Books about Beauty & Courtesans

I just finished reading two books, by two different authors, and each one was the second book by that author that I've read, and I have to say that I was disappointed with both. I liked the first book better in both cases.

I just finished reading On Beauty by Zadie Smith, and it was okay, but not that great. It was just so depressing... at the end of the book, the characters' lives were in shambles, and there was no way that they were going to be put back together again. It was kind of interesting to see how their lives were all interconnected, but the book ended with the tint of yellow and the hint of things to come, and it was just kinda hollow.

The first book that I read by Zadie Smith was White Teeth, and I loved it. I actually had to read it for a class at OSU, and I remember reading it while driving to/from Cleveland with Kevin one weekend. I was reading out loud to him while he was driving, and he got so into the story, that he read it out loud to me while I was driving. It is a really happy memory, and maybe that biased me towards the book. (But the second book was really just like the first book all over again, but with different characters in a different place, and slightly different - read: more depressing - things happen to them.)

While I was reading On Beauty at work, I was reading In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant at home. I loved the first book that I read by her, The Birth of Venus, and I was really excited about this second one. But, unfortuanately, I didn't like it as much. I think that I didn't like it as much because I couldn't relate to the character that narrated the story (the courtesan's dwarf companion). I mean, the story was alright, but I think I would have liked it better if it had been told from the courtesan's point of view.

Both books were really heavy on sex, and Kevin picked one of them up while I was reading it, and he was really suprised. He said he didn't know that I read such dirty books! It got me to thinking, though, that most "adult" books have sex in them, and even some "young adult" books do, too. My mom used to get mad when she found out that a novel that I was reading for high school had sexual material in it, even though it was considered a "classic"... I guess that since sex is a universal thing, people write about it a lot.

Titian. Venus of Urbino. 1538. Oil on canvas. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy.