Unraveled Wednesday: 1/3/24

I'm joining Kat and fellow Unravelers for the first Unraveled Wednesday in 2024! The year feels fresh and new, but I'm working on a project left over from last year - the Funfetti Hitchhiker. The first picture shows the whole thing but it looks so dull that it almost seems like I took a black and white photo. The second picture shows a closeup of the lovely colorful confetti bits that keep me knitting. 

I'm at 40 teeth and close to adding in the second skein. I hope to finish the Hitchhiker soon(ish) by knitting on it monogamously. I have some ideas for the yarnover rows when I'm done but I'm not sure if they will work or not. My next cast on will be Sarah's lovely design, Hydrophily (ravelry link). I dug through my stash looking for yarn that might work but I have a fairly definite idea of what I want, so I've ordered yarn that I hope will look like what I'm picturing. I want to be finished with this current Hitchhiker so I can cast on when the yarn arrives. It might be as long as four to six weeks before it's dyed and delivered, but I am excited about what I finally chose. 

I only finished one book in the last week, but I feel like I worked hard for this finish. It's not that I don't enjoy long books, but I like them to say something on all those pages. For me, The Bee Sting drifted aimlessly for far too much of its length, especially during the Imelda and Dickie sections. I won't even harp on the lack of punctuation in Imelda's section but I was glad when it was done. I found the ending to be an absurd, far-fetched, disappointing cliffhanger, but there was a big sense of relief at finally finishing the book. It took me eight days to read this but it felt more like 80.

It wasn't all bad. Paul Murray has written an interesting family story that kept me reading until the end. I was glad to read the bits of humor and wittiness as they helped. Stronger editing and a bit of punctuation could have made this a four-star book for me. If I could only figure out what happened at the end, it might even be five stars! 

"We need to take off our masks …. And that's hard, after a lifetime of hiding away, it's existentially hard, take it from me. But once you do it, the world is transformed. Once you take off your mask, it's like all the other masks become transparent, and you can see that beneath our individual quirks and weirdnesses, we're the same. We are the same in being different, in feeling bad about being different. Or to put it another way, we are all different expressions of the same vulnerability and need. That's what binds us together. And once we recognize it, once we see ourselves as a community of difference, the differences themselves no longer define us. That's when we can start to work together and things can change."

What are you making and reading this week?