Reading & Knitting Round Up – Week 7 of 2020

It’s Wednesday – that means it’s time for a round up! On Wednesdays I love to share what I’ve been reading and knitting. This has become a touchstone for me and a post that I look forward to writing every week. Thanks to a couple of awesome linkups, I’ve restructured how I think about my reading each week and I work hard to share some knitting progress, which often got pushed aside in my life.

A big thank you goes out to:

• Kat at As Kat Knits for hosting Unraveled Wednesdays – a weekly linkup of knitters and readers, and
• Sam at Taking on a World of Words for hosting WWW Wednesday. The Ws stand for What am I currently reading? What did I recently finish reading? and What do I think I’m going to read next?

These are both lovely communities and I’m so grateful to both for introducing me to new bloggers!

Reading

Finished This Week:

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Thank you to Netgalley and HarperCollins for an advanced copy of Catherine House. This was The Secret History combined with The Stepford Wives. Ines, a young girl running from the mistakes in her past, is accepted to an elite and isolated college, Catherine House. The school is known for dangerous scientific experiments which everyone thinks have been curtailed due to ethical and experimental concerns. Catherine House is a strange place where there is no monetary cost for its students to attend, yet they pay the school in other ways.

Ines is an odd character. This is written so that everything almost seems fuzzy – she’s flighty, not at all ambitious, and a bit reckless. She’s motherly to others yet has no concern about herself. And the one thing that she is determined about is discovering what’s going on behind the locked doors of Catherine House.

I’m still not sure if I liked this and gave it 3 stars on GoodReads. It felt like a slog in some places, but picked up momentum at times. Then it became a slog again. I am glad that I read it because there were some interesting ideas, but it seemed to fall flat overall.

I wasn’t planning to read The War of Art this week, but the baby fell asleep on me while I was finishing Catherine House and I searched through my Kindle for an interesting option. This is often billed as the book for battling your inner demons and breaking through to a creative life. I detested it. There were some interesting quotes which I marked as public on GoodReads, but I found very little to be worthwhile. I only finished it because it was super short and can be read in a few hours. I kept hoping to find something redemptive, but no dice – it just got worse. I was especially put off by his assertion that people get cancer because they chose a life that didn’t fulfill their destinies. He goes on to say that when people buck off their old life and begin doing what they feel called to do, then their cancer is cured. That was just too much for me!

Currently Reading:

I’m finally reading Lethal White! Yay for getting caught up in this series! And I’m loving it – Cormoran and Robin’s relationship is moving into the spotlight and I’m curious about how this is going to end. I hope they don’t get together so that we can keep the suspense going! (don’t worry, I won’t post spoilers)

Up Next:

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Still the same three from the last couple of weeks – Nemesis, Anne of Avonlea, and Bitter Orange. My public library now has a couple more books that I’ve been dying to read (A Long Petal of the Sea and The Ten Thousand Doors of January), but I didn’t pick them up when I was in on Saturday. I’m trying not to hoard library books and am hoping they’ll be available when I need them to be!

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Knitting

There’s a tiny bit of progress on the sweater for my oldest, I finished the body! Last week I was concerned that it was going to be too short, but I compared it with another sweater he has and it should be okay (but it still looks short!). I was hoping to have a sleeve done this week – not there yet – but I’ll try to start a sleeve today! Nap time knitting hasn’t been possible over the last week — maybe this week? Or maybe I need to brainstorm again and find a good time to knit? We shall see!

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These Wednesday posts have become so much fun for me! How has your week been going?