post on Monday. I started off by running farther than I've managed before without having to stop and walk: 7 miles! The weather was gorgeous all day, I got a free drink at Starbucks, and the Mister came home with Bundtlets for dessert so I didn't have to bake myself my own cake. My father also sent me flowers; I think he felt bad that he was out of town.

I also started swatching for my sweater, which is still in progress (fingering weight sweaters take time, so naturally so do their swatches!).

I'm hoping that by the end of the week, I'll know if I can cast on using the recommended needle size or if I need to swatch again.

It's been another good week of reading, with four finishes!

If I had to pick one word to describe I Am Agatha, it would be spare. There are few extraneous details, minimal background given on the main character, and not much in the way of plot. That is not to said, however, that these are drawbacks. Rather, they are fitting for a main character inspired by an artist whose work is all about minimalist lines and grids.

Agatha Smithson (the fictionalized characterization of artist Agnes Martin) is an outsider in New Mexico, living in a primitive house she built herself after fleeing New York City following some sort of mental breakdown. When she arrives in New Mexico, she falls in love with Alice, a widow slowly fading into dementia. As Alice's condition worsens, Agatha is determined to move her to Agatha's home, a step complicated by Alice's unwillingness to leave the backyard grave of her daughter, Lorna, and by Alice's son, Frank Jr., who wants to move his mother into a care home. Agatha is stubborn and determined, however, so she enlists a young neighbor boy who is always eager to help her in a plan to move Lorna so that Alice will feel at home. Alice is missing as all of this is happening, though, and soon it becomes apparent that Agatha isn't the only one keeping secrets in this small town.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. Agatha is abrasive and bossy, and she's not afraid of hurting people by doing what she thinks is best for them. But she is loyal to those who are important to her and unapologetic about who she is. I gave it 4 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published March 17, 2026.

I was reminded recently that I'd wanted to read more by Valérie Perrin because I enjoyed Fresh Water for Flowers. Forgotten on Sunday was actually her first book but was only relatively recently translated into English. This novel tells two stories that intersect. First, there is Justine, who is in her early 20s and working as a nursing assistant at a nursing home. She grew up with her grandparents and her cousin, Jules, after their two sets of parents were killed in car accident when they were both children. One of the residents Justine cares for is Hélène, a woman in her 90s whose life story -- and love story -- Justine is recording for her family. We soon learn that there are secrets in both women's pasts and that love can be very complicated. This was a beautiful story that I very much enjoyed listening to, although I was annoyed by the narrator's inconsistent skill with French pronunciation (it took me a while, for instance, to realize that a character's name was Rose because she kept pronouncing it "Hose"). This might be better on the page for that reason. In spite of these annoyances, I gave it 4 stars.

Liar's Dice is a debut novel. For all of their young lives, Dolores and Mita have been alike, and not just because they're identical twins. They seem to be able to read each other's thoughts and even have a secret way of communicating. But then Mita begins having seizures and starts losing control of her body, leading to doctors' appointments and time spent in hospitals. And then one day she is gone -- much like many of those who speak out against the regime in early 1970s Brazil. Dolores is told that Mita has gone to live in a children's hospital in their father's native England, but she isn't so sure. Now she is alone at home and lonely at her new school, where she's struggling because she hasn't yet learned to read. But a new friend who, like Dolores, is a native Brazilian and isn't wealthy, and a caring teacher help her to find her way, and she becomes determined to earn enough money to fly to England and see for herself whether her twin is still alive.

Dolores is a sympathetic character, and I felt her sadness at the loss of her twin and her frustration with parents for their unwillingness to discuss her sister and moving on as if she never existed. I did find some of her activities in the seedier parts of Rio to be a bit hard to believe, but without much knowledge of Brazil in the 1970s, I can't say whether they were realistic or not. My biggest complaint in reading this novel is the amount of Portuguese used without a translation; it wasn't until I finished that I found a glossary in the back. Perhaps I would have enjoyed the book more if I had more background knowledge of the history of the setting, but all the same I admired Dolores's tenacity and loyalty to her sister. I gave it 3 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published April 28, 2026.

