Venetian Books

There are many, many books written about Venice, set in Venice, or that have a scene in Venice. I found a website (Fictional Cities) that has a list of many of them. From this list I realized there are two genres for stories set in Venice: Romances and Murder Mysteries. I decided that I've seen enough of Casanova for a while - the last time being the Heath Ledger film - I focused on the mysteries.

David Hewson's The Lizard's Bite
My favourite of the ones I read because I got a sense of the city both in terms of the people and the geography. The themes apparent in every book are the strong familial ties, an ingrained loathing-yet-needing of foreigners (read: tourists), and a laid-back attitude to everything.

Mary Hoffman's City of Masks
This was a childhood favourite of mine (read: high school) but I decided to go back to it because it is set in Venice. It still holds up pretty well, and sets the scene fairly decently.

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
This is a beautiful book, but I don't really like poetry all that much, so I found it a bit of a hard read. The premise is a good one: Marco Polo reporting back to Kublai Khan about all the cities he has visited so that Khan may know his empire. Others liked it better than I did.

Donna Leon's Death in a Strange Country
Yeah, not so much. I found the writing to be too...American. That might not mean anything, but to people who read as many mysteries as I do, it makes a big difference what country the writer is from. Also, the protagonist doesn't actually end up solving the crime, he just accepts the story given to him by someone else. Hmmm.

Ok, so I spent more time looking for Venetian novels than actually reading them. There is always time when I get back, and as my cousin has just told me about The Passion, I can see that there are many more for me to find.