Unraveled, Week 49/2023

Week 49 of 2023 -- only three more Wednesdays left this year?! Yikes! Where does the time go?

Before I get into the typical stuff for Unraveled Wednesday, I want to thank you all for your concern. I'm happy to share that I'm back to normal and that my issue on Monday appears to have been a normal IBS flare combined with my typical catastrophization (is that a word? If not, if should be!). I have a tendency to worry way more than is necessary about things, especially feeling sick, which often results in feeling much worse, and that seems to be what happened earlier this week. But I took a little nap after my morning meeting -- a definite perk of working from home -- and was feeling well enough that I was able to attend a dinner with a rabbi candidate Monday evening.

But enough about that -- it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers and talk about making and reading! My making this week is going to be a little boring because I'm singularly focused on finishing up some gift knitting. We're having a Chanukah party with my side of the family on Friday night, so I'm furiously trying to finish up the hat for my sister-in-law.

I've got 20-ish grams of yarn left and will start decreasing when I get to 10, so it's possible I will finish today. My goal is to get it done by tomorrow at the latest so I can block it and have it be dry to be wrapped on Friday.

Once the hat is done, my focus will be my Fibernymph Dye Works fiber minis; I'm nearly finished with the ninth. I think once I get through the first half, I will change bobbins. I'm not sure if I'll ply those first 12 before spinning the others or wait to ply them all at the end. But either way they're going quickly, and I don't think I'll have a problem finishing them all before we leave for vacation.

Reading has been good this past week. I've only finished one book, but it was an excellent one.

North Woods just came out in September and is a strange sort of book. It's called a novel, but in many ways it's more like a series of short stories, some of which are more interconnected than others. Really what ties all the stories together is what's right there in the title: the woods. The story starts in the early colonial days, when an unnamed couple leaves their Puritan community for the freedom of the woods. Over the course of the book, which brings us more or less up to the present, we see what happens in this same spot and how the people who live there affect the woods. Along the way, the author explores a number of different genres of writing to tell the stories. This isn't going to be a book for everyone (in fact, I know some of you have already read it and didn't care for it), but I thought it was fascinating. It would make for a really good book club read, I think, because there's so much to discuss about what the author is doing. I gave it 5 stars.

EDIT: A comment from Carolyn made me realize I finished another book last week!

I enjoyed Wellness so much that I went back to read Nathan Hill's first book, The Nix. I know this book has been out for a while and many of you have read and enjoyed it, but I'd never heard of it until recently. I decided to listen to it, even though it's much longer than the audiobooks I typically listen to, and that proved to be a good choice. The narrator does such an amazing job of differentiating the characters without seeming like he's "doing" a voice. I loved how all the different storylines and characters came together and how it almost felt like it could have been a bit autobiographical (I didn't do research to see if this is the case, but doesn't it seem like Hill could have been writing about his own mother?). I really enjoyed it, though I like I enjoyed Wellness just a bit more. I gave this one 4 stars.

I am still reading Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone and am determined to finish it before we leave for Florida. I've just made it past page 500, so I am more than halfway through, and I think finishing in the next week and a half is reasonable if I focus on it.

What are you making and reading this week?