As Does Voltaire and Byron . . .

Interesting revelation this afternoon: Amazon.cn.  I guess I've always known it was there, but never really bothered to try to set up an account and use it.  I have a trip coming up suddenly that I hadn't really planned for.  If I’m heading to Venice I'd like to read up a bit.  There is the remarkable imperial history of the city-state.  I can remember being in Crete and learning that it was the Venetians who had established Hania and Rethymno.  Want to see the famous horses in the Hippodrome of Istanbul, which Theodosius II had made on the island of Chios?  Too bad.  The Venetians took them when they sacked Constantinople in the thirteenth century and after a brief loan by Napoleon they have been placed back at St. Mark's, inside the Basilica.

I've got a Lonely Planet Italy from three years ago.  But if I were in the States I'd get the more recent one they have, just for Venice. I took a look on line for “novels in Venice.”  This was a mistake as I was shown dozens of Harlequin Romance novels set in the city.  No, no.  "Literature in Venice."  The Guardian seems a name I could trust and soon I had a good list to consider.  I seem to remember I’d read, and did not particularly enjoy "Death in Venice" the first time I visited, but Henry James has a novel set there as does Voltaire and Byron and Lawrence and Waugh.  They all have books set there among the canals. 

I have, in the past ordered books from the Amazon in the US to be sent over here to Beijing.  This proved expensive and time consuming.  With only ten days to go, I doubted that I'd have any luck with that.  The "Page One" bookstore down town started out with a bang but its English section has been slow, and steadily winnowing down to a sad remnant of what was once a substantive collection.  So I resigned myself to popping by the school library, which I still may do.  But my expectations were low.  Why would they stock a history of Venice for the high school kids?

Well, nothing too suspenseful here.  It turns out Amazon.cn is happy to ship far more books they I could ever reasonably ingest concerning the general topic: "Venice."  They were not happy to identify me by the same email as my U.S. Amazon account though.  I wasted a bit of time looking to see if there was a way to link them, before simply using one of my multiple corporate accounts to anchor it.  Our local Amazon had no issues accepting my U.S. credit card and the delivery times, and shipping rates, competing as they must against the likes of Taobao and JD.com, were quick and cheap.  Pressure's on now to finish up the novel I'm in the middle of so I can light this bonfire. 

I do need to wait and see that they actually do arrive here and they aren't all Chinese editions.  But it looks good.  Hopes are up. 

Sunday 03/05/17