Exceedingly Mundane

I was so happy to see this book out on the “New Arrivals” shelf at my library on the last visit. It’s not often that I read a book on the NY Times Bestseller list, much less one that just came out (I blogged here that I was the first one to check it out!). This was definitely a different kind of book for me. I normally read what I call “women’s fiction” – very light, entertaining and quick, or lately, more Christian fiction by authors such as Karen Kingsbury. So, this book about a courtesan and her dwarf in Renaissance Italy in the 1530’s was something a little different.

Having said that, I really enjoyed it. It’s good for me to break out of my norm and read something different. This book, being historical fiction, had a different tone and cadence to it, but I got used to that fairly quickly. It has a very small amount of bad language or references (but considering the subject matter, she is a courtesan, it was to be expected), but not so much that it distracted me. I really enjoyed it, and I will put Sarah Dunant’s initial bestseller on my list to try to read in the future (“The Birth of Venus”).

For the stats: this is book #12 for the year, with a total of 4,272 pages read. I have entered a review of it on Hambones.org. In the mean time, I’ve started the last book I have from the library (due next week), another Karen Kingsbury book. This one is very current, it’s a fictional account of 9/11 and looks to be very, very good.