Finally, if you are an American concerned about the current state of affairs in this country, I'd highly recommend On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. This very short work of nonfiction (I read it easily in an afternoon) offer 20 concrete ways to fight against tyranny by illustrating how tyrants and dictators took power in the 20th century and detailing how fledgling democracies failed. The bottom line is that there are things that even the average person with no political power can do to fight this kind of extremism and to contribute to saving the democratic ideals envisioned by the founding fathers. This is one I know I'll come back to for encouragement. I gave it 4 stars.

As I continue to very slowly make my way through The Odyssey (I haven't even made it to the poem yet -- I'm still in the introduction!), I've also gotten a new ARC I'm very excited about and just started yesterday.

What are you making and reading this week?

Restorative Weekending

It's a new week, and I'm happy to say that the weekend was a restful one. Ruthie thankfully slept in a little both days -- until almost 7 on Saturday! -- and that combined with taking a decongestant before bed allowed me to get some much-needed sleep. Saturday I woke up without any sinus pain for the first time since this infection started, and I'm hoping that means I'm past the worst of it. I would still happily sleep longer and nap, but that's pretty much the case anytime.

Other than a trip to Costco (we very badly needed tissues, among other things), dinner out with the Mister, and walks with Ruthie, I didn't stray much from home all weekend. After we had a bit of "sprinter" last week, it got cold again, with rain on Saturday and snow on Sunday, so I was quite content to curl up with a warm puppy, a book, and my knitting. And I got quite a lot of knitting done! You'll have to excuse the very poor lighting, but here is a pre-blocked but finished Static cowl:

I really enjoyed knitting this pattern and can see myself making it again. This one, unless I decide it's perfect for someone I know, will be added to the charity pile; I really knit it to meet the requirements of the challenge and to use up the yarn. Once I weave in all the ends and block it, I'll take some better photos and give you all the details.

I also used the weekend to finish and block my sweater swatch, and it looks like I'll have to go through the process again with a larger needle, as I'm getting 18 stitches and 38 rows with a US 7/4.5 mm and the pattern calls for 17 stitches and 34 rows. I'll see what happens when I go up to a US 8/5 mm. There's always a chance that will be too big, in which case I'll use a 7 and perhaps make a larger size to compensate for the difference in gauge. But I'll wait until the next swatch is done before I determine my next step.

In the meantime, I've pulled out some fingering scraps and am holding them triple for another charity hat (apologies again for the photo -- there really was no natural light to be had yesterday):

I'm once again knitting the Sagamore Flyover hat (Ravelry link), which is so easy and fast to knit and has great texture. I've knit a ton of these with fingering scraps for some really warm hats. I'm using up some bright Fibernymph Dye Works leftovers in this one.

This is going to be an interesting week. The Mister is traveling for work and will get home just in time for us to all leave for Chicago for my cousin's daughter's bat mitzvah. Wednesday is my all-day work retreat, though I suspect I might have a relapse of my sinus infection and be unable to attend (oh darn!). At least it's a short week because of our trip and we all have next Monday off to look forward to. Let's hope there aren't any curveballs thrown our way!

Rough Reentry

I'm very glad that it's Friday. It's been a challenging week in a number of respects. First, my sinuses took offense to being taken out of the nice Florida air and being brought back north and have rebelled. I typically get a sinus infection once or twice a year and am used to having to ride them out, and thankfully this one has been pretty mild, but it's still uncomfortable to have sinus pain and pressure and then have a nose that's either dripping like a leaky faucet or completely stuffed up. Then, Ruthie's had some trouble readjusting to our schedule and was barking at 4 a.m. on Tuesday. Molly's been a typical moody teenager back at school after a long vacation. And the Mister's has to be at work early and been late getting home most of the week, so I've been doing double duty on school runs and had to do cooking and clean up. All that is to say that I'm pretty tired and ready for a weekend!

Fortunately work has been calm (as it should be, given how much I had to do before the break!) and I've been making steady progress on my knitting. I've finished the first of the three sections of the colorwork cowl:

I'm really enjoying this pattern, and though this particular cowl is likely going in the charity pile, I could see myself knitting it again. Wouldn't it be fun in some handspun, for instance?

