Firstly, "The Birth of Venus" is a pretty good book. I read it a long time ago and don't remember all the details, but the gist of it in my memory is positive. I know from listening to the audio version on Sirius that there are things I didn't, and don't, like but overall, good story.
But I'm not bringing this up because of the story quality. What I want to talk about is the narration on the audio version.
Jenny Sterlin reads this.
Jenny Sterlin is AWESOME. I love her voice. I love her accent. I could listen to her read ALL DAY. Here is her narrator profile.
For fun, I'll give a meandering synopsis of the book: main character is a girl in Italy, back in days of arranged marriages, olden times, and such. She's peculiar in that her parent's have allowed her to go to school. She's scholarly and artistic. Her parents arrange for her to marry a much older man, who actually seems to be a good match at first, because he has a huge library and is totally okay with her eccentricities. But then she realizes that he's gay and in love with her brother. Also, around this time a monk, or priest, or some dude who has something to do with the church, decides that Florence needs to change her ways. Everyone needs to become more pious and start having much less fun. People start to be taken in for questioning. Questioning involves torture. The husband gets her brother out of prison (where he's been getting tortured for being a sodomite) and basically abandons the girl (I think, memory getting hazy) to care for him. She ends up having an affair with a painter (also a monk), and then joining a convent. It's a nice convent in the beginning, sort of a safe place for scholarly and artistic women to go. She has her kid there, has visits from her painter, but then a new order of theology comes in, and everything gets stricter at the convent. She sends her daughter away to live with the painter, and lives at the convent until she dies. When she dies they prepare her body for burial and find out that she has tattooed a snake around her body with the head of a man (her lover).
I kind of don't remember the point of the book.
Anyway.
On to the minor note!!!!
I'll talk more about this book when I finish it. I'm listening to the audio version in my car.
Today I heard something that made me say "What?!" in my car: Amy says that Eldest sounds a lot like Hitler, and then Elder is thinking to himself, wondering what she meant by that. Because Elder has taught him that Hitler was a wise man.
A WISE MAN.
Until this point, I was trying to be sympathetic to Elder, through all that he's done until now, because he has a load on his shoulders and all that shit. But now I realize that this man is insane and very possibly the villain in this book.
Side note: the parts told by Amy's point of view are read by Laura Ambrose, who played Claire on Six Feet Under, and who I LOVE. I seriously love how she reads this.
The dude who reads keeps giving Amy a baby voice and makes her sound pathetic. I hate that.
