Unraveled Wednesday: 10/2/24

I'm joining Kat and the Unravelers today with a new hat on the needles (for the second time) and a book or two.

After taking a closer look at the hat I showed you last week, I thought that the circumference around the bottom looked a bit large and the ribbing seemed floppy. When I measured it, it was 28 inches. My kids have big heads but not that big! Then I took a closer look at the needle I was using and after squinting at it in bright light, found that I was using a size 8 instead of a 6. It was a rookie mistake, and there was nothing to do but unravel and start over again. I worked on the ribbing while spending time in the car and even managed to do a few cables in the car. So the hat is moving forward, albeit slowly. But the yarn is so nice I'm knitting it twice. 

Last week Sarah reviewed Happening, and I decided to give it a try. It is a non-fiction recounting of the author's abortion in France when she was 23 years old. There is evidence of Ernaux's relative immaturity at age 23 (alternately worrying about getting rid of her pregnancy and almost ignoring it) but since abortion was illegal in France at the time it is also horrifying. The author states that she is recreating this event decades later based on her diaries and she has trouble recalling feelings and moods. Reconstructing material procedures was awful enough but I wish the author could have included more of what she thought and felt at the time. Three and a half stars rounded up.

I also read Small Rain by Garth Greenwell. Brilliant, evocative, and vivid are words that come to me when trying to describe Small Rain. This is a novel about a poet who experiences sudden debilitating pain and eventually ends up in the ICU. It is about medicine and the dysfunctional American healthcare system but also much more - meditations on art, beauty, memory, poetry, and introducing his literature students to a poem by George Oppen. His poem "Westyrn Wynds" gives the novel its title. Greenwell's narrator has quite a bit of time to muse while in his hospital bed, and his thoughts veer off into interesting tangents like his childhood, his life with L., and their disastrous home renovations. I appreciated the contrast between the narrator's literary mind and the clinical logic of medicine. The author narrated the audiobook and his voice added to this marvelous book. Four and a half stars rounded up.

“My ignorance was an indictment of something, me, my education, the public schools where I was raised, that I could be so helpless when it came to anything useful, that the only technologies I knew anything about were antiquated, unnecessary technologies: iambic pentameter, functional harmony, the ablative absolute. They were the embellishments of life, accoutrements of civilization, never the necessary core—though they were necessary to me.”

What are you making and reading this week?