Unraveled Wednesday

I'm happy to join Kat and fellow Unravelers for Unraveled Wednesday. I've got a pair of finally-kitchenered socks and the Hitchhiker-in-progress.

There's no sign of the Wollmeise roll gradient showing up in the Hitchhiker yet so I'll just have to keep knitting. 

I took a picture on the grass this week in case I need a reminder of what green grass looks like. We got about 0.1" of rain in May, so unless something changes in the next month we may have brown, crispy grass and be done mowing. I'm not really so concerned about the grass, but drought in general. (Fingers crossed for some significant precipitation.)

I finished a variety of books this week, all of them non-fiction. The first one was Margaret Renkl's The Comfort of Crows. She's written a series of 52 essays that follow the plants and creatures in her backyard for a year. She includes the personal along with the flora and fauna and there are delightful illustrations by her brother. One of the things I like best about Renkl's writing is that she is able to express joy and wonder about the natural world while still writing honestly about climate change. When this four-star book is published on October 24th, I'm going to buy a copy so I can read an essay each week.

The next book is one that I had high hopes for but it turned out not to be for me. On Our Best Behavior is subtitled The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good. I agreed with the basic premise of On Our Best Behavior - that women are raised to be "good" but most of the time there is a price to pay for this good behavior. The place I ran into some difficulty was with Ms. Loehnen framing her thesis in terms of the seven deadly sins. Her historical background on fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus and Pope Gregory didn't add much to my thought process, especially because the seven deadly sins were posited for everyone, not just women. I think that is up to each individual (man, woman, or otherwise) to try to live wholeheartedly while recognizing that meeting basic needs do not make you greedy, just as resting when necessary does not make you lazy. This book was three stars for me. 

Lastly was an interesting book I stumbled upon, Boundless by Christine Henneberg. It's billed as the story of an abortion doctor becoming a mother, but it's really the story of a young woman growing up and questioning her choices of medicine, marriage, and motherhood. Dr. Henneberg has written this story with honesty and vulnerability. She writes truthfully about wondering if she could manage to stay in medicine and still make her physician husband feel loved. The chapters are full of candor about how she loves to perform abortions, and even though this sounds like an odd thing to say, she realizes that she likes providing women with the freedom to make choices. She wrote the book in 2018 and a separate foreword in 2022, and even though she practices in California, she has had to ask the question about her patients: what would happen if they were in Texas? (and now a whole host of other states that have restricted access to abortion healthcare). This four-star book is timely and thoughtful.

What are you making and reading this week?

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I have a friend whose father has died. He is here from British Columbia and is staying with us for a week to attend the funeral and get some things accomplished. My blogging will be hit or miss over the next week, but I will be back for our Trespasses discussion on June 6th.