Successful Rendezvous - Guido on a Roll

Well our rendezvous last night at Bombgasm's eclectic abode was a success (we missed you ROXY!). Guido provided most of the entertainment for the evening: breaking stemware, throwing cheese, dropping lemon bars, spilling juice (sidebar: next time bring a tarp for easy cleanup)... AND performed a stunning interpretive dance to the "Girl from Ipanema." Words cannot begin to describe his some of his other renditions - and we'll leave that alone for the time being but can say this much: we were in tears for more than an hour.

Back to the book:
Berendt's sophmore effort The City of Falling Angels can't equally be compared to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. As entertaining as the characters and expatriates of Venice were, there didn't seem to be any concrete plot, or point to many stories within the story (other than there are many entertaining personalities in Venice). The crime, which was supposed to be a cornerstone of the book, took a back seat to the characters, some of whom did not have anything to do with the burning of the Fenice.

We appreciated some side points such as reading and learning more about Ezra (and printed out a few of his poems for further discussion) and Seguso the glassblower's artwork.

The book is not poorly written and Berendt has a gift for observing and describing people. The plot did suffer however, and I don't think we got the point of the title. It could be inferred that falling angels describes the state of the city in decay, hoping for a revival, or in a biblical sense a fall from grace waiting for redemption.

The villains gave the book three machine guns (out of six total).