Unraveled, Week 33/2025

It's another hot Wednesday here, and the humidity has been turned back up -- but we are supposed to get rain today! Good thing, too, because we've apparently had the driest start to August since sometime in the 1800s. I am longing for fall weather, but it looks like that's not coming for a while yet, so I'll be hiding in the air conditioning as much as I can until then.

Time to join in with Kat and the Unravelers! The arrival of a big work project last week meant a slowdown in my daytime knitting, but the current hat on the needles is now about half a Ruthie long:

Apologies for showing you so much leg!

I haven't weighed the skein of yarn, but it has gotten noticeably smaller, so I'd estimate I'm about halfway done. There's no deadline for this, but I expect it won't be on the needles for too much longer because it's so easy to work on while doing other things.

I've also made some progress on my Kudzu, despite putting it down for a day or so to check with the designer on some numbers. I've just joined the front and the back to work in the round, so things are likely to go faster now.

I'd really like to get this done by the end of the month, if possible. I have a lace/texture chart to work through under both arms, but after that it's all stockinette, and I know that will go quickly. Partly I want to get it done to be able to wear it while it's still summer (even though at the moment it feels like summer is going to last forever), but partly the desire to finish it is so I can get started on something for colder weather.

In spite of being busy at work, I somehow managed to finish four books in the past week -- largely thanks to being caught up on a backlog of podcasts and thus being on the hunt for audiobooks!

First up was The Friend, the next Read With Us selection. There was a wait for the digital book at my library but not for the audio, so I went that route. This is a short novel (only about 6 hours on audio) about a woman whose longtime friend and mentor has just died by suicide and whose Great Dane she ends up inheriting, despite living in a New York City apartment where dogs are forbidden. The dog's presence inspires her to reminisce on their friendship and reflect on her grief as well as how the dog might (or might not) be processing the absence of its owner. I think that perhaps audio might not have been the best format for me to read this book because I kept getting lost and a little confused, and that definitely contributed to my feelings about the book in general. I'll be watching the movie made from it (the first time we've done this for RWU!), and perhaps that will help to make things a bit clearer for me. I gave it 3 stars.

Next up was Sandwich, a book I know quite a lot of you read when it came out last year and that I'd been meaning to read, and I was reminded of this fact when Bonny mentioned the author's forthcoming follow-up. This was another short book (less than 6 hours) that I ended up listening to in its entirety over the course of one day between my run, walks with Ruthie, and doing some house cleaning. The title is a reference to that stage of life when adults have to worry both about their children and their parents, though I think it's also clever as it could be the setting for the town on Cape Cod where the main character's family vacations for a week every year. Rocky is about 10 years older than I am, but I felt that I understood a lot of her struggles -- the worry about her kids, the worry about her parents, the havoc caused by menopause hormones (perimenopause, in my case), and the nostalgia for the seemingly simpler times when the kids were young and life seemed less complicated. I think this book also appealed to me because we used to vacation at the Cape when I was tween/teen, and when I was younger than that, we'd go to the New Jersey shore, so the descriptions of packing up lunches, schlepping all the stuff to the beach, and having sand get positively everywhere felt so very familiar. I gave it 4 stars.

Up next was a selection from my library holds, Ali Smith's Gliff. This is apparently meant to be a retelling or reimagining of Brave New World, which I have never read (so I cannot comment on that aspect). All I can really say is that, like other Smith novels I've read, I didn't fully understand what was going on but nevertheless enjoyed it. I've learned that I really just need to go along for the ride and not worry about the details, because they're rarely forthcoming. The best sense of the plot I got is that this is set in the near future, when technology has taken over nearly every aspect of life and has led to a surveillance state in which certain people are considered undesirable and are forced from their homes, the notice of which is a red line literally being painted around them. That is what has happened to the two siblings at the center of this story when their mother has gone to help out their ill aunt, leaving them with her partner. But when they are evicted, the partner goes to retrieve the mother and leaves the two children on their own. There's a horse involved and attempted evasion from the authorities, and later on one sibling (having lost track of the other) is looking back on this time in their life. I still feel a bit like I need someone to explain it to me, but I gave it 4 stars in spite of feeling rather clueless.

After finishing Sandwich, I thought I should listen to Catherine Newman's first book, We All Want Impossible Things. Though the characters and circumstances are completely different, many things felt similar, so it's clear to me that Newman is drawing a lot from her own life and experiences. This is a largely sad novel, about two friends since childhood, one of whom is dying of ovarian cancer. Ash and Edi have known each other for nearly all their lives, and now Edi is spending her last days in a hospice in Ash's hometown. As she grapples with the impending loss of her best friend, Ash is also struggling with her marriage and recent separation and concerns about her daughters. It seems like this novel should be a tearjerker, and it is at parts, but it also made me laugh out loud several times. I was left with the message that it shouldn't take the death of a loved one to make us appreciate the people in our lives we most care about. I gave it 4 stars.

What are you making and reading this week?