Unraveled, Week 18/2026

Wednesday again -- time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers!

Not that much progress has been made on either of my two WIPs, so I'll spare you another photo of a little bit of a sleeve and some ribbing. Instead, I present for your viewing pleasure the four pairs of Mother's Day socks, all washed and blocked:

I don't feel a need to block socks I knit for myself, but I like to do it for socks I'm giving as gifts, not least because it helps to get rid of the magic loop ridges. These will get wrapped up later this week, and who knows, they might even get worn right away because it's supposed to be a slightly chilly weekend!

In addition to a slower week of knitting for me, it's been a slower week of reading as well, though I think that's in large part due to the fact that one of the two books I finished was 700 pages.

I had heard about The Remembered Soldier from several friends who had read it after it was named to the International Booker Prize longlist. It follows the life of a Belgian man who had fought in WWI but had lost his memory and had been living in a psychiatric asylum until a woman shows up and identifies him as her husband, Amand. Though he has no memory of her, he returns home with her and learns about his life as Amand, a photographer and shopkeeper with his wife, Julianne, and two children. Over time, Amand and Julienne have to get to know each other and fall in love all over again, even as Amand struggles with the horrifying dreams of war and his uncertainty of what is real and what is not. Then he starts "disappearing" for longer and longer periods of time, during which he claims to be someone else -- a man married to someone else. What is real? What is dream or imagined? Are these disappearances caused by the trauma of war or glimpses of his real self? And can he not remember Julienne because he has truly lost his memory or because he never had the memories to begin with? This is a long book, and it's written almost entirely in run-on sentences that give it a sense of breathlessness, but it gives the reader a lot to think about and certainly raises some big questions about memory and its reliability. I gave it 4 stars.

Crooks was mentioned on a recent episode of the What Should I Read Next podcast and sounded like something fun and a little lighter, which I was in the mood for. It follows members of the Mercurio family, who come from a long line of criminals and thieves -- crooks, in other words. Each section of the book follows a different member of the family, starting with the father and then moving through his children, all of whom are involved in crime in some way. The exceptions are Alice, the smart one, who has known what her family is all along and has avoided it for most of her life, and Piggy, the baby, who feels like he's missing out. I had a little trouble staying focused on this book at the beginning, but the narrator does a great job of reading with appropriate emotion and made it more entertaining. I'd never heard of this book or this author before, and I can't say I'm eager to read more of his work, but this made me laugh, and that's what I wanted. I gave it 4 stars as well.

I'm currently in the home stretch of The Hakawati, am a little more than a third through Dominion, and just started a really interesting work of nonfiction on audio.

What are you making and reading this week?