I also located the yarn I intend to use for my cabled sweater and wound up a skein so I could swatch. I'm using size 7 needles and they feel so big!

I know it looks a little brown here, but that's just the lighting. It's actually a medium-to-dark gray called Wordsworth -- seems appropriate that for a sweater named after one poet, I'd use yarn with the name of another! Here's what it looks like on the Knit Picks site, for comparison:

I should be finishing up the swatch soon and blocking it, so by the weekend I'll have a better sense of whether I can proceed with the called-for needle size or need to swatch with a different one.

We've got a fairly quiet weekend ahead. Molly is attending a leadership event Saturday morning (during which time I plan to make a Costco run) and then a dinner party for a friend's birthday Saturday evening. The Mister and I are having a date night with dinner out at one of our favorite local restaurants. And Sunday is wide open. I'm really hoping Ruthie might sleep in a little, but if she doesn't, at least we'll have longer snuggle time in the afternoon. After a bit of a warm spell this week, it's supposed to get cold again over the next couple of days, so it'll be good to snuggle up with a warm pup inside. I hope you have something relaxing and enjoyable planned -- happy weekend, friends!

Unraveled, Week 23/2025

You'd think after having a long weekend I'd be ready to take on the new week, but it's been dragging. I feel like it should already be Thursday -- maybe the fact that we've turned on summer and it's been hot has something to do with it? Or some of the smoke from the Canadian wildfires? In any case, it is only Wednesday, but also, yay, it's Wednesday! Time to join in with Kat and the Unravelers.

I managed to find a few minutes on Monday to block my linen/silk swatch, and it took almost no time at all to dry. And wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, my gauge is spot on!

I wish I could convey the drape of this fabric through the screen -- it's simply divine! Now I need to find some time when I'm fully caffeinated and not keeping an eye on the puppy to read through the pattern, highlight the numbers for my size, and cast on.

It's been another excellent week of reading, with three finishes.

I had started Mercury, a hardcover my mother passed along to me, back at the end of April. It didn't grab me right away (maybe the timing was off?), and in the meantime I was reading other things, but it was sitting on the coffee table in the family room where I spend my days with Ruthie, and eventually I got tired of seeing it there and picked it back up again. This is a story of a complicated family in a small (fictional) town outside of Pittsburgh. In the early '90s, high schooler Marley moves to town with her mother and gets swept up into the Joseph family, parents and their three sons who run a roofing company and whose personalities are so big they frequently clash with each other. Initially attracted to the oldest son, Marley soon finds herself pregnant and married to his just-younger brother and thrust into the middle of the family drama. When a roofing job leads to a shocking discovery years later, one in which all members are the family are implicated, everyone is forced to take a hard look at their relationships with one another. I found the story line and characters to be interesting, but I had a hard time figuring out how I felt about the book. On the one hand, I thought the author was telling me too much, but I simultaneously felt that there were times that there was something important I was supposed to intuit but just wasn't getting it. I'd say it was a decent read. I gave it 3 stars.

The other two finishes this week were read thanks to Bonny's recent recommendations.

Speaking of complicated families, The Homemade God follows the Kemp family -- self-taught painter Vic and his four adult children -- in the wake of Vic's announcement that he's marrying a much younger woman he's only recently met and his subsequent drowning near the family's vacation home in Italy. As the children deal with the sudden loss of their father, their only parent for much of their lives after their mother died when they were all young, they also confront the meaning their lives have taken on in the shadow of their father's huge personality, their relationships with one another, and the validity of their self-identities. Then there's their father's widow, an enigmatic artist who they've never met until now, and the mystery of what happened to their father's final painting, a piece he claimed would be his best work ever. The characters are beautifully and sometimes painfully written, and you might say that how this family fractures and frays is a piece of art in and of itself. If great writing and interesting characters aren't enough to convince you, there's also a fabulous Italian setting in a dilapidated estate and delicious food. I gave it 4 stars. Thank you to NetGalley and Random House/The Dial Press for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published July 8, 2025.

"'You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books? A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while reading it. And it preserves it, like a time capsule.'"

