Unraveled, Week 52/2023

Happy last Wednesday of 2023, friends! It's not an official Unraveled Wednesday, as Kat is taking the week off from her usual link-up, but the perfectionist in me compels me to share one last Unraveled post for 2023 to complete the perfect year of them.

I know that none of you will be surprised by what I'm making -- I'm still plodding along (though faster, now) on my Birch Pullover, and having measured my progress at 8.25 inches last night before bed, I'm now fairly confident that I'll be able to finish the body before the week is over.

The outdoor lighting makes the fade of the skeins more obvious; in normal light, it's not quite as obvious. There's variegation within the skeins themselves, and I'm also alternating skeins every round when I join a new one. I did have a little surprise yesterday when I was knitting outside, though:

The color is rather washed out here, but do you see the purple? I never noticed that in the yarn, and it was a fun surprised when it appeared in the sunlight.

As for my progress, I've managed to figure out how to work the half fisherman's rib rounds without looking except occasionally, so I've been able to work on this while reading, and that's been a huge help. The instructions tell me to knit until the body measures 10 inches from the underarm and then work regular 2x2 rib for another 2 inches. So I've got less than 4 inches of fabric left to knit on the body in total, which seems quite achievable.

Now that we're past Christmas, I will also share the color photo of the minis I spun before we left:

The theme this year was "A Walk through Middle Earth," so each day's colorway had a location and a little story that went with it. I'm not a huge Tolkien fan, but I've read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (and seen the movies), so things were somewhat familiar to me, and even when they weren't, I still enjoyed how much thought Lisa put into them.

I typically use this vacation to do a lot of reading, and this year has been no exception. I've read two excellent books this past week.

Land of Milk and Honey is a buzzy new release that I was excited to get from the library. This is a book that I can definitely see being one to be divisive. It's set in the near future, when a smog has settled over much of the world and blocked the sun, making it impossible to grow many crops and led to food shortages and starvation. Our narrator, a trained chef, applies for and receives a job at an exclusive, reclusive self-contained "country" in the mountains of Italy where food is miraculously abundant. How this place came to be and how it has such resources is mysterious and even a little sinister, with an overwhelming sense that survival in this new reality is contingent on wealth. A lot of this book gave me an icky feeling (mainly the other characters and how they behaved), but the writing is spectacular, and it's clear that the author knows about food and cooking. I would not recommend this book to everyone, particularly not those of you who don't care for post-apocalyptic stories, but if you're okay with that sort of thing and you want to get immersed in that world, you might like it. I could not put it down. I gave it 5 stars.

I so enjoyed Tommy Orange's voice in There There that when I heard he had a new book coming out, I rushed to read it. This new work is in some ways a continuation of his first novel in that some of the characters reappear and it addresses the aftermath of the dramatic event that concluded it, but you don't have to have read it recently or at all to appreciate it. This book is even more sweeping in its scope of the story of a family and the heartbreaking story of how the white man sought to wipe out the Indigenous peoples, by destroying their identity when they couldn't entirely do it physically. That notion of destroying the native from the inside has reverberations throughout the novel, as all the characters struggle in some way with what it means to be Indigenous and how to connect to their ancestors. How much of one's identity is in one's ancestry? Do you need to be raised within a 

community to still identify as a member of it? The voices in this book are beautiful

and distinctive, with the echoes of the past reverberating in the present. I gave it 4 stars. 

Thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and NetGalley for providing me with a digital ARC in return for an honest review. This book will be published February 27, 2024.

I've got plenty of books to choose from in my Kindle library, but I decided I wanted something light and entertaining for these last few days of 2023, so I'm reading Do Tell right now. I'm nearly halfway through it and expect I'll finish it up in the next couple of days.

I hope you're enjoying this strange in-between time, with good projects and good books to keep you company. I expect I'll be doing some sort of year-end wrap-up on Friday, so see you back here then!