Read this donkey’s years ago (but the date counter won’t let me put anything earlier than this).

I suppose I was at an advantage because I just had to crack on with this difficult yet rewarding book, and not be distracted with the rampant silliness that is “The Da Vinci Code”

This is one of those books that I can respect and appreciate, but one that I just really hated. I’m not a fan of po-mo fiction…those big books that are packed to the brim with narratives and info and beautiful sentences and images…but in the end, they’re all JUSTMEANINGLESS!! See, this kind of thing depresses me. Sorry if I’m lame, but I DO like to learn when I read, and I do look for some sort of moral argument, and it really infuriates me when an author plays on that desire, lures you along, and then leaves you with nothing in the end. Now, there are some purely sublime moments in this book. But there is soooo much b.s. to wade through, you start to wonder why you’re doing it at all. When it was over, I wanted to cry. Not because I was sad I was finished, but because I was sad I had wasted two weeks reading it.

One of my all-time faves, this has been taken out and dusted down for another reading.

It’s the best book I’ve ever read about the intoxicating simultaneous joy and danger of ideas, and the rather frightful liberties we’re willing to take with reality in search of the reassurance of meaning and order. The desire to remake the world in the image of our ideals is a strong temptation, and it’s not something that is totally beyond our grasp, but is such wish-fulfillment advisable or humane? That’s the main problem that this book is trying to get at. It’s also a great cock and bull story and a veritable encyclopedia of human knowledge, both spurious and legitimate.

What I’ve read of this book so far has been good, but continuing to read it is such a task. Right now I’m averaging about ten pages per week — at this rate, I’ll never finish.

In other news, I recently read Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. That’s Umberto at the start of the entry. He’s Spanish, but somehow he looks like my friend Massimo that I saw recently.

Foucault’s Pendulum is a strange, interesting and ultimately hard to read book about a global conspiracy uncovered by three book editors in Milan. It turns out that they stumble into what I would call the grand unified theory of the strange. The Holy Grail, the Templars, the Masons, the catacombs under the Vatican and the Golden Fleece are all connected in the strangest ways.

Eco is a philosopher and focuses his work quite a bit on language and its relation to the world. In this novel, it seems to me that his characters actually shape the world by using language, which is an extreme extrapolation of some of his theories.

Throughout the novel, we follow Casaubon unravel the mysteries of mysteries, but what makes the book hard to read are the pages and pages (and pages!) of descriptions about the occult, the hermetic mysteries, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, the Freemasons… and who knows what else. I mean, really, how many novels need to have a new character explain their connection to the big conspiracy with three pages of unbroken monologue?

I recommend skimming these sections… because if you do, there is an interesting plot with a number of surprising twists and turns that really accelerates in the last 100 pages of the book. I’m not sure I would have finished this book, but it was the only thing I had with me on a long plane ride.

More or less an impulse buy. I was looking for a different book when this caught my eye. I liked The Name of the Rose, so I figured I’d grab this one.

Mixed; some interesting stuff but overly dense.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/livredor/25703.html

so far, very interesting. eco has a niche market. i am warming up to him.

Religious numerology, text-randomising software, and the fragmented history of the Templars, with tangents. A bit over-detailed and clever-trousers, but it works within the book’s context, the expositional dialogue being punctured with sufficient drama, cynicism, scenery and asides. (It’s getting a bit heavy towards the end, mind.)