Lily King's Heart the Lover was one of those rare books for me in that, while I was reading it, it seemed that the rest of the world fell away and I was so much in the moment that I'm sure I will be able to recall the specific day when I read it (and yes, I did read it in a day -- I started it just before bed on Sunday evening and finished it before bed on Monday). There are three main players in this book: the narrator and two men she meets in a creative writing class in college, Sam and Yash. They call her Jordan, after the character in The Great Gatsby. She begins dating Sam, but that relationship doesn't last the year, and when she decides to delay her graduation to pursue a thesis, she can't deny her growing attraction to Yash or his attraction to her. But there are romantic relationships and there are friendships, and when the two collide, things become even more complicated. Years later, all three have moved on and the narrator has achieved success as a published writer when Yash comes back into her life. And when tragic news brings all three back together, they are all forced to confront how they handled things decades ago. This is one of those books where not that much happens but the beauty is in the characters and how they interact with one another. The author does such a stunning job of looking at love, friendship, forgiveness, and personal growth. I'll admit I cried at the end. I gave it 5 stars. Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published October 7, 2025.

I'll end this with an obligatory puppy photo -- because I've heard several of you like them! Ruthie has been going to bed on her own the past couple of nights, which means I'm getting a little more time in the evening to myself. Yay!

It's June?

Good morning and happy Monday. Yesterday was the start of meteorological summer, but it doesn't feel like it. Both yesterday morning and this morning, I took Ruthie out for her first potty break of the day and needed a coat because it was in the mid-40s. Brrr! We're supposed to get some more summery weather the next several days, but it was downright chilly this weekend.

So, a catch-up: Friday ended up being a busy day off as well as a wet one. I took Ruthie in the car to pick Molly and her friend up from school and learned that she gets car sick. Oops! Fortunately I'd had the foresight to put a towel under her, so the car stayed clean. I'm hopeful that this is something she'll outgrow, but in the meantime, she will not be getting her usual breakfast before we go to puppy class in the weeks ahead. Once we were home, I went for a run (and recorded my fastest 5K yet since getting my Apple Watch, 27:28) and then spent the afternoon ferrying the girls around while they did some shopping. The three of us then went out to dinner with my parents to celebrate the successful conclusion of Molly's freshman year of high school -- and if you'll allow me to brag a bit, she finished with straight A's, including a pretty high A in physics! We're very proud.

Saturday was a bit of a lazy day. It was cool, overcast, and windy, so not a good day for being outside. I attended the first session of puppy class on my own, which was a lot of informational content about feeding, training, etc. Ruthie and I went for our usual walks, but she also took a long nap in the afternoon (as did the Mister!). That gave me some time to knit and read a good portion of a book. Yesterday was a bit busier. Molly and I finally got around to making the babka we'd been intending to make when the ovens died. We have yet to taste it yet, but it looks and smells pretty amazing. I expect we'll dig into it today, and I'll let you know the final verdict.

Recipe link!

The evening was a bit of chaos. My brother- and sister-in-law and nephews have been wanting to meet Ruthie, so we invited them over for dinner, and my in-laws just got back from more than a week in London, so they came as well. My nephews are 5 and 2, and my mother-in-law loves to get up close and personal with Ruthie, so it was a lot. She's been doing better about not peeing in the house now that I've realized I have to take her out right after she has dinner, but I think because of all the chaos, she was nervous and had an accident as I was literally putting on my shoes to take her out. It happens!

Not a ton of crafting got done over the weekend, but I did manage to finish up the swatch with the linen/silk yarn:

The color is way off and the lighting is terrible because I had to snap this photo this morning before the sun was fully up (the busy afternoon yesterday meant that I couldn't get this post ready to go ahead of time as I've been doing), but I think you can see how nice the fabric is. Today I'll measure and block and keep my fingers crossed I've got gauge.

It's a typical work day for me, but I won't have to do school pickup this afternoon and will have Molly around the house, which will be really nice. She starts her new job tomorrow! She's on the schedule for two four-hour shifts this week to start learning the job, and I think that will be a good way to ease into it. I'm looking forward to having her around but also not sitting in the house all day.

And with that, I'll wish you a good start to your week!

