Anybody else just finish Death in Venice?

Last night I couldn't sleep, so I got up and finished Death in Venice -- the Thomas Mann novella (Michael Henry Heim translation), not the Dirk Bogarde movie. Reading Death in Venice on the longest night of the year isn't exactly the most cheery thing you could do, but it was inspiring because the book is so great.

SPOILER ALERT!! (OK, well, the title pretty much tells you what happens. But I will hide a minor spoiler from you, and justify blogging about it, by embedding this lovely travel video of Venice.)



Lo and behold, during some downtime this evening I'm surfing the Web on my iPhone and I see this story in the New York Times: "As Earth Warms Up, Tropical Virus Moves to Italy." Which is, you might note if you've read it, exactly what happens in the book. (I know, I know, maybe it's all his imagination. But you get the idea.) The story concerns an outbreak of a disease associated with the Indian Ocean reaching a town in northern Italy, not far from Venice. In the summer, yet. NYT informs us that this was "the first outbreak in modern Europe of a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics," which immediately tells me something about the book, namely that it's talking about an event that hadn't happened in real life and would have been extraordinary. Reading about what the government said about this outbreak last summer was quite surreal.

So apocalyptic. But what are the odds of reading both of those the same day?