by Kat | Jan 24, 2018 | General, Unraveled Wednesday
Winter time, and the knitting is easy…
The last time I talked about my knitting, I was in the midst of determining if I had enough yarn to finish my Stopover. So, some crazy knitty math was done and it will be close, but by my calculations, I think I will have the tiniest bit of yarn left so I will have enough to kitchner the underarms! I have started my second sleeve and am inching along on it. I have not been doing much knitting (outside of that birthday knitting that is finished and will be blocking today!)
However, Death Cleaning is winning big. I don’t know what got into me, but maybe this stretch of warm weather we have had has given me a bit of Spring Fever and I have been cleaning accordingly!
However, reading has not slowed at all and it has improved dramatically from last week!
I finished The Orphan’s Tale and Lie With Me. One was awesome, the other not so much. I gave The Ophan’s Tale 5-stars. It was moving and at times heartbreaking. I fell in love with Noa and Astrid and I highly recommend it! Lie With Me got 2-stars from me. I had high hopes for this book based upon the description from the publisher but, honestly, for most of the book I felt like this… what the heck is going on??? The story unfolded so slowly, it almost didn’t. The main character is horrid. I disliked him immensely and could not muster any sympathy for him. The ending did tie up so loose ends, but I felt it the story could have been told better. The ending felt rushed after the slog of the first 2/3’s of the book and sadly, I do not recommend this one at all.
I also began and finished Behold the Dreamers. It was so wonderful, and I really loved it. It is a 5-star book and I highly recommend it. I listened, and the narration is marvelous and even better is the singing that would be lost in the written word. The melodious language is captivating. I laughed, I got angry, and I cried. It is a powerful and moving story!
I also started The Girl in The Ice, I am not far into it, but so far, so good!
I also have some very, very, very good things in my queue:
The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Never Let Me Go, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, and up next is Armand Gamache in A Trick of the Light.
I just want to do nothing but read all the things!
What about you? What is consuming you this week?
If you are joining us today, please leave your link below in the comments and thank you!
by Kat | Jan 17, 2018 | General, Unraveled Wednesday
Greetings Unravelers!
It has been quite the week here with the continuation of cold and snowy weather. I might almost think I am back in Michigan!
Fortunately, all this cold makes it easy to knit sweaters! And, knit I have! I am moving along nicely with my Stopover. Sleeve one is well underway (and much farther than the above image shows) and sleeve two will be soon to follow!
Add to all this much improved reading this past week and you have the makings of a practically perfect week!
I finished The Last Tudor, and gave it 4-stars.
I started listening to The Orphan’s Tale and I am about half way through. So far, it is wonderful!
I am reading Lie With Me, which I got an ARC from Netgalley. So far, I am finding it very hard to connect the dots in the story, but I am hoping that clears up soon!
I have some very good things coming up:
Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers!
What are you making and reading this week? Please leave your link if you are participating today!
Thank you!
by Kat | Jan 10, 2018 | General, Unraveled Wednesday
Is it just me, or does this month seem be moving by and a most rapid pace? Not that I mind at all and the days are getting every so slightly longer, which is a very good thing!
Speaking of good things: Treysta is DONE and is currently getting a bit of a Soak™ and then some blocking. Glamor shots later this week!
And, I even managed to start my Stopover last night, and got a few rows done. I had forgotten what a fast knit this is!
Reading…for all the reading I have done, very little of it was good and in fact most of it was disappointing:
In the disappointing category:
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. This started out really wonderfully but for me just sort of fell apart from about a third of the way in to the end. 2-stars.
Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss. After reading and deeply loving The History of Love this just fell incredibly flat for me. I kept paging back because I felt like I missed something in the story. 2-stars
Sadly, I do not recommend either of these books at all.
I finished my first book in for the “read harder challenge” Killers of the Flower Moon. I thought this was done really brilliantly. It is a fascinating story told from three perspectives – each was better than the last. This was a very quick listen and the narration was excellent. 4-stars.
Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures. This was a recommendation from someone in my knitting group and while I found it very interesting, I don’t think I enjoyed it as much as she did. If you are a science buff, there is so much fascinating information in this book. Also, while parts are true – much of the book is fiction. I gave it 3-stars.
The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld. A well-written and riveting tale – and a quick read! 4-stars. I highly recommend this book.
Currently reading:
The Last Tudor which is not that fantastic at all. I am listening and pushing through as I am almost done with it.
Up next: The Orphan’s Tale
What are you making and reading today?
If you are joining me today, please leave a link in the comments! And, thank you for participating!
by Kat | Jan 3, 2018 | General, Unraveled Wednesday
There was a bit of unraveling here this week. I had started this sweater earlier least year and I was uncertain on what size to make because well, a sweater knit with 14″ of positive ease? So, I cast on with a more moderate amount of ease and began knitting.
Now, let’s talk for a brief moment about knitting with dark brown yarn, shall we? And, this pattern… it seems like the perfect storm for making a mistake and never even realizing it until, oh let’s say, several repeats later… Um, yeah. So, I tried to ladder back, with cabling…and dark brown yarn…
Right, so now you see the unraveling bit. But, before I unraveled, I tried on the sweater thus far, I did have a good bit of the yoke completed. Enough to make the determination that a little more ease than I planned would be better.
So, adjustments made, and I re-cast on Monday night. This will be a bright light knit, but I feel more confident about where this pattern is going now.
I also finished a book to start off the New Year! I read The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking. It was a quick and easy read. There were some “ah-ha” moments and some things that made me laugh, and I realized that in all those trips to my mother-in-law’s house with candles, Kringle, Æbleskivers, and great company were the best hygge training a girl could ask for. Sadly, I see clearly that I live with a hyggehater, so everything that I want to do puts me in direct opposition to what Steve wants to do. Case in point, twinkle lights no longer turn on. Candles? He complains that I am about to set the house on fire. And, don’t even get me started on lamp light in rooms! Anyways, if you want a quick and simple plan for inserting some hygge into your life, this book gives you some great ideas. I am on the waitlist for Wiking’s The Little Book of Lykke: The Danish Search for the World’s Happiest People. I am looking forward to reading it as well!
I am currently slowly reading Manhattan Beach, but I need to get moving on this as it is due back to the library soon! I just started listening to my first Read Harder Challenge book, Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann.
What are you reading and making to start the new year? If you wrote a post for Unraveled Wednesday, please leave your link! Thank you!
by Kat | Dec 27, 2017 | General, Unraveled Wednesday
This week its all about my reading and a review of the best books I have read all year. It was so much fun to go back through my books and do a little memory lane reminiscing with all the incredible books I have read!
I will end up with 85 books finished this year, which includes Urlula K. Le Guin’s No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters. I have about 20 pages to go, so this will be super easy to finish. This is impressive for me because I began the year slowly and was 11 books behind my goal of 60 books when Summer Book Bingo started. So, to end up exceeding by 15 books ummm, that would be 25 books!! I am quite proud of myself!
I had hoped to finish Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, but I don’t think that is likely to happen, but that means it will be #1 for 2018 and give me a very good start for next year!
Now, on to my best of books (and really, these were the best off – all books here received a 5-star rating from me!), starting with books I should have read long before I did:
- 1984
- Moby Dick, The Whale
- Animal Farm
- On the Road
- The English Patient
If you have not read these, I highly recommend doing so. I listened to all of them and they had incredible narration (even Moby Dick which I listed to via the Moby Dick Big Read. Now, I understand that having 136 different narrators might put some people off, but they were ALL excellent.
Up next are books that are part of a series:
- And, in first place is Louise Penny’s series with Armand Gamache. I read 4 books in this series this year: The Cruelest Month, A Rule Against Murder, Bury Your Dead, and The Brutal Telling. It seems incredible, but each story in this series is better than the one before. If you like a good mystery, this series is WONDERFUL!
- Next, is Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Department Q series. His latest installment, The Scarred Woman was SO GOOD! And, I love Carl Morck almost as much as I love Armand Gamache! Nordic Noir at its best!
