Unraveled, Week 4/2025

It's Wednesday, even if it feels like Tuesday, so that means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers!

I'm happy to report that my handspun sweater now has two complete sleeves and the very tiny start of a body:

There is some shaping on the body (including bust shaping, which I'll likely do even though it seems a bit unnecessary for my barely there bust), but overall the knitting from here on out is much less involved. I'd love to get this done before the end of the Pigskin Party, which gives me about two and a half weeks, but I'm not going to stress about it if I don't. It'll get done when it gets done, and there are a number of demands on my time in any case, so I'm not going to hurt myself by trying to knit on it every free moment.

For one thing, I've been enjoying my spinning time -- yesterday I finished up my third bobbin of singles from the kiddie pool fiber, and I'm really excited to see how this all plies up!

There also has been quite a lot of reading after a slow start to the month! I've finished three books since this time last week, including one I read in its entirety yesterday.

Like many people (but perhaps not you hard-core poetry readers), the poet Maggie Smith first came on my radar thanks to her poem "Good Bones." I had heard really good things about her memoir, so I picked it up on Kindle when it was a daily deal. You Could Make This Place Beautiful takes its title from that poem and is primarily about the dissolution of her marriage. Even if you didn't know she was a poet before reading this, you'd probably be able to tell from the unusual structure of the book. It doesn't progress in a linear fashion but rather circles around and around, jumping back and forth in time and returning again and again to certain themes and frameworks. It feels a little weird to say that I loved someone's story about how painful her divorce was, but the way Smith talks about that pain and about her healing is truly beautiful. I also love it when I read someone's first-person writing and feel like they're a friend telling me their story. I gave it 5 stars.

The next book I read came to me courtesy of Kat, who raved about it when she first read it and then mentioned it again at the most recent Read With Us Zoom (I put it on hold while we were still chatting). Hard by a Great Forest follows Saba who, along with his older brother and their father, left the republic of Georgia shortly after it gained its independence and a civil war broke out but had to leave their mother behind and were never able to afford to bring her to join them in the UK. Nearly two decades later, their father has returned to Georgia and promptly disappeared. Then the older brother goes looking for him and disappears himself. Soon Saba finds himself back in their old neighborhood, trying to figure out where his father and brother went, why the police are after them, and how to silence the voices of those who they left behind and deal with his guilt in doing so. The echoes the USSR and the war are still loud, and there's still armed conflict going on in the disputed region of Ossetia. When Saba arrives, recent flooding has enabled a slew of wild animals to escape from the zoo, adding to the surrealism. His search for his family is physically and emotionally demanding, occasionally funny, and often aided by complete strangers ready to offer the hospitality for which Georgians are known. Though the story is completely different, the tone and post-Soviet setting reminded me a lot of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and The Tsar of Love and Techno. I gave this most recent read 4 stars.

And now for something completely different: AEdnan is an epic in verse telling the story of the Sàmi people through the experiences of two families. The Sàmi are the Indigenous people of what is today Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and like many other Indigenous peoples, their culture was suppressed by modern governments but has seen more recent efforts at revival. This work spans a century, starting with Ristin and her family, who are reindeer herders, and ending with Sandra, whose mother was in a Nomad School (the equivalent of North America's Residential Schools) and who is an activist fighting for her people's rights. Although this work is a relatively quick read due to its spare language, it packs a punch. There is so much pain in so few words and so much left unsaid. I think this a work that would benefit from reading some history in parallel; I found myself looking things up quite a lot because I knew so little about the history of the Sàmi people. I gave it 4 stars.

I'm still reading Same as It Ever Was and have only gotten about another 100 pages in; I'm sure this is partly due to the fact that I've been reading it before bed, when I only get 15-20 minutes of reading time, but it also feels like a bit of a slog. I think I'll prioritize it for the next several days and see if I can get through the rest of it faster.