The Week in Books: Scribed and Siena

Each year I set a reading goal for number of books I will read, and I try to average about one a week. This year I set it for 55. After years of having a young kiddo in the house, working my own business, being perpetually exhausted, and only daydreaming about the times when I used to luxuriate in bubblebaths with my Kindle, 2021 is turning into a calmer year, and I expected I would be able to read more. I have a stable contract and don’t need to hustle so hard, my child is sleeping and amusing herself independently, and so I set a big juicy reading goal of 55 books.

Very quickly I discover the difficulty with this type of goal: I avoid heavy and long books, because they will eat into my book total. However, I decided to offset this by counting audiobooks I listen to as reading, and so I feel okay digging into some classics that might take me a bit longer, because I can make up for it by listening to audiobooks instead of the news. This means that I literally have no idea how the current Israel/Palestine conflict escalated, but I am 21 books down for the year so far – a good total for midway through May – which included a heavy biography of Ben Franklin.

I read mostly on Scribd – a subscription service like Spotify, but for books. The “Spotify for books” model has long been interesting to me. Back around 2012 a service called Oyster launched calling itself a Netflix for reading. I subscribed, and loved it, but it didn’t hang around. I signed up to Scribed a few months later, and haven’t looked back. I use Scribd to search for books I want to read, but also I rely on their recommendations. Now that I’ve read so many books on their service, they know me pretty well, and I get fun recommendations of books I’d probably never choose to read if they hadn’t been recommended.

One of those gems that came along recently was The Scribe of Siena by Melodie Winawer. I was uncertain at first. A time traveling book about a doctor and the Black Death? Would it convey the enormity and desperation of the period? But I gave it a shot, and I’m so very glad I did. It is a gorgeous story of a stressed-out empathic doctor, Beatrice, who inherits a house in Italy from her historian brother when he dies suddenly. She travels there looking to finish his research, when she winds up in Medieval Siena. Because she is a doctor, and her brother studied the Black Death from a medical history perspective, she knows that she has arrived just a few months before the impending doom. Watching the plague arrive, knowing it’s coming and not being able to stop it, is as harrowing as her attempts to solve a medieval mystery, and get back to her own time.

There’s also a love story, and a decision about where home is, how we can choose where we belong, and connections across time and space. The writing is beautiful, and the story kept me hanging until the end. I listened to the audiobook, and there were times when I wasn’t thrilled with the narration, but not so much that it took away from the story.

I love that Scribd knows me so well that they can predict books like this, and hit the mark! (By the way, if you want to try Scribd, use my link – we both get 60 days free when you sign up with my referral. Yay!)