Skip to main content

Unravelled Wednesday and WAYRN - The one with the feelings

It's winter, it's cold, COVID cases are on the rise, and we are about to have the anniversary of lockdown 5 - a twelve day lockdown that started with the cancelling of the Australian Sheep and Wool show - my favourite weekend of the year (We got out of that for  8 days, and then went into a 77 day lockdown.) And I thought I had processed all that as well as I could. I must have, when I requested Delphi by Clare Pollard from NetGalley:

It is 2020 and in a time more turbulent than any of us could have ever imagined, a woman is attempting to write a book about prophecy in the ancient world.

Navigating the tightening grip of lockdown, a marriage in crisis, and a ten-year-old son who seems increasingly unreachable, she becomes fixated on our many forms of divination and prediction: on oracles, tarot cards and tea leaves and the questions we have always asked as we scroll and click and rage against our fates.

But in doing so she fails to notice the future creeping into the heart of her own home. For despite our best intentions - our sacrifices and our bargains with the gods - time, certainty and, sometimes, those we love, can still slip away ...

This is not so much a novel as a diary of living through the first 2 years of COVID. The book is English and the main character has a son and a flaky husband, but it reflects the universality of the (middle class) COVID experience. It is a rather brilliant book, but has led me down a contemplative memory journey of a weird and disturbing time. COVID is not just a thing that is happening in this book , it is the plot - as far as this book has a plot. Don't read this if you don't want to re-immerse yourself in that  strangest of times.

I've been knitting two things at the same time, which always makes for slow seeming progress. The Sockhead hat has been a great project to take out-and-about with me, and I might even get it finished at the pub tonight. 

I've also made steady progress on my brioche jacket - but only knitting that at home has lead to limited time on it. I'm taking it away with me this weekend, so hopefully it is well enough established that I won't mess it up knitting in public.

And that's what I'm knitting and reading right now.  To read my all my book reviews, and to see everything I knit, you can find me on Ravelry as Sharondoubleknit and on GoodReads as Sharondblk. 

I'm joining in with Kat from As Kat Knits for Unravelled Wednesday and Kat from the Bookdate for It's Monday, What Are You Reading.  Thanks Kat and Kat for hosting these linkups.  






 

Labels:

Comments

  1. shelleyrae @ book'd out18 July, 2022

    Delphi sounds quite interesting, but probably because lockdown affected me very little though. I’m so frustrated at the way we have let things slide after doing so well initially. I had high hopes that Labor would be more pragmatic than the LNP but it seems not. In the meantime I’ll keep masking and avoiding crowds in what might be the vain hope I’ll avoid it.

    Wishing you a great reading week

    ReplyDelete
  2. Cheriee Weichel19 July, 2022

    I agree with shelleyrae @ book'd out that Delphi does sound interesting. After reading your review I had to ask myself if I am ready to read a book with Covid as the central plot line. The answer is not yet. In order to get through the darkness of the last couple of years I started reading Terry Pratchet's discworld. I'm not ready for the real world, unless it's nonfiction, for now at least.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unravelled wednesday and WAYRN - the one where I prepare

We are heading off for some camping and hiking and general R&R on Friday, so I'm currently in planning and preparing mode. Of course that mainly means deciding what to knit - I'm going to make the Old Romance cardigan by Joji Locatelli. The yarn is wound and I'm ready to go. I completed Leon's Winter Set (2023) just in time, and it's currently blocking. I'm reading Georgette Hayer's Fredrica , which I am enjoying very much. Regency romance is so sweet and, unlike current romance offerings, I know it won't suddenly tumble into gynaecological territory!  For unexplained reasons, NetGalley is offering some Georgette Heyer books at the moment - (maybe it's re-release?) and I'm taking this opportunity to read a few more of them And that's my week in knitting and reading.  To read my all my book reviews, and to see everything I knit, you can find me on Ravelry as  Sharondoublekni t and on GoodReads as  Sharondblk .  I'm joining in with Kat ...
2 comments
Read more

Yarnalong - the one with the final bit of transport

Remember how I took every form of transport known to man a fortnight ago? Well, I was missing just one thing, suburban trains. But today I got to remedy that, knitting my way to Dandenong for work. Yay? My Char jumper has been knitting up ridiculously fast. It's easy, pleasant and a well written pattern. I'm reading Rachael Herron's latest book The Ones Who Matter Most . It's a good read so far, family centered fiction, easy to read but still emotionally challenging. I'm listening to Evelyn Waugh's Men At Arms . I'm enjoying it, I didn't really know what to expect, but some of it reminds me of Catch 22, in that it catalogues the absurdities of war and bureaucracy. The narrator has the perfect upper crust English accent and I'm very pleased it's the first of a trilogy.   And that's another week of reading, knitting and catching trains everywhere for me. Do pop along to Ginny's blog to see what she and the rest of the yarnalong ...
3 comments
Read more

Why Andrea Mowry, why? (A rant and a rather nice finished object)

As mentioned, prior to our hiking trip I suddenly, and rather randomly, decided to knit  Andrea Morwy's Traveler Shell . It's basically an open fronted rectangle in a knit purl pattern. The pattern is FOURTEEN pages long. Why is the pattern 14 pages long? Because, instead of explaining the ten row repeat and then putting the shaping on top of that (e.g. decrease while continuing to knit in pattern), she writes out the entire ten row knit purl sequence every time something changes. Additionally, most of the time she starts with even number being the right side and wrong numbers being the right side,which is just plain odd. It's confusing and it's like she wants to keep you looking at the pattern for every row, rathe than following the very intuitive stitch pattern, which I had memorised after one repeat.  The instructions for the band just say 'pick up x number of stitches'. No ratios, no acjnowledgement that different bits of the band have different ratios. Afte...
1 comment
Read more