I was out of town (without knitting) for five days out of the last seven, so I haven’t made much progress on my sangria sweater. However, I did finish the first sleeve yesterday morning. I’m pretty sure I made the sleeve too long, and it’s a testimony to how much I enjoy working with this yarn that I am actually looking forward to ripping out half of the sleeve and working all the raglan decreases over again. I’ll get sleeve #2 done first and then see what I think.

I spent almost all day yesterday reading Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know – in my hotel room, in the Baltimore airport, during my first flight, in the LA airport, and during my second flight. I even finished off a chapter after I got home around 12:45 am. But the thing is, with all that reading time, I only read about 130 pages. This novel is contemporary and accessible, but there is so much happening on so many levels that I have to read it extremely slowly. I did find this pace a little frustrating at first, but once I was into chapter 2, I was hooked. It’s about all kinds of things: displacement and exile, Afghanistan and the Taliban, the subprime mortgage crisis, identity and family, social class and money, and – oh yes – unproven mathematical theorems that are about other unprovable mathematical theorems. And then there’s marriage, divorce, and the termination of romantic love. Friendship. Globalization. The 1971 war between Pakistan and Bangladesh. The subjectivity of storytelling and the fact that, as the title suggests, we can rarely be certain (outside of mathematics, however) that anything is true because we can never know everything we need to know to make that judgment. And did I mention that every chapter in this book has 2-3 epigraphs? I’m discovering that, unlike epigraphs in some novels, I have to pay serious attention to these epigraphs and also be skeptical toward them – I’ve found at least one that I’m 95% sure was NOT actually written by the person (Winston Churchill) to whom Rahman attributes it. This book is good – and once I got over some initial frustration, I am actually happy that this author is forcing me to slow down and pay attention.

That’s it for now, except to say that Yarn Along is hosted by Ginny on her blog, Small Things.