Unraveled, Week 1/2025

Happy New Year! Somehow the start of the year falling smack dab in the middle of the week feels right -- we all know by now that time is just a human construct, and certainly I didn't feel any measurable difference upon waking up this morning compared to any other morning (my first thought, after going to the bathroom, was "I need coffee").

That said, it is nice to start the counter over again on my Unraveled Wednesday posts, and it's also nice to join Kat and the Unravelers for another year. I did not stay up until midnight last night, but I did stay up long enough to finish one last project for the year:

This is my Same as It Ever Was pattern (Ravelry link), worked at a looser gauge than given in the pattern (adding the guidance for how to do that to the pattern is high on this year's to-do list), using Fibernymph Dye Works Bounce in the This Day We Fight colorway. My skein was a bit overweight, as Lisa's usually are, and I used all but 1 g of the yarn, or 420 yards. It's not blocked yet, obviously, but I'll take care of that when we get home and then put it in a pile for charity. These are not colors I really wear, not to mention that I already have plenty of hand-knit hats to wear, but I know it will make someone smile and keep them warm, plus the yarn purchase supports a good cause.

Now I'm down to just the one project here, so we'll see how much sweater I get knit in the next several days.

As is typical for this time of year, when I'm on vacation and don't have any work reading to do, I've gotten a lot of reading for pleasure done and finished four books in the last week!

My mother was finishing up The Wedding People when we came down, so when she finished it, she handed it to me. Phoebe is 40, her husband has just left her for a friend after a series of failed IVF attempts, and her career is going nowhere. Despondent, she decides to book a luxury room at a hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, to commit suicide. But when she gets there, she discovers she's the only person staying at the hotel who is not there for a lavish wedding week, and she soon gets sucked into the festivities. As a result of her involvement with the bride, the groom, and their friends and families, she realizes that maybe her life isn't as bad as it seems and maybe what she's thought she wanted wasn't really what she wanted all along. It's funny, sad, touching, and a bit ridiculous, but a thoroughly enjoyable read (despite a very obvious typo I found). I gave it 4 stars.

I had a pretty long library wait for the most recent Inspector Gamache book, but my hold came up just as I was ready to start a new book (don't you love it when that happens?). The Grey Wolf finds Gamache, Beauvoir, and Lacoste racing against time and unsure who can be trusted when they uncover a plot to contaminate Montreal's water with a neurotoxin that will kill thousands and send the country into political turmoil. There are the usual moments of levity, but this is a tight, tense thriller, and most of the tension comes not from the potential impact of the plot but from Gamache's constant doubts. Who can be trusted? Who is telling the truth? Are his suspicions valid, or is he being paranoid? I very much enjoyed it, with the possible exception of the big cliffhanger at the end and the fact that we have to wait almost 10 months until we get the next book. I gave it 4 stars.

I can't remember where, exactly, I first heard about I Who Have Never Known Men, but I was so intrigued by the description and kept thinking about it so much that I ended up buying a Kindle copy because I didn't want to wait for it from the library. This is a tight, tense little novel in which not much happens but so many questions are raised. Our unnamed narrator is a young teenager when the book opens, and she is the youngest of 40 women being held in a cage in an underground bunker that is guarded by men who never talk but who wield whips for punishment. None of the women remembers much about how they got there or why the narrator was kept with them. One day, an alarm sounds and the guards disappear at the precise moment the cage door was being opened to wheel in a meal, and the women are able to escape. But once they are out of the bunker, they have even more questions. Where did the guards go, and how? Are they the only ones alive on Earth? Are they even on the earth, or is this another planet? Over the years that follow, they are able to answer some but not all of the questions as they explore their surroundings, build homes, and age. Eventually our narrator is the last woman left alive, and we learn that the story we are reading is an account of her life that she has written as she nears death. This book was originally published in 1995. The author and her family fled Belgium when the Nazis invaded in WWII, and it's not difficult to see this book as an allegory for someone trying to establish their humanity when an enemy power was seeking to dehumanize them. I wouldn't recommend this book if you're someone who doesn't like ambiguity or an untidy ending, but it's one of those books that I know I'll be thinking about for a long time. I gave it 5 stars.

My last finish for the year was Colored Television. Jane is a 40-something biracial English professor on sabbatical from her teaching job as she tries to finish sophomore novel, now a decade in the works, while she and her painter husband and two kids move from one temporary home to another. When her novel is rejected by her agent and publisher, she is left reeling and wondering who she is if she's not a novelist. In an desperate moment, she calls the agent of the friend whose house she's staying in and steals his idea for a TV show based on biracial characters. Everything seems to be going well -- until it's not. I found myself getting a little frustrated with Jane and the increasingly desperate decisions she made, but I also wonder if I was maybe not the target audience for this book. I also wonder how much of this book is auto-fiction; Danzy Senna is a biracial novelist who is married to Percival Everett. While the real-life authors clearly aren't struggling to make a living like her characters are, the internal struggle over identity felt genuine, and I certainly identified with that even if I couldn't identify with the racial questions. I gave the book 3 stars.

I got another library hold last night after returning this one last book, but I decided to wait to start fresh today. Here's to another year of good reading and good crafting!