Recording the Reading, 2007, # 34
Finished last week:
34. The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant, audiobook read by Jenny Sterlin
I really liked this book! It’s set in the late 1400s/early 1500s in Florence, Italy, just around the time Lorenzo de Medici dies and Savaranola, a fundamentalist monk, tries to take over the city. The main character is a young woman, Alessandra, who wants to be a painter. The book begins just after her death, at which an intriguing discovery made me want to read the rest of the book to find out what happened. Alessandra tells the rest of the story, which has romance, mystery, intrigue and sex. A few years ago I read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo, which helped make the settings and people in Dunant’s novel more real to me. It also provided a suggestion for what Allesandra’s unnamed painter (hired by her wealthy family to paint their chapel) was doing when he snuck out of the house in the evenings (not what you probably think!).
The audiobook is abridged (and well read by British actress Sterlin, despite the accent), but I will be reading the whole book sometime before next July as my out-of-town book club made it one of our selections, and I will likely lead the discussion since I suggested the book!
34. The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant, audiobook read by Jenny Sterlin
I really liked this book! It’s set in the late 1400s/early 1500s in Florence, Italy, just around the time Lorenzo de Medici dies and Savaranola, a fundamentalist monk, tries to take over the city. The main character is a young woman, Alessandra, who wants to be a painter. The book begins just after her death, at which an intriguing discovery made me want to read the rest of the book to find out what happened. Alessandra tells the rest of the story, which has romance, mystery, intrigue and sex. A few years ago I read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo, which helped make the settings and people in Dunant’s novel more real to me. It also provided a suggestion for what Allesandra’s unnamed painter (hired by her wealthy family to paint their chapel) was doing when he snuck out of the house in the evenings (not what you probably think!).
The audiobook is abridged (and well read by British actress Sterlin, despite the accent), but I will be reading the whole book sometime before next July as my out-of-town book club made it one of our selections, and I will likely lead the discussion since I suggested the book!