Unraveled, Week 7/2025

Good morning and happy Wednesday, friends! Another winter storm is moving through, though thankfully it doesn't look like we're going to be much impacted (a little snow overnight and this morning and then rain later today). My sinuses aren't a big fan, but at least I won't have to dig out the driveway and sidewalk this time. I am happy to report that I am feeling loads better, if a little sleepy -- I love tea, but it just doesn't wake me up as well as coffee does. But without anyone snoring next to me in bed, I'm sleeping better, so I think it all evens out right now. Time to join in with Kat and the Unravelers!

I did manage to finish one last charity hat Monday night, so my total for this particular hat-knitting fever is six, which used up a total of a bit more than 2,400 yards of yarn, or about six average skeins of fingering weight. That's a lot!

These will get washed and then safely put away for donation the next time they're needed. And now I can move on to new projects.

There's not much to see at this point, and the terrible lighting doesn't help the fact that there's a lot of gray here. On the left is the start of my swatch for my vest, knit by holding a strand of very old Knit Picks laceweight alongside my handspun. I'm going to continue with the handspun alone because I think the two strands held together might actually be too thick, but I do like the look of the combination. We'll see what happens after blocking. In the middle is a swatch for the hat I'm testing. I normally wouldn't swatch for a hat, but the needle size called for in the pattern is a lot smaller than what I'd normally use for worsted, and the gauge listed is also in the textured pattern rather than stockinette, so I didn't want to just guess on the needle size. Finally, the cuff on the right is a new pair of socks for Molly using Fibernymph Dye Works Mountain Tweed in neutrals (you saw the skein earlier in the week). I am hoping that by the end of the week the swatching will be complete and I'll have actually cast on those new projects.

It's been a good week for reading, with four solid books completed.

The longest of the four was an audiobook, The Unseen World, written by the author of The God of the Woods and Long Bright River. Most of the story is about Ada, a young woman raised by her single father, David, a computer scientist in the 1970s and '80s at the "Boston Institute of Technology" (presumably a stand-in for MIT). Her childhood is unconventional in that she is home-schooled by her father and is a regular in his lab, where he and his team are working on the precursors of artificial intelligence. But when Ada is entering her teen years, it becomes apparent that something is wrong with David, as he becomes more and more forgetful and confused as dementia tightens his grip on his mind. Ada eventually moves in with one of David's colleagues when it's clear that David needs full-time care, and then a new mystery arises when none of the details of David's life seem to be true and all she has left of him is a disk with a string of letters he has left her to decode. In near present day, Ada is a computer scientist herself working on virtual reality, but she is still haunted by the code she could never solve. I could have done without the repetition of those letters and some computer code in the book; had I been reading with my eyes, I probably would have skipped over them. But the story was really intriguing, and even though it's told against the backdrop of computers and AI, at its heart it's a story that raises questions about how well we can know people and when the stories we tell ourselves become the truth, even if they're not actual facts. I gave it 4 stars.

Next was the first in the next series of books that a small group of us is focusing on this year -- women in translation, translated by other women. Boulder was short-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2023 and follows our nameless narrator (the title is her nickname), who goes from being a cook on a merchant ship to living in Reykjavik when she falls in love with Samsa. All seems well until Samsa decides that she needs to have a baby. Boulder, in contrast, doesn't want to be a mother, but ultimately her love for Samsa wins her over. The pregnancy and the baby change Samsa and ultimately the relationship in a dramatic way, causing the narrator to reassess her life and her partnership. Eva Baltasar is a poet, and this comes through in the prose and the translation. I gave it 4 stars.

Colum McCann's Apeirogon is one of the most memorable books I've read in the past several years, so I was delighted to be invited to read an ARC of his forthcoming novel, Twist. In three sections, we learn about an experience the narrator of the book, Irish writer Anthony Fennell, has had and his struggles to make sense of it. In the first, he travels to South Africa after he learns about the crews that repair the undersea cables that enable transcontinental communication and proposes an article about one of them. He is connected with John Conway, a fellow Irishman who is chief of mission for a repair ship, and through Conway meets his partner, Zanele, an up-and-coming South African actress. In the second part, the two men get on board the boat to embark on a repair, and Fennell learns about the hierarchy of the ship and the process of the repair. But something dramatic and unexpected happens at the end of the mission, and in the third part of the book, Fennell grapples with making sense of what happened then and afterward. I thought the writing in the book was spectacular and the characters intriguing, but I also felt a little at a loss for why the story was being told. There is, of course, some pretty big symbolism in the need to repair connections, but I also felt that there were a lot of things that weren't explained. I gave it 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4. Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published March 25, 2025.

Finally, I read The Message, a collection of four essays by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I enjoyed the first three very much, but the final (and longest) essay was a difficult read. It discusses his trip to Israel and Palestine and his efforts to make sense of the long conflict and the current state of affairs. Though he opens his essay by recounting the impact of his visit to Yad Vashem, it is clear that he sides with the Palestinians and believes Israel to be an apartheid state and a colonizer. While I admit that much of the knowledge of Israel I was raised with was very one-sided, I have to disagree with Coates' position that Zionism is about colonialism and subjugation. I think that like so much about this conflict, there are many sides and any opinions -- lots of shades of gray and no black and white. His position did make me think a lot, though, and I think that's a good thing when it comes to writing. I also gave this book 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

I'm currently reading Eva Baltasar's debut novel, Permafrost, and plan to start something new on Kindle soon. What are you making and reading this week?