Unraveled, Week 22/2025

It feels weird that it's already Wednesday; I've once again been thrown off by a long weekend and another one coming up (I'm taking Friday off because I'd reached my maximum on accrued time off, so I needed to take a day or I couldn't earn more). But it is Wednesday, which means it's time to join Kat and the Unravelers, this time with FOs!

I'd have liked to have modeled this first one for you, but I did not have light and another photographer in the house at the same time, and we all know I'm not great at selfies.

Pattern: Zuzu's Petals (Ravelry link) by Carina Spencer, using instructions for Gauge 1/Fingering
Needles: US 7/4.5 mm
Yarn: handspun Rambouillet/mohair/CVM/tussah silk/silk noil, approximately 77 g/188 yds. used
Started/Completed: May 13/May 21

This was a surprisingly fast knit, given that I was really only working on it during Ruthie's afternoon naps (which, on a good day, might be two hours long). Although my yarn was more in the sport to DK range, I followed the instructions for the fingering weight version and used bigger needles to use up as much yarn as possible. I did get a bit into the green in the skein at the edging -- maybe not as much as I wanted, but enough to make me happy. There's about 100 yards of yarn left and no plan for it, though I would expect I could combine it with some other handspun bits and bobs to make something.

Though I don't have a photo yet (because blocking is happening), I also finished my Sugar Maple tee yesterday afternoon! It was a long bind-off in twisted ribbing that took most of nap time, and it's satisfying that I finished well ahead of the end of the month so I'm not in a rush this weekend.

Because I knew I would finish the sweater at some point in the day yesterday, I also took some time to wind yarn for my next cast-on. I'm going to be knitting another summer top. It's not for the SSK knitalong, but it is using yarn that I bought at the last one I attended (back in 2023).

This is Miss Babs Damask, a really interesting blend of silk and bleached linen. I bought the two skeins with another sleeveless summer top in mind, but I'm going to be using for this one (Ravelry link) instead, provided I can get gauge. Swatching is in progress. If it doesn't work, I'll go back to the original plan (Ravelry link).

Reading time has been more plentiful this past week, though the books I've finished have been a mixed bag.

First, after a long wait, I got Onyx Storm from the library. This is the third book in the series, and I really only decided to read it to see what would happen with the cliffhanger at the end of book two and because Katie had read it. This is one I easily could have DNF'ed, but I decided to finish it just in case something happened at the end. Well, there was another cliffhanger, and aside from one other development, that's about all that happened. I couldn't tell if it was the writing/writer or the fact that it had been more than a year since I read the last book, but I had a really hard time remembering who everyone was and what had happened previously, which meant I was confused for a lot of the book. On top of that, it seemed like a lot was going on without anything actually happening, if that makes sense. I gave it 2.5 stars, rounded down. I doubt I'll be continuing with the series unless a reader I trust tells me I need to read the last two books (though in that case I'd probably have to start over and read the whole series so I remember what happened).

I made quick work of an audiobook from the library, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum and Me. This memoir tells of the author's time as a security job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a job he took when his older brother was battling cancer. The book doesn't really follow a timeline but rather is a series of vignettes about the author's experiences with visitors, his friendships with other guards, and his reflections on the art he sees every day. I think that perhaps there's something lost in reading this on audio, as I think the print version might contain images of the works he references. I did look up a few, but mostly I was listening while walking, so it wasn't always convenient to get out my phone and search. It did, however, make me want to visit the Met and see all the amazing works of art they have there, and the several hours I spent listening to someone talk about art were quite pleasant. I gave it 3 stars.

Finally, a book that was very good but also very hard to read. Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, and I've been wanting to read some of her work. I have her most recent novel on hold at the library [EDIT: We Do Not Part is a Kindle daily deal today, if you're interestested], but in the interim I read Human Acts, a short novel full of utterly devastating things. This book is based on the events and aftereffects of the Gwangju uprising in South Korea in May 1980 in which citizens protesting against a military coup were brutally massacred. The book is told in multiple points of view over different time periods, ranging from a young boy who was killed to those who were there with him that day but survived to his mother, years later, trying to find meaning in his death. This isn't a book for the faint of heart, but if you're willing to read it, it raises some very important questions about the value of human life and what causes people to harm versus help others. It's really masterfully written and impactful for being only a little more than 200 pages. I'm looking forward to reading more by Kang in the future. I gave this one 4 stars.

