Joining Kat and friends for Unraveled Wednesday.

Knitting.

Back to the Boxy. Knitting this sweater in a 2X-3X size in fingering weight yarn is making me think that such an enterprise is actually possible. This is very good news, since sweaters in heavier yarns are generally too warm for me. Way back in my stash — purchased in 2007 — is enough gorgeous blue/green/maroon Polwarth fingering weight yarn for a sweater. Perhaps someday...

Reading.

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The Hand that First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell. I have read a couple of O’Farrell’s books and found them worthwhile, so I have several more on my want-to-read queue. This one, however, did not match the others in quality in my opinion. Perhaps it was due to my reading this over four or five nights, but the further I got into the book, the harder it was to keep the characters straight. This was not helped by the plot device of jumping backward and forward in time. IMO; YMMV. 2✭

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The Speed of Light by Eliss Dickey. Another Amazon/Kindle freebie — sadly, these freebies are seldom worth the time it takes to read them. Most are just a half-step above Harlequin romances. This one features a young woman recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and her struggles. That premise could have yielded a much better book if written by a better author. 1✭

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Hill House (Harry Starke book #3) by Blair Howard. If it weren’t for this author’s persistent habit of name-dropping brand names, it would have earned another half-star from me. I do not want to know what brand of — presumably expensive — shoes the detective puts on, nor what the labels of his shirt, sweater, or underwear say. Sheesh. Otherwise, this series is decent, standard detective fiction. 2.5✭

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Listening.

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The Rose Code by Kate Quinn. Quinn is the author of The Alice Network and The Huntress, both spy novels set during WWII, with female protagonists, and which I enjoyed immensely. This one is set at Bletchly Park, the top secret site where the Brits decoded messages sent by the German high command, using an Enigma machine recovered from a sunken German vessel. Three very different women become friends there and after the war seek to expose a traitor. Although I am listening to this one, I think I might prefer to read it the old-fashioned way. 4✭

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Watching,

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The X Files. We finished season 8, and it was way better than season 7. The majority of the episodes furthered the mythology; there was a minimum of monster-of-the-week episodes.

Tragically, our library system has neither season 9 nor season 10. When we are ready for it, season 11 awaits. Smokey went on eBay and found season 9 for ten bucks, and he will search again for season 10 when we are ready.

K

A Quiet Place. The sequel to this movie is playing at our local cineplex, and a review of it mentioned that it was as good as the original, so I got the latter from the library. It has an intriguing plot: somehow the world has been taken over by bullet-proof metallic gangly monsters who are blind — no eyes — but with extraordinary hearing. As the movie’s tagline states, “If they hear you, they will kill you.” Overall, the movie was okay, but given that there was almost no dialog, it was a complete bust for knitting. 3★