Unraveled, Week 42/2025

Good morning! It's Wednesday again, and although Kat is away this week and there's no formal link-up, I like sticking to a schedule.

Here is where my WIPs stand:

As of Tuesday afternoon, when I took this photo, I had one repeat of Chart B left on my shawl (each pattern repeat is three repeats of the chart). By the time you're reading this, I'm hoping to be further along and may well have finished, but the rows are so long by now that I'm counting on needing another day to get through those last dozen of them. And then, of course, I'll have to weave in ends and block. I'm fairly certain that I will have an FO to share by the end of the week, however, and that will mean I can also turn my attention back to the socks for my sister-in-law. I've been ignoring them for the past several days while I focused my attention on the shawl, but I'm nearly ready to start the heel flap on the second sock and don't expect to need much more time to finish up the pair.

Reading this week has a study in extremes -- two very short audiobooks and one long digital book.

Coming from the Booker Prize longlist was Universality, a very short novel (I listened to all of it in less than 24 hours) that packs a punch. Like the author's first novel, I suspect this is one I'm going to need to reread with my eyes because so much went by so fast in the audio. This starts out with article written about an event at a farm owned by a banker during COVID lockdown in which a member of an anarchist group is seriously injured with a gold bar. But is that really what happened? The story is reexamined through the point of view of various people involved directly or indirectly in the incident, and these alternate points of view show just how much power can be held in the written word. There's also a lot here that probably went over my head because it's focused on the UK and British views on race, class, money, etc. As with the earlier book, I was impressed by how much heavy stuff could be crammed into such a brief novel without having the feeling of being overwhelmed. I gave it 4 stars.

My next finish was one I'd been waiting for from the library for a while, and it was worth the wait (and the time it took to read when work kept getting in the way). Katabasis is the third R.F. Kuang novel I've read and my favorite so far. As was the case in Babel, there's a strong element of magic in this one, principally that it's a field of serious study ("Magick") and the scholarly focus of the main character, Alice Law, who determines that, following the death of her Cambridge advisor, she must go to Hell to find him and find some way of bringing him back to life, if only so that she can achieve her goal of having a career in academia. She is horrified to discover that her fellow advisee, Peter Murdoch, has done the same thing, and now both of them have to navigate the courts of Hell to find their advisor. In the process, they discover much more about themselves. I love that Kuang, in her typical genius way of skewering a particular segment of society, make Hell resemble a college campus, turning this into a truly funny work of satire of academia. But it's also clear how smart she is in how much actual knowledge of math, philosophy, physics, religion, language, and classics she weaves throughout the narrative; frankly, sometimes I didn't feel smart enough to understand the book! It's funny at times, sad at times, and at times goes on a little too long, but I really enjoyed it and felt it had an especially satisfying ending. I gave it 4.5 stars.

I really enjoyed Sarah Moss's memoir earlier this year but had only previously read one of her novels, so this past weekend I listened to another. Ghost Wall follows 16-year-old Silvie, who is on holiday with parents in the north of England joining an experiential archaeology course. Silvie's father, a bus driver, is obsessed with England's ancient history and insists that she and her mother be as authentic as possible in this experience, which means eating only what they can hunt or gather and wearing clothing that people then would have worn. He is also harsh and demanding and physically punishes both women when he feels they've disobeyed him or embarrassed him. Silvie longs to escape her stifling home and gets a taste of what life might be like as a university student from her interactions with the students on the course, but it's made clear to her again and again that she is still under her father's control. It all comes to a head when her father and the course professor decide to reenact a human sacrifice. Will Silvie be a willing participant, and how far will her father go? It's a very well-written book that captures some very strong emotions in few pages (or, in my case, few hours of listening time). I gave it 4 stars.

I'm currently reading three books: on paper, Celestial Bodies, for our Women in Translation study; digitally, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny; and on audio, Is a River Alive? (which just mentioned the term "katabasis" -- don't you just love it when there are connections like that in your reading?!).