I'm currently reading two books. First, I've returned to Mercury, which I started almost a month ago but wasn't in the right mindset for at the time, so I've largely ignored it until now. I'm more than halfway through and am hoping to finish it up by the end of week. I'm also reading a digital ARC from NetGalley, The Homemade God, based upon Bonny's recommendation. I'd been preapproved for it and was mulling it over but finally decided to read it based upon her say so, and I'm glad I did, because the few chapters I've gotten through so far have been good.

I'll leave you with a Ruthie photo, because I can't seem to post without one anymore! This is a still from a video the Mister took in an effort to capture her response to him, and I think it gives you a really idea what this pup is like when she's awake and ready to play.

Happy hump day, friends!

Unraveled, Week 14/2025

It's been a wild few days here. On Sunday, our ovens died (and this is after we'd just replaced them several years ago), and that foiled some baking plans and made dinner prep a bit complicated. Then, after a warmer weekend that encouraged pretty much every living thing outside to bloom, we go a return of winter yesterday, though at least the sun came out for the afternoon. It's supposed to be wet off and on for the foreseeable future, but I guess that I should expect that now that it's April! And it's Wednesday, which means it's time to join in with Kat and the Unravelers.

On my long to-do list over the weekend was to swatch for handspun sweater, which I started but didn't manage to complete until Monday. The one benefit of the weather turning colder is that it meant the radiators came back on, so after washing it Monday afternoon, it was dry by Tuesday. Even better? My stitch gauge looks pretty much spot on and row gauge isn't off so much that I can't make it work.

I was undecided about how to use the two skeins of yarn (two different colorways from Southern Cross Fibre with slightly different fiber content), but I think I am just going to use them both the whole way through the sweater and alternate every two rounds for micro-stripes. I'd thought about fading from one to the other, but then I couldn't decide which one I wanted to be on top. I'm getting 9.5 rounds per inch, so each stripe is going to be less than a quarter inch in width, and I think I'll get a nice blending effect. And if I've knit a bit and it looks terrible, I'll just rip and start over!

My top priority at the moment, though, is finishing up my sister-in-law's socks, which are on the home stretch:

I prefer knitting with long circulars, but it makes for awkward photography.

I expect that I should be able to get the second sock finished later this week, and I'll be seeing her on Saturday and can give them to her then as a belated birthday gift.

After my eyes uncrossed after reading all those names last week, I got some good reading time in last week.

Remember how I recently reread Jane Austen's Mansfield Park? The reason is because I wanted to refresh my memory of the story ahead of reading This Motherless Land, which is a retelling rather than a modern update. It follows the lives of two cousins over several decades. First, we meet Funke in Nigeria. The daughter of a Nigerian father and a (white) British mother, she hears stories about the magical house in England where her mother grew up and is content with her life. When a great tragedy happens, she is sent to that house to live, only to discover that it's old and dilapidated and full of unfriendly relatives, especially her aunt, who is intensely bitter about how her life has turned out after her sister left. The one bright spot is Funke's cousin, Liv, who is nearly the same age and is desperate to be her friend and protector. The two become inseparable as they grow up, only to be split apart by an accident that sends Funke away from the place she had begun to think of as home. We see how the two cousins reconcile the split and the choices they make with the lives they've been given in the aftermath, all the while trying to come to grips with who they are and what makes a place home. While I found the connections to Mansfield Park to be slight, it's an enjoyable story that comments on race, class, and culture. I gave it 4 stars.

I expected How to Read a Book to be a bit "women's fiction"-y, but I was surprised by its emotion and depth. This novel follows three main characters: Violet, a woman in her early 20s who is in prison for manslaughter; Harriet, a retired English teacher now running a book club in Violet's prison; and Frank, the widower of the woman Violet killed. When Violet is released from prison and find her family cannot forgive her, she tries to make a new life in Portland, Maine. In a bookstore, the three meet by accident, and that meeting changes the trajectory of all their lives. I wouldn't call this heavy reading, but it does address issues like grief, forgiveness, and life after incarceration -- and, as the title suggests, it emphasizes the power of books. Interestingly, both this book and This Motherless Land feature grey African parrots, which was an amazing coincidence! I listened to this one and found it easy to follow. I gave it 4 stars as well.

