I made an effort to read in May, though it was infinitely harder to do given the constraints on my time have been many. And while I did only fully read one book, I read half of two others so expect those in the next month round-up, I hope.
At the end of April I started a GIS course through Oxford Online Learning. Then at the start of May I flew down to the Bahamas. I spent a week scuba diving on Cat Ppalu, part of the All Star Liveaboards fleet. After that I returned home and spent the next week rapidly plugging through writing assignments and admin tasks. I needed to turn in three articles (including editing photos for them) before my next dive trip to Lembeh, Indonesia! The home of muck diving. Yes, I know, charming notion. That said, I read something and here’s what I read without further rambling:
Spinning Silver
Author: Naomi Novik
If you’ve been following my posts, you’ll know I’m on a bit of a Novik sprint. The Scholomance series at the start of the year, then “Uprooted,” and four books in, I was happily hooked. So I picked up “Spinning Silver” expecting more of what had carried me through the others.
The opening twenty percent delivered. The premise was a real challenge: a moneylender’s daughter sharpening her teeth against a community that resented the work her family did, and the protagonist had me. I had my claws hooked in.
Then the POVs started multiplying.
At first, the switching was just tricky. The new voices belonged to women from similar stations of life, and I found myself flipping back to figure out whose head I was in. As Novik kept layering more in, it tipped past tricky into genuinely confusing. I kept hoping for a simple name above each break. None came.
Around the same time, the story I thought I was reading slipped sideways. The protagonist went from trying to make a living to literally turning silver into gold, and the leap felt abrupt, more like a new premise being layered on than the original one deepening. Many of the POV characters we settled into felt minor to me, side figures whose interior lives I hadn’t yet earned a desire to know. I started to slog. By the end, I was relieved to be done which surprised me. Novik has been such a reliable joy.
If this had been mine to write, I’d have kept the POV count low—two, maybe three at most—and only stepped outside the protagonist’s head for characters whose arcs genuinely turned the story. I’d have labeled the breaks clearly; atmosphere isn’t a reason to lose a reader at the chapter line. The silver-to-gold pivot I’d have seeded much earlier. And I’d have spent more time grounding the world—both the Staryk land the protagonist ends up in and the “normal” one she comes from. “Spinning Silver” seems to want the flavor of folklore, and folklore IMO lives or dies on the specificity of its places. Not for me, in the end. But I’ll still be there for whatever Novik writes next.
I’m also still making my way through Sentient (nonfiction). I pick it up here and there. Each chapter reveals a different animal and how, in some way, this animal helps us understand something about ourselves as humans. It’s illuminating and fascinating. Hopefully I’ll get to do that review one of these days.
As for other reading, my GIS textbook—Geographic Information Science and Systems—is the only other thing I have to report on and I’m NOT going to report on that as I think it’s terribly written. It’s dry and might also have been condensed into half of what it is now. Bleh.
