Unraveled, Week 39/2025

It is another steamy morning here in SW PA, and as it's Wednesday, that means it's time to join Kat and the Unravelers! I've been strangely monogamous with my knitting this week; though I've knit up a swatch with the Shibui Linen I brought home from Nashville (still to be measured, blocked, and measured again), mainly what I've been working on is the socks I started on the way there. The first sock was finished up Monday and the second immediately cast on.

If you click to embiggen the photo and look closely, you might notice a fun bit of serendipity. When I finished the first sock, I had just started a new color, so I wound off the yarn until I got to the start of the next stripe and cast on for the second sock at that point. It was not until yesterday afternoon, when I pulled out the first sock to compare the cuff length, that I realized I had managed to start both socks at exactly the same point in the stripe sequence without planning it! In all honesty, I'd planned on not trying to get the socks to match because the stripe sequence is so long, so this was a pretty fun thing to happen.

I've finished another two books this past week:

Some of you who are also on NetGalley likely recently got an email about What We Can Know. This new novel from Ian McEwan tells its story in two parts. First, we follow Tom Metcalfe, a humanities professor in the 22nd century whose scholarship focuses on 21st-century British poet and the famous lost poem he wrote as a tribute to his wife, Vivien. Tom's research is made all the more difficult by the fact that climate change has led to rising seas and dangerous travel. Relying on the poet's archives, which include Vivien's journals, he is convinced that he will be the one to find the missing poem and that it will make his career, but he is so focused on his work and his obsession with the poem and Vivien that he neglects his wife and fails to notice that his students don't appreciate his fixation on the past. In the second part, we get to read the memoir Vivien left behind and learn that the story of her life, as told to us by Tom, was not entirely accurate and that the famous poem written for her might best be left in the past. This book is billed as speculative fiction, but the only thing speculative I found in it was the creation of the world transformed by climate change -- and even that doesn't seem so uncertain these days. The prevailing message of the novel, to me, is that often what we know of history is biased based upon who is telling the story of the past and that even when we tell our own stories, we're not under any obligation to be entirely truthful. I gave it 3 stars. Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for providing me with digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published September 23, 2025.

Broken Country is one of those buzzy new books that seems to be popping up a lot of places. I'd heard of it and thought it sounded interesting but wasn't going out of my way to read it -- but then my mother passed along her copy and I thought I'd see what all the fuss was about. This novel is set primarily in 1968 in the English countryside, with flashbacks to a decade earlier. At its heart is a love triangle. Beth, the main character, fell in love with Gabriel as a teenager, but miscommunication and a difference in social class drove them apart. In the present day, she is married to Frank, a farmer who quietly loved her from a distance for years. They are living on his family's farm, still mourning the tragic death of their young son, when Gabriel, now with his own young son, returns to his family home and it's apparent that the feelings of the past aren't entirely in the past. Amid all of this, we know someone has been killed and someone is on trial for murder, but we don't know who (and don't find out their fate or what actually happened) until much later in the book. I can see why this book is making the rounds: It's an easy, propulsive read. Perhaps it's a bit predictable, too, though there were a couple of twists toward the end I didn't see coming. I enjoyed it (4 stars), but I don't think it'll make my list of favorites for the year.

I'm currently reading a book my brother lent me after we adopted Ruthie called Dog Is Love, which is fascinating both as a dog owner and as someone who majored in psychology in college, and another ARC -- the forthcoming ninth book in Ann Cleeves's Shetland series!

What are you making and reading this week?