Finally, the real star of this past week's reading: The History of Sound is a collection of short stories set in New England over the course of several centuries. They are connected in an interesting way, with each story having another that pairs with it. This isn't to say that the stories in each pair have the same characters or even take place in the same time period; there's just some way they're connected. And the stories are beautifully written and inventive. I think one of my favorites (or at least, in my view, the most original) is an imagined transcript of an episode of the podcast Radiolab, so well done that I showed the first page to my husband and then played him the intro to the podcast so he could appreciate it as well. I savored these stories over about a week, but the whole collection is a pretty quick read. I also found each and every story to be satisfying, which is saying a lot; my biggest complaint about short stories is that I often feel I want more when I finish them, and few collections I've read have been this satisfying. I'm so glad that I bought myself a copy of this book rather than waiting for it from the library, and I'm passing it along to my parents next. I gave it 5 stars.

What are you making and reading this week?

A Conundrum

Happy Friday, friends, and happy Valentine's Day! My original valentine has just landed from his trip across the country; my other valentine is still sleeping (she is off for an in-service day today; yesterday was the last day of her second trimester at school, so the teachers are busy working on grading). We got a very light dusting of snow overnight, and we're expecting snow changing to wintry mix changing to rain tomorrow -- we're actually under a flood watch. Today, though, will be dry and cold, and even though I'm working today, it feels a bit like the start of the weekend.

I finished and blocked my vest/slipover swatch on Wednesday afternoon, and now I'm trying to decide what to do next. Amazingly, I had perfect stitch and row gauge on both sections before blocking, but of course the fabric changed after. Here's the blocked swatch:

On the left is the handspun held together with the lace yarn. On the right is the handspun alone. I am pretty close on gauge on both -- 20 stitches over 4 inches on the left and 20.5 stitches over 4 inches on the right compared to the pattern gauge of 21 stitches/4 inches. There's a fair amount of positive ease built into the pattern, so I think I could make both work. The conundrum is that I'm not sure which way to go. Certainly the handspun alone is closest to gauge, but the fabric is also a bit thinner. The handspun plus lace creates a sturdier fabric, but the gauge isn't as close and I think the lace yarn obscures the colors in the handspun a bit. I could go down a needle size with the handspun alone and see if I can get closer to gauge (though I suspect I'd then have too many stitches per inch), but I think my fabric would be too stiff with a smaller needle using the two yarns together. So what would you do?

Unraveled, Week 7/2025

Good morning and happy Wednesday, friends! Another winter storm is moving through, though thankfully it doesn't look like we're going to be much impacted (a little snow overnight and this morning and then rain later today). My sinuses aren't a big fan, but at least I won't have to dig out the driveway and sidewalk this time. I am happy to report that I am feeling loads better, if a little sleepy -- I love tea, but it just doesn't wake me up as well as coffee does. But without anyone snoring next to me in bed, I'm sleeping better, so I think it all evens out right now. Time to join in with Kat and the Unravelers!

I did manage to finish one last charity hat Monday night, so my total for this particular hat-knitting fever is six, which used up a total of a bit more than 2,400 yards of yarn, or about six average skeins of fingering weight. That's a lot!

These will get washed and then safely put away for donation the next time they're needed. And now I can move on to new projects.

There's not much to see at this point, and the terrible lighting doesn't help the fact that there's a lot of gray here. On the left is the start of my swatch for my vest, knit by holding a strand of very old Knit Picks laceweight alongside my handspun. I'm going to continue with the handspun alone because I think the two strands held together might actually be too thick, but I do like the look of the combination. We'll see what happens after blocking. In the middle is a swatch for the hat I'm testing. I normally wouldn't swatch for a hat, but the needle size called for in the pattern is a lot smaller than what I'd normally use for worsted, and the gauge listed is also in the textured pattern rather than stockinette, so I didn't want to just guess on the needle size. Finally, the cuff on the right is a new pair of socks for Molly using Fibernymph Dye Works Mountain Tweed in neutrals (you saw the skein earlier in the week). I am hoping that by the end of the week the swatching will be complete and I'll have actually cast on those new projects.

