Unraveled, Week 39/2025

Happy Wednesday, friends! On the one hand, I'm glad it's already Wednesday, but on the other hand, Monday and Tuesday ended up being such long days that I feel ready for the weekend already. Time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers and see what everyone is up to!

I barely sat down for more than 20 minutes on Monday until just before bed, and yesterday we were at services in the morning, then out to lunch, and then Ruthie's schedule was so off that she didn't take her usual afternoon nap. All of that meant little to no knitting time for me, so I don't have much of a knitting update today because my WIPs look virtually the same as they did on Monday (I've added just a few rows to the shawl). I can report, though, that Ruthie did really well with all the people on Monday evening. I'm sure the sedative helped (and I'm keeping the few we have left for Thanksgiving!), but she did start to come out of her shell just a bit toward the end of the evening. She seemed really interested in my niece, which I guess is no big surprise because she's the human closest in size to her!

They really seemed to enjoy each other, and I'm hoping they'll get to play again soon when there aren't quite so many other people around. Apparently my niece is very into Leo lately, too, and Leo is being a good boy and tolerating her. As you can see from the photo, she's started pulling herself up to stand -- she was even standing on tiptoes as she was trying to hold on to a higher step at one point! I'm sure she's going to be running after both dogs before we know it.

The reading has not been as voluminous this past week, but it has been very good. I've finished two books, both of which are up for the National Book Award (one for fiction, one for nonfiction).

A Guardian and a Thief is a work of speculative fiction set in Kolkata, India, in the not-so-distant future when climate change has caused temperatures and seas to rise, leading to crop failures and food shortages. In a week's time, Ma, her 2-year-old daughter, and her father are due to leave to join her husband in Michigan, having secured valuable climate visas that will allow them to leave India and settle in the United States. But the night after obtaining these precious documents, they are stolen, leaving their potentially lifesaving trip in jeopardy. In turn we learn what led the thief to Ma's house and that her seeming good luck in having food for her family and an exit strategy haven't entirely come her way honestly. This book paints a fairly grim picture of what happens when there isn't enough to go around to ensure everyone's survival, the lengths even an otherwise good person will go to in order to feed their family, and the rationalizations and lies people will tell themselves to justify their actions. This isn't a story with a happy ending -- but often that's reality, so it feels genuine. I gave it 4 stars. Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published October 14, 2025.

My other finish this week was The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life, which I listened to via Hoopla. As the title implies, much of this memoir is about the author's experience running a farm in Vermont, where she and her family raise Icelandic sheep and try to be conscientious stewards of the land. Although the setting sounds idyllic, the author is frank about the hard work, expenses, and life-and-death realities of raising livestock. Amidst the stories of lambing and sheep shearing are interludes of history, such as how the Merino sheep got to North America and the cruel attempts of white settlers to keep Indigenous tribes of the Southwest from the sheep they traditionally raised. And it's not all about the farm, with moving and wistful passages about raising children (the author's stepdaughter and daughter) and losing her mother to dementia. In spite of some bad blunders by the reader, I found this book to be thoroughly enchanting and would recommend it highly to anyone interested in the fiber arts. I gave it 5 stars.

I'm currently in a good place where I have more to read than I have time for -- to the point where I actually had to suspend a hold on a library book because I have too many others ahead of it! My top priority is finishing Flashlight, which I've been reading since late last week and which just made the Booker Prize shortlist. And I'm also roughly halfway through a reread of Mrs. Dalloway, having last read it during my senior year of high school -- I'm even using the same copy I used back then, which has all my notes in it and even contained a bookmark on which I'd passed notes back and forth with a classmate talking about where we thought we might choose to go to college, which is quite a trip down memory lane!

What are you making and reading this week?