Unraveled, Week 51/2023

Can you believe we've reached the penultimate Unraveled Wednesday of 2023? Of course just as I know what number week it is for this year, I'll have to start the count all over again! But whether or not I know the number, linking up with Kat and the Unravelers is always my favorite time of the week.

As I noted on Monday, my primary focus while we're away is going to be my Birch pullover, and I am making some progress! It looks like I've knit about three inches of the body below the underarm, so still a lot to go, but I am nearly ready to start blending in the next ball of yarn.

Please excuse the late-night bathroom lighting.

The knitting is very straightforward now, even if I can't quite do it without looking (I still need to check that I'm knitting into the stitch below on the k1B, p1 rounds).

Yesterday was an exciting day for Mo -- she cast on her sweater! I did have her swatch first, which was a bit of an extra challenge because I had her do a mock in-the-round swatch, but she managed just fine.

After blocking, her gauge was ever so slightly off but in the direction that it will work in her favor (the sweater will end up a little larger, so she'll have some room to grow). The yarn is also a superwash Merino, so I expect we'll be able to adjust it as needed when we block it.

Reading has been a bit of a mixed bag the past week. I've finished three books.

I heard about The Leftover Woman on the What Should I Read Next podcast, and the premise sounded really good: A woman in China is told that her newborn has died, but in fact her husband, disappointed that it was a girl, has secretly taken it away to be adopted by an American couple, and when she discovers this betrayal, she pays smugglers to get her into the United States to find her daughter. While the storyline was as advertised, the book was disappointing. The characters were really flat and they and the story felt completely implausible to me. The writing felt like it was trying too hard -- way more telling than showing, if you know what I mean. I might have DNFed this except that it was short and I wanted to know how it would end (which was, predictably, in an entirely implausible way). It wasn't a total waste of time, but I wouldn't recommend it. I gave it 2 stars.

One of the two paperbacks I brought with me was Four Seasons in Rome, a book I actually bought several years ago and have had sitting on my nightstand ever since. It's a short book, only about 200 pages, so I read more than half of it on the flight down to Florida (with Mo asleep on my arm) and finished it up the next day. Doerr chronicles the year he, his wife, and their newborn twins spent living in Rome while he had a fellowship, and it's both a love letter to the art, culture, and food of Italy and a memoir of the first year of parenthood. It's an easy and enjoyable read, one that made me long to go back to Italy. I've now passed it along to my parents, both of whom I think will enjoy it. I gave it 4 stars.

My latest audiobook was The Candy House, read specifically because Jennifer Egan is the next author up in my local speaker series and I try to read the books before the talks if at all possible. The audio was recorded by a full cast, which I think really enhanced the very wide range of characters in this book, though I did find it hard to keep all the characters and their relationships to each other straight. This is a bit of a strange book in that there is no clear plot line moving through it, and while it's not really interconnected short stories, the sections do focus on different characters at different points of time. I thought the writing was very good (save for the apparent confusion of "titled" versus "entitled," a pet peeve of mine), but I also felt I was not quite smart enough to get the book as a whole. I gave it 3 stars.

I am currently reading Tommy Orange's forthcoming novel, Wandering Stars, which I am very much enjoying even though I haven't gotten very far yet.

What are you making and reading this week?