sending out an s.o.s.

above: Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night by Dora Wheeler Keith (1856-1940)

part i {the yarn}

I often think of Penelope when I unravel a lot of yarn — and it’s especially comical this week, since Troy’s out of town… (Fans of The Odyssey, or anyone who remembers it, know what I mean.

Where to begin?

How ’bout with that blooper I mentioned. That was my first unraveling.

The shortest version: I just…kept…going…for 23″ in garter rib and left no armholes on the front of the sweater. (Audrey suggested a short poncho, instead? For her brother. It’d also make a fine knitted dickey. Which is just what it’d have looked like, had I continued.) Anyway, that was an easy fix. It made a fine pile of yarn to wind, but no biggie.

The troubles came Monday night, after accounting for arms and reaching the neck.

Now, I’ll admit it’s been a hot minute since I’ve made a sweater. (7 years?) But I’ve never struggled [this much] reading the pattern. With my stitches, sure. But not the pattern.

In fact one thing I love about knitting is that, most of the time, as long as I keep putting one foot in front of the other without overthinking, it all works outs in the end. Even if I can’t wrap my head around it at the time? Just follow the pattern, Carolyn.

And that almost always works.

Except when it doesn’t. Which leads to my second and third unravelings… Knitters who know what they’re doing, consider this an SOS!

The back neckline went just fine. I bound off in the middle of the row and decreased at the neck edge, no problem.

The front neckline’s a different story:

At first, I thought my only problem was whether to do those 6/4/3 bind-off stitches every row, or every RS row. I tried both. Unraveled both. Because…

No matter what I did, I ended up with a ‘floating’ active stitch still on my needle, with the bind-offs behind it and nowhere for that lone stitch to go. (I think of that stitch as the bind-off ‘anchor.’)

The only thought I had — tired, on cold meds, and unraveled myself — was, perhaps, to bind off those 6/4/3 stitches and break my yarn each time? Like, commit. Full stop. Bind. Off.

But I’ve never knit a neckline that way. And if I’m [most likely] wrong, what a mess that would be.

Does anyone have sage advice?

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part ii {the yarns}

Reminder: I’ve let got of star rating; when choosing a book for myself, it’s simply too subjective and often misguides me. I’m sure you can glean plenty just from my take on each book. And if you’ve read any of these, I’d love to hear! It’s most fun to discuss when we differ as readers, I think….

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I’m so glad I stuck with The Rabbit Hutch.

I almost set it down.

(I’d just finished The Book of Goose, which was excellent…but not what you’d call uplifting! And The Rabbit Hutch has a dark start, itself. And I didn’t want dark.)

A voice in my head said Read it anyway.

Tess Gunty’s smart, layered debut novel won the 2022 National Book Award (+ more). While there’s no arguing it’s a dark premise with troubled, complicated characters, there are enough absurdities to keep reality at bay and the book, entertaining. It could almost read as interconnected stories — and initially requires attention to keep everyone straight. (I wasn’t sure whose story it was, at first. In a way, it belongs to more than one of them.)

From Goodreads, abbreviated: Blandine isn’t like the other residents of her building: An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents — neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana.

[Beautiful, intelligent, high school dropout] Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys [who, like her, have aged out of foster care–which repeatedly failed them anyway].

…[C]ulminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.

Every blurb I’ve read leaves out some of the most interesting characters. (It’s impossible to squeeze them all in.) Elsie Blitz, for example, former child celebrity who dies in her 80s, leaves behind an estranged and angry 50-something son (a more absurd character in the book). She writes her own obituary–and if you ask me, the book is worth the read just for that chapter! (Excerpted here, in Granta.)

Which leads to another great element: format. I love when an author’s creativity spills over from straight text — which happens a lot here. Gunty plays with chapter length; she includes lists, internet commentary, emojis, online obituaries, and drawings. While The Rabbit Hutch is entirely ‘listenable,’ you have more to gain from holding this one in your hands.

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I couldn’t do much last week, besides read and try to sleep, so I finally finished Bel Canto (my bedtime book), and I read some just-for-fun suspense. Mini takes on those:

Ann Patchett based her fourth novel, Bel Canto (2001), on a 1996 terrorist takeover of the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru. It’s very good reading but not a page-turner for me, so it took a while to finish as a ‘before bed book.’ Full of curiosity, compassion, love, loss, and risk, Bel Canto makes a great case for breaking down barriers and what we think we know about others, especially when we only see them as part of a group. It’s an unlikely beautiful portrait of humanity.

Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People and Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers came to mind at the start. (Two other novels, in recent memory, based on holding hostages.) While I’m an avid reader of all three of these authors, Patchett’s comes out on top for me.

Sick days served for page-turning entertainment: Alice Feeney’s Rock, Paper, Scissors and Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid were at once fun, a-light-kind-of-dark, and suspenseful.

I’ve not read much psych-suspense, so I had to remind myself that occasional corny dialogue and unlikely set-ups are part of the package here. While I’m not sure I’ll read more Alice Feeney (maybe?), I’ll definitely follow up with the second in McFadden’s Housemaid series.

Having heard so much good about Nathan Hill’s Wellness, I’ve just started his 2016 debut novel, The Nix, and I find it fantastically entertaining on audio. (Long!) (Should serve well for travel.)

And…that’s a Wednesday wrap! Thank you, Kat, for the chance to link, share, and see what everyone’s up to.

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What are you making…thinking about making…reading…or otherwise?