Bookshelf: The Sixteen Pleasures

I just finished reading The Sixteen Pleasures. And it was okay. It's a novel telling the story of a young woman who goes to Florence after the 1966 flood to help restore books that had been damaged by the water. She finds a rare book and embarks on a journey to restore and sell it and return the funds to the convent where she had been living. She finds and loses love and experiences a sort of self-transformation. I wanted to like it more than I did, but I kept thinking that I just wanted it to hurry up and end. I skimmed passages where it seemed like the author was getting carried away with his own knowledge of art or literature. I have a major aversion to books that seem like vehicles for a writer to show off his sophistication and opinions unless central to the plot, which it rarely is. However, the book did make me want to travel, particularly to Italy. And daydreaming about traveling is never a bad thing.