It's been a good week for reading, with four solid books completed.

The longest of the four was an audiobook, The Unseen World, written by the author of The God of the Woods and Long Bright River. Most of the story is about Ada, a young woman raised by her single father, David, a computer scientist in the 1970s and '80s at the "Boston Institute of Technology" (presumably a stand-in for MIT). Her childhood is unconventional in that she is home-schooled by her father and is a regular in his lab, where he and his team are working on the precursors of artificial intelligence. But when Ada is entering her teen years, it becomes apparent that something is wrong with David, as he becomes more and more forgetful and confused as dementia tightens his grip on his mind. Ada eventually moves in with one of David's colleagues when it's clear that David needs full-time care, and then a new mystery arises when none of the details of David's life seem to be true and all she has left of him is a disk with a string of letters he has left her to decode. In near present day, Ada is a computer scientist herself working on virtual reality, but she is still haunted by the code she could never solve. I could have done without the repetition of those letters and some computer code in the book; had I been reading with my eyes, I probably would have skipped over them. But the story was really intriguing, and even though it's told against the backdrop of computers and AI, at its heart it's a story that raises questions about how well we can know people and when the stories we tell ourselves become the truth, even if they're not actual facts. I gave it 4 stars.

Next was the first in the next series of books that a small group of us is focusing on this year -- women in translation, translated by other women. Boulder was short-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2023 and follows our nameless narrator (the title is her nickname), who goes from being a cook on a merchant ship to living in Reykjavik when she falls in love with Samsa. All seems well until Samsa decides that she needs to have a baby. Boulder, in contrast, doesn't want to be a mother, but ultimately her love for Samsa wins her over. The pregnancy and the baby change Samsa and ultimately the relationship in a dramatic way, causing the narrator to reassess her life and her partnership. Eva Baltasar is a poet, and this comes through in the prose and the translation. I gave it 4 stars.

Colum McCann's Apeirogon is one of the most memorable books I've read in the past several years, so I was delighted to be invited to read an ARC of his forthcoming novel, Twist. In three sections, we learn about an experience the narrator of the book, Irish writer Anthony Fennell, has had and his struggles to make sense of it. In the first, he travels to South Africa after he learns about the crews that repair the undersea cables that enable transcontinental communication and proposes an article about one of them. He is connected with John Conway, a fellow Irishman who is chief of mission for a repair ship, and through Conway meets his partner, Zanele, an up-and-coming South African actress. In the second part, the two men get on board the boat to embark on a repair, and Fennell learns about the hierarchy of the ship and the process of the repair. But something dramatic and unexpected happens at the end of the mission, and in the third part of the book, Fennell grapples with making sense of what happened then and afterward. I thought the writing in the book was spectacular and the characters intriguing, but I also felt a little at a loss for why the story was being told. There is, of course, some pretty big symbolism in the need to repair connections, but I also felt that there were a lot of things that weren't explained. I gave it 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4. Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published March 25, 2025.

Finally, I read The Message, a collection of four essays by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I enjoyed the first three very much, but the final (and longest) essay was a difficult read. It discusses his trip to Israel and Palestine and his efforts to make sense of the long conflict and the current state of affairs. Though he opens his essay by recounting the impact of his visit to Yad Vashem, it is clear that he sides with the Palestinians and believes Israel to be an apartheid state and a colonizer. While I admit that much of the knowledge of Israel I was raised with was very one-sided, I have to disagree with Coates' position that Zionism is about colonialism and subjugation. I think that like so much about this conflict, there are many sides and any opinions -- lots of shades of gray and no black and white. His position did make me think a lot, though, and I think that's a good thing when it comes to writing. I also gave this book 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

I'm currently reading Eva Baltasar's debut novel, Permafrost, and plan to start something new on Kindle soon. What are you making and reading this week?