Unraveled, Week 38/2025

Hello and happy Wednesday, friends! I hope you're having a good week. It's been a bit exhausting here, but the sun is shining, my sinus infection is finally going away, and it's my favorite day of the blogging week. Time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers!

You saw my sock progress on Monday, so I'll spare you more of that and instead show you how my two-color shawl has grown:

I am about halfway through the pattern repeats now, but of course the rows get longer as you go, so there's still a lot more knitting still to do than already done. The pattern has two main body charts, one with the first color dominant and one with the second color dominant, and you alternate three repeats of each for each section. Now that there's more knit, the zig-zag patterning is also much more apparent. I'm also at the point where I basically just have to do a quick check-in at the beginning of each right-side row to get my bearings and then I'm off the chart.

I've also managed to put in a bit more time at my wheel. I'm starting to wonder if this yarn is just going to look grayish brown when it's plied, but we'll see -- I very well may be surprised!

There hasn't been as much reading in the past week as in weeks prior -- not entirely a surprise, given a puppy patient and a big work project -- but I have managed to finish two books since this time last week.

When I asked for audiobook recommendations recently, Pam mentioned Kevin Wilson's latest book, but as you'd expect, it has a long wait on Libby and isn't on Hoopla. Hoopla did, however, have two of his earlier books available, so I decided to finally read Nothing to See Here, a book that many people I know had long ago read and that I actually had a copy of on my shelf, having picked it up from a Little Free Library. The premise of this book is a bit ridiculous: Lillian, our narrator, gets a call one day from Madison, who was her roommate for a year she spent at an elite boarding school. Madison is now married to a senator being considered for secretary of state, but there's a big secret in his family that could derail his plans: His children from his first marriage spontaneously burst into flames. Madison asks Lillian to come take care of the children for the summer while the vetting process is ongoing, and Lillian, whose life since leaving that school has been rather aimless, sees it as a way to get out of her mother's house and get a change of scenery. Though the idea of children catching on fire is bizarre and totally unrealistic, it's a creative way to portray people who feel like they don't fit in or aren't loved by their family. Yes, it's all rather preposterous, but it's also funny and surprisingly touching. And it was an easy listen. I gave it 4 stars.

It's a good thing I was listening to a lighthearted book, because my other finish this week was the complete opposite. As Night Watch opens, it is 1874 and 12-year-old ConaLee and her mother are being driven to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum by Papa, the man who ConaLee knows is the father of the three babies her mother has given birth to in the past two years and who they have just given to nearby families but not to her. She doesn't really know who he is, only that since he came to their West Virginia mountain home, her mother has virtually stopped talking and stopped being able to care for herself or her children. Papa tells ConaLee that she must pretend to be a neighbor of her mother's, call her by a different name, and see that she's taken care of in the asylum -- and then he drives off, leaving them alone. The story then jumps back in time a decade, to the last year of the Civil War and the experience of a nameless sharpshooter in the Union Army leading up to the Battle of the Wilderness. And we get some of the story of Dearbhla, the older Irish woman who lived near ConaLee and her mother and who was more intimately connected with them than ConaLee ever knew. All of this is set against the background of the hospital, a real place founded according to the principles of a "moral" cure. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2024, and if you look at the reviews on Goodreads, it's a mixed bag. It's not an easy book to read and includes some very difficult subject matter -- war, sexual assault/rape, racism, etc. -- but I think it was extremely well done. I gave it 5 stars.

What are you making and reading this week?