Unraveled, Week 3/2026

It's already Wednesday -- a nice benefit of a long weekend! It's my favorite blogging day of the week because it means I get to link up with Kat and the Unravelers.

Molly had a remote learning day yesterday, thanks to frigid temperatures, so I had her home with me and didn't have to do school pickup, which meant longer snoozy time with Ruthie. Thanks to that extra time, I got in a little more knitting and finished up another triple-stranded scrappy hat:

Yes, technically it was still on the needles, but when you have a dog sleeping next to you and want them to continue to sleep, you put off finishing the crown of a hat until later. This was a hat I pretty much made up as I went along, and I rather like how it turned out. I did take some notes as I worked so I can reknit it in one yarn -- in fact, I have some fuzzy bright pink yarn that would be perfect for it. But first I'll weave in my ends, weigh my remaining yarn, and give this one a block.

With all the travel in the past week, I haven't gotten a ton of reading done, but I did manage to finish three books.

The River Has Roots is a novella that is a sort of fairy tale about two sisters and the unbreakable bond of their love for one another. There is some magic in the river and in grammar, there is a love story, and there is a villain. I listened to the audiobook over the course of last Thursday, and while I really enjoyed the addition of sound effects and song in the background of the reading, I think this is a book I would very much like to reread with my eyes so I can both take my time and flip back and forth. Admittedly, I don't comprehend what I read with my ears as well as what I read with my eyes, so perhaps it wasn't the best choice. But it's well done and a great little piece of semi-escapist fantasy. I gave it 4 stars.

The Devil's Grip is the final work a small group of us are reading for our year or so of focusing on women in translation. It follows a woman who has traveled to Italy and taken up with a man she describes as ugly but whose transformation leads him to be attractive to other women. He cheats on her, and when she confronts him, he beats her. So she begins an affair of her own, with an American man who convinces her to come back to New Orleans with him. She finally gets up the courage to leave her boyfriend and fly to the United States, only to encounter a potentially even more dangerous situation. I won't bury the lede: I didn't like this book. I didn't understand what the woman saw in her boyfriend in the first place, I didn't like that she put up with his abuse, and I just didn't like her as a character. I would have DNF'd it if we weren't going to be discussing it. I gave it 2 stars, mainly because I could appreciate the writing even if I didn't care for the story.

My last finish for the week was, thankfully, a little lighter. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible, which won the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction, is told by the titular character, a 60-something gay high school philosophy teacher who lives in Beirut with his mother. In flashbacks, we learn about some of his formative childhood experiences and how they influenced his life's course. Throughout it all there is the constant of his relationship with his mother, arguably the most important relationship in his life, both as a child and as an adult. It's funny, it's sad, and it's heartwarming. I really enjoyed it and gave it 4 stars.

I'm currently reading The Small and the Mighty on Kindle and Florence Adler Swims Forever on paper, the latter of which I was handed down by my aunt when we were in Florida.

What are you making and reading this week?