Unraveled Wednesday(!) | Week 2 of 2025

Good morning from a very cold New Hampshire. We are in the midst of a string of frigid days with wind chills below zero and are staying warm with homemade lattes, hot chocolates, and lots of warm woolens! I hope you’re also staying warm wherever you are.

It has been a long time since I’ve managed to link up with Kat on her Unraveled Wednesday. I used to do this every single week, but fell out of practice quite a while back. I’m making an effort to get back into the swing of linkups this year and am delighted to be here today. Today’s post is an update on my most recent knitting and the books I’ve finished in the last week.

Knitting:

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I opened my first “sock club” package this week. I was delighted to find an ancient skein of Lorna’s Laces, which I’ve had for at least 15 years at this point? This yarn is shepherd sport and I only had one skein in my stash – not ideal for a pair of socks. I also remember there being a issue with color pooling in Lorna’s Laces? And still – I’m doing this because I want to use up my stash even if the projects aren’t perfect. So my kitchen scale helped me divide this into two balls and I’ll make toe up socks and knit until each ball runs out of yarn. As long as I get past the heel then they should be good enough and they will be roughly the same size. My strategy is working so far:

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Reading:

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty
“We are made of stories, and if we don’t know them — the ones that make us — how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?” p226

Fire Exit landed on my TBR because it’s on this year’s Aspen Words longlist. This book is slow-paced and written in a straightforward way, but is so emotional and gut-wrenching. Talty asks questions about identities and how to cope with decisions from our pasts.

Charles is a lonely man in Maine. He is struggling with sobriety, his mother is in the early stages of dementia, he feels guilty about the death of his stepfather, and he’s estranged from his daughter. It sounds depressing, I know. But I really liked Charles and how he went through life, trying to make up for decisions he’s not proud of and to be a good person. This book reminded me of a Wendell Berry novel in a lot of ways, including the writing style and stories of good people trying to do the right things. I enjoyed how this novel made me slow down and sit with Charles’s emotions which, while our circumstances are different, seemed to mirror a lot of my own.

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Guide Me Home by Attica Locke
“Turned out the Founding Fathers were just men who liked to talk big all night after tying on a few, scribbling down laws and ideals that contradicted themselves every third paragraph, dreaming up an institution of freedom on a foundation built by slaves. It was all a house of cards. Smoke and mirrors. Just marks on parchment. With holes you could drive a truck through. And a talented huckster got behind the wheel of one and drove it all the way to the White House. It was reported that he had told over ten thousand lies since taking the oath of office, had broken umpteen laws. Darren would have said allegedly, but the president had either committed or admitted to many of these on live television. And no one seemed to care. Not really.”

I know that’s a long quote but it seems to sum up my unhappiness with the US and why I loved this series so much. Guide Me Home is the third (and final?!) book in the Hwy 59 series. All three books follow Darren Matthews, a Black Texas Ranger in East Texas, the same part of the world where I grew up. He is a complicated character with some questionable decisions in his past but always working towards being a better person (maybe that’s this week’s reading theme?).

In this third book, his mother comes to him about a missing girl at a sorority house at Stephen F. Austin University. With just a little digging, Darren discovers that there’s more than the sorority is letting on and that this girl could really be in danger. Darren’s investigation uncovers so many rotten things lurking just below the surface of our society and it felt so satisfying to have a writer put words to the feelings that have been bubbling up for me in the last decade or so. I hope you’ll give this series a chance and check out the first book, Bluebird, Bluebird.

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I am currently reading The Power, Sky Full of Elephants, and Human Acts. They are keeping my brain well-occupied! I love it when books challenge the world around me and teach me about history, creativity, and new ways to approach old questions and doubts. This is why I read.

I am so excited to have written this blog post and to get back in the habit of linking up with Kat. I hope you’ll check out some of the other bloggers who left their links if you also loving stitching and reading. And until Friday – I hope you get a chance to do a few things that recharge your battery. Take good care!