Unraveled, Week 43/2026

The last Wednesday in October is here, and time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers. I promised you a big sweater update, so I won't keep you waiting. I'm almost done with the first sleeve! (In fact, I likely will be done by the time you're reading this because I'm getting this post ready on Tuesday ahead of my evening knitting time.)

As with the body hem, I'm working the cuffs as a combination of the textured eyelet pattern and twisted ribbing. You may notice that I have only one skein of yarn attached; although I was alternating every round on the sleeve, I didn't want to have to weave in two ends from the cuff bind-off, so I cut off the second skein before I started the ribbing. Really, the alternating was done mostly because of inconsistencies in handspun and not for color management reasons, so I don't think you'll even be able to tell (I did it on the body, too).

While the sweater has gotten my main attention in the evening, during the day I'm churning out quite a bit of marled stockinette in the form of yet another charity hat:

Part of the Pigskin Party is that there are always special challenges. Participation is optional, but it can get you extra points. And I love more internet points! Plus, it makes this hat serve three purposes: extra points, adding to my charity donations, and using up yarn. This one is all scraps. I've been holding a strand of black yarn (leftover Knit Picks Palette and Knit Picks Stroll) alongside some purple and blue Wonderland Yarns/Frabjous Fibers leftover from a sweater I knit for Molly nearly a decade ago. I really love holding multiple strands together because it uses up quite a lot of yarn but doesn't take that long to knit.

As to reading, I have four finishes this week:

Solace in Winter by Mary Lawson (digital)

My rating: 4 stars

In today's hectic world, it is a comfort to visit simpler times through the books I read, so it was a treat to travel to the winter of 1969 in a small town in Canada. Though the setting is the same as Mary Lawson's earlier novel, A Town Called Solace, this isn't an continuation but rather a totally different story. In Solace in Winter, we meet Jack, a widower missing his late wife and who has a difficult relationship with his adult daughter. Though he's a bit of a loner, he doesn't hesitate to help when he encounters first a badly injured dog and then a badly injured young man at the same dangerous curve in the road. He ends up housing them both while they recover, forming a bond with the dog (whom he names Lola) and the young man, Chris, who had fled to Canada to escape the draft and Vietnam. They all have pain in their pasts and aren't quick to reveal their secrets, but somehow these three come to trust each other, helped along by the local vet and the wife of the town's only police officer, who was a nurse before she became a mother. Just as they seem to be finding their way to recovering, Jack's daughter shows up, full of suspicions, and threatens to destroy these new friendships.

This is a quiet, thoughtful novel about the power of human kindness and care to ease pain, both physical and emotional, and it shows how sharing ourselves with others can help us to feel more whole.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House/Knopf Canada for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published November 10, 2026.

Switzy by Emma Cline (digital)

My rating: 4 stars

I'd had this buzzy book on hold for a while (and then suspended my hold for a bit) mostly because it was on the Booker longlist, and for a while I wasn't sure if I wanted to read it. But, as always, the reviews of readers I trust convinced me to, and I'm glad I did. This book tells the story of David Hastings, a 70-something man in the throes of Alzheimer's disease who is on his way to Switzerland to for a physician-assisted suicide. Along the way he has stops in London, to see his daughter, and to a small town in France, to meet an old schoolmate to whom he owes an apology for his long-ago treatment. Though the narrative is told in close third person, it gives the reader a very good sense of what it must be like to be dealing with dementia, with everything mostly clear one minute to immersion in an old memory the next to confusion and anger the very next. David isn't an entirely likable person, but that doesn't prevent you from feeling for him. I think Cline is incredibly successful in both putting together a narrative that feels just as jumbled and frustrating as the thoughts of a person with dementia would be and in creating a character who is unlikable but also inspires empathy.

Shift and Dust by Hugh Howey (audio)
My rating: 3 stars / 3.5 stars

After reading the first book in the Silo series, I figured I might as well read the other two in the trilogy, particularly as I'm interested in the Apple TV series and would prefer to know all of the story before I start watching. The second book, Shift, goes back in time from the first book to explore how the world came to be the way it was and why the silos were built in the first place. There's also some background on a character from the first book. I thought it dragged a bit and was longer than it needed to be, which I think often happens in the second book of a three-book series, and I think it also raised more questions than it answered. 

The third book pulled most of the loose threads together, coming back in time to the end of the first book and rejoining that book's main character in her efforts to uncover the truth. Things get pretty dark in this last book, but I think it does have a happy-ish ending.

I can't say I loved this series, but it was intriguing, and it's certainly a good warning about what can happen when a few people get too much power and think they know what's best for the world. And I am interested to see how it's portrayed on screen.

Reading this week is a little limited because most of what I'm reading is for work -- the December commencement lists have started to come in. So I'd love to hear what you've been reading!