Unraveled, Week 36/2026

Did anyone else wake up yesterday and think it was Monday? Apparently a lot of my neighbors were also confused about the day because they already had their trash out, forgetting that when there's a holiday on Monday, trash pickup gets pushed back a day, so ours isn't until Thursday this week.

Today, however, is Wednesday, which means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers. And it's the first day of the NFL season, which means it's also the first day of the Pigskin Party and I can cast on my new sweater. I had a pretty good feeling about getting stitch gauge on my swatch, but I was astounded when I measured once it was dry and saw that I'd gotten both stitch and row gauge -- for only the second time, I think, in my entire knitting career!

As a reminder, I'm planning to knit a long-sleeved Seashore Stroll (Ravelry link) with this yarn, a blended merino from FatCatKnits that I spun (unbelievably) a decade ago. I think this will be a great fall/spring (and maybe winter in Florida) sweater, so I'm excited to get it on the needles.

I've finished four books since this time last week:

The Artist and the Feast by Lucy Steeds

My rating: 4 stars

In the summer of 1920, Joseph, a young British journalist, arrives in Provence at the remote house of the reclusive French painter Edouard Tartuffe to interview him. But Tartuffe wants nothing to do with him until his niece and housekeeper, Ettie, convinces him that Joseph could serve as a model for his next painting. As Joseph lives with the two for the summer, he and Ettie are drawn to each other and begin to learn about each other's secrets and painful pasts, but there's still something mysterious about Ettie and her painter uncle and why they've hidden away from the rest of society. This book raises questions about the value of art and who is allowed to create it -- and how who creates art determines its value to the wider world. I picked this up at Vera's recommendation and enjoyed it, though it does have its faults (some of which Kym pointed out in her review).

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

My rating: 2.5 stars

I'd had this book on my TBR for a while but was moved to read it when it was mentioned last week on the What Should I Read Next? podcast. The premise sounds promising: A British explorer, following the many stories of the legendary city of El Dorado, determines to find it deep in the Amazon rainforest. After several failed expeditions, he sets off again with his teenaged son and his son's best friend -- only to vanish. Grann, a journalist who not only did the research but attempted to follow in the explorer's footsteps, chronicles the expeditions and the general fascination with finding the fabled City of Z, which may or may not have existed. But I found it hard to stay engaged with the narrative and frequently didn't remember names, and frankly there were many things related to the Amazon expeditions that were really hard to listen to, as they involved a great deal of illness and physical suffering. I kept with it only because I didn't have anything else queued up and also wanted to know if there was any great discovery in the end, but there was no particular resolution, and I wouldn't really recommend it. (Also, what is with audiobook narrators reading dates as cardinal numbers rather than ordinal?)

The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian

My rating: 4 stars

I put this new release on hold based on Carole's recommendation. At the end of the summer of 1978, teenage golf phenom Mira is getting ready to head to her freshman year at Yale when one of the practice shots she's taken at her family's golf club somehow goes through the net meant to stop it, hitting a caddy (and her former classmate) in the head and almost instantly killing him. Everyone agrees at first that it was a terrible accident, but then authorities start taking a closer look and Mira comes under suspicion, especially when her earlier instances of recklessness are viewed in light of the fact that she's been carrying on an affair with a much older married man. Mira tells the story, revealing that now, many decades later, she is a successful novelist writing her first memoir. She is brutally honest about her questionable behavior as a teen while also exposing the double standard applied to women versus men at that time. I have to admit that I felt a bit icky at the beginning of the book, namely because a male author was writing a certain way as a teenaged female narrator, but I'm glad I stuck with it. I wouldn't necessarily call it a thriller, but there is a bit of a mystery to be unraveled about what happened and who was responsible, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy

My rating: 4.5 stars

Sometimes you pick a book at random because it's available from the library and you get really lucky. This was one such book. Beth Macy, a journalist and nonfiction writer probably best known for Dopesick, grew up in Urbana, Ohio, where her family struggled with her father's alcoholism and persistent poverty, but thanks to a Pell Grant was able to go to college, eventually moving on to bigger cities for her journalism career. But when she returned to her hometown in 2020 as her mother was dying, she found a drastically different city, both economically and politically. This book is part personal memoir and part exploration of how so many smaller American cities have changed, especially in the last decade. She interviewed family members and former classmates who had turned to far-right politics and conspiracy theories. She spoke with teachers, counselors, and social workers about high rates of truancy and falling graduation rates. And she spoke with scholars about the trends across the country, noting how a decline in the availability of reliable, fact-checked news sources has corresponded to a rise in distrust of the media in general and a growing acceptance of what we might call "alternative facts." There is a lot to unpack here, but I never lost interest or the thread, and in fact I might want to read it again on the page (I listened to Macy read the audio to me). I found it to be well written, well researched, and really fascinating -- and also disheartening. If you like this sort of book, I'd recommend it.

I am currently reading Shy Creatures in print, House on Endless Waters on my iPad, and The Girl Who Wrote in Silk on audio via Hoopla. What are you reading and making this week?