The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt.

This is a book about the city of Venice by John Berendt, who wrote "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."

I had enjoyed "Midnight" very much, so when "City of Falling Angels" was chosen by my book group, I was loking forward to reading it.

I was disappointed though.I found the book boring.There is a lot of gossip and a lot of uninteresting detail.Berendt seems particularly fascinated by rich people, so rather than getting a picture of the city as a whole, what we get is more like a portrait of the people who appear in newspaper society columns.

To the extent that there is a narrative thread in the book, it involves a fire that destroyed the Opera House, and its subsequent rebuilding.But in large part the book hops around from one thing to another.There isn't the kind of strong suspensful storyline that I had liked so much in "Midnight in the Garden."

I did learn some interesting things about Venice -- about glass-blowing, and about art, and even about rats!But there was too much boring stuff to slog through to get to the good parts.