Unraveled, Week 22/2025

It's been a wild few days here. On Sunday, our ovens died (and this is after we'd just replaced them several years ago), and that foiled some baking plans and made dinner prep a bit complicated. Then, after a warmer weekend that encouraged pretty much every living thing outside to bloom, we go a return of winter yesterday, though at least the sun came out for the afternoon. It's supposed to be wet off and on for the foreseeable future, but I guess that I should expect that now that it's April! And it's Wednesday, which means it's time to join in with Kat and the Unravelers.

On my long to-do list over the weekend was to swatch for handspun sweater, which I started but didn't manage to complete until Monday. The one benefit of the weather turning colder is that it meant the radiators came back on, so after washing it Monday afternoon, it was dry by Tuesday. Even better? My stitch gauge looks pretty much spot on and row gauge isn't off so much that I can't make it work.

I was undecided about how to use the two skeins of yarn (two different colorways from Southern Cross Fibre with slightly different fiber content), but I think I am just going to use them both the whole way through the sweater and alternate every two rounds for micro-stripes. I'd thought about fading from one to the other, but then I couldn't decide which one I wanted to be on top. I'm getting 9.5 rounds per inch, so each stripe is going to be less than a quarter inch in width, and I think I'll get a nice blending effect. And if I've knit a bit and it looks terrible, I'll just rip and start over!

My top priority at the moment, though, is finishing up my sister-in-law's socks, which are on the home stretch:

I prefer knitting with long circulars, but it makes for awkward photography.

I expect that I should be able to get the second sock finished later this week, and I'll be seeing her on Saturday and can give them to her then as a belated birthday gift.

After my eyes uncrossed after reading all those names last week, I got some good reading time in last week.

Remember how I recently reread Jane Austen's Mansfield Park? The reason is because I wanted to refresh my memory of the story ahead of reading This Motherless Land, which is a retelling rather than a modern update. It follows the lives of two cousins over several decades. First, we meet Funke in Nigeria. The daughter of a Nigerian father and a (white) British mother, she hears stories about the magical house in England where her mother grew up and is content with her life. When a great tragedy happens, she is sent to that house to live, only to discover that it's old and dilapidated and full of unfriendly relatives, especially her aunt, who is intensely bitter about how her life has turned out after her sister left. The one bright spot is Funke's cousin, Liv, who is nearly the same age and is desperate to be her friend and protector. The two become inseparable as they grow up, only to be split apart by an accident that sends Funke away from the place she had begun to think of as home. We see how the two cousins reconcile the split and the choices they make with the lives they've been given in the aftermath, all the while trying to come to grips with who they are and what makes a place home. While I found the connections to Mansfield Park to be slight, it's an enjoyable story that comments on race, class, and culture. I gave it 4 stars.

I expected How to Read a Book to be a bit "women's fiction"-y, but I was surprised by its emotion and depth. This novel follows three main characters: Violet, a woman in her early 20s who is in prison for manslaughter; Harriet, a retired English teacher now running a book club in Violet's prison; and Frank, the widower of the woman Violet killed. When Violet is released from prison and find her family cannot forgive her, she tries to make a new life in Portland, Maine. In a bookstore, the three meet by accident, and that meeting changes the trajectory of all their lives. I wouldn't call this heavy reading, but it does address issues like grief, forgiveness, and life after incarceration -- and, as the title suggests, it emphasizes the power of books. Interestingly, both this book and This Motherless Land feature grey African parrots, which was an amazing coincidence! I listened to this one and found it easy to follow. I gave it 4 stars as well.

Finally, the real star of this past week's reading: The History of Sound is a collection of short stories set in New England over the course of several centuries. They are connected in an interesting way, with each story having another that pairs with it. This isn't to say that the stories in each pair have the same characters or even take place in the same time period; there's just some way they're connected. And the stories are beautifully written and inventive. I think one of my favorites (or at least, in my view, the most original) is an imagined transcript of an episode of the podcast Radiolab, so well done that I showed the first page to my husband and then played him the intro to the podcast so he could appreciate it as well. I savored these stories over about a week, but the whole collection is a pretty quick read. I also found each and every story to be satisfying, which is saying a lot; my biggest complaint about short stories is that I often feel I want more when I finish them, and few collections I've read have been this satisfying. I'm so glad that I bought myself a copy of this book rather than waiting for it from the library, and I'm passing it along to my parents next. I gave it 5 stars.

What are you making and reading this week?