- I also loved Viveca Sten’s The Sandhamn Murder Series, especially Tonight You’re Dead.
- Finally, Lotte and Soren Hammer’s series with Detective Konrad Simonsen, I found The Hanging to be the best one I have read thus far, but I enjoyed the other books in this series too.
I delved a bit into poetry this year, and was so pleasantly surprised by how much it resonated with me. I devoured two Mary Oliver Books: A Thousand Mornings, and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. I also loved Wendell Berry’s A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014. Expect to see more poetry in 2018!
I also snuck in a children’s book: The Night Gardener, which was lovely in word and picture.
I read one biography: Hillary Clinton’s What Happened. It was cathartic for me and beautifully read by Hillary herself.
Now for the rest of the list and there are many, but trust me each of these books has stayed with me, they are thought provoking, moving, and at times uncomfortable. But, good books should stretch us and sometimes take us out of our comfort zone. These books do that and more:
- The Secret History
- I am the Messenger
- A Gentleman in Moscow
- The Nix
- 4 3 2 1
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
- And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer
- Lincoln in the Bardo
- The Help
- South of Broad
- Beach Music
- Millard Salter’s Last Day
- Life After Life
- Little Fires Everywhere
- Sing, Unburied, Sing
- Elmet
- The History of Love
So much good reading this year, and I am equally excited about next year. I am participating in Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge, because one thing I learned this year was that those books that were outside of my comfort zone were some of the best books I read all year long!
And, so, it is almost time to set my Goodreads goal next year, and I am going to challenge myself there as well with a goal of 100 books.
What about you? What was your favorite book (books?) of the year!
ALSO!! Because, simply-linked has been performing less than optimally (but what can I expect for a free application!) Please leave your blog link in comments. Thanks for your patience and participation as I work out the best way to make this work best for all of us!
P.S. Sorry about the bad photo today, but the light has not been cooperative at all. But, my sweater grows, I am almost done with the waist shaping and then have about an inch and a half before the colorwork at the bottom (and then on to the sleeves so, sadly there is no chance this will be done this year)
by Kat | Dec 20, 2017 | General, Unraveled Wednesday
‘Twas five days before Christmas and all though the house…
Lots of stirring. Lots of last minute things I did not plan for, or expect, or yeah.
And, then my darling daughter wondered if I would just buzz over to Target to get something that my Target had in stock but hers did not.
Umm, I love her dearly, but Target five days before Christmas? I am pretty sure I won’t even be able to get into the parking lot! So, yeah… at least that was not added to the “must complete list” in fact, this one did not even make to the “in my wildest dreams list” (Thanks, Kym for that great list name, because prior to reading your post it was the “no effing way list” lol)
However, my super-secret knitting is DONE! Cross that baby off the list! Woo hoo!! Which brings me back to my regularly scheduled knitting, and I am making progress. I am through the beginning of the shaping decreases and onto just straight knitting for a bit. And, Mother Nature has turned the heat up outside so the urgent need for another sweater is not as pressing. But, I knit on!
Reading has been good and next week I will be sharing my favorite reads of the year!
I finished listening to Sing, Unburied, Sing. Wow. What an amazing, powerful book. Excellent narration as well! I gave it 5-stars.
I finished listening to Bonfire, which I also did not love. It did not live up to the hype and got 3-stars.
I also finished reading The Rules of Magic. I thought this was an okay read, but not my cup of tea and it only got 2-stars.
I am listening to The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden and I started reading The History of Love.
And, after Thursday night (my last choir rehearsal before Christmas eve) I am free to read to my hearts content! And, READ I will. I am 3 books away from hitting 85 books read this year and I am determined to do that! Also, to everyone who says, how can you read so much? Well, I am a rabid audio-book listener! I start shortly after I get up and have about 7 hours a day to listen. You can get a lot of “reading” done in that amount of time! It is truly the BEST!
But, I hope that crazy is not reigning at your house and that you are embracing the season and thanks for joining me today!
