Eco, Umberto

• Foucault's Pendulum (6 r)

  • Very long and complex story that conspiracy theorists will just eat up. This is about a man who is trying to track down what he thinks is a Masonic conspiracy, but so many other threads come unraveled along the way that he (and at times the reader) becomes hopelessly lost as events carry him along. Read this book when you have time to concentrate on it and read it all at once...it is tough to follow, but the ending is worth it.

• The Name of the Rose (7 r)

  • Excellent book about murder in an early European monastery with a really cool maze of a library. Lots of wonderful characters and plot twists. Very entertaining read, and it was also made into a good Sean Connery movie of the same name.

• The Island of the Day Before (6)

  • This novel is set during the 17th century, when accurate timekeeping (for the purposes of keeping track of longitude) was a big problem in navigation. A lone shipwreck survivor finds safety on board an abandoned but well-stocked ship at anchor in the relatively calm harbor of an island. Why is the ship abandoned? And why is it found by a poor soul singularly emotionally unequipped to deal with such a puzzle?

    In any case, the answers to the ship's mysteries slowly unfold while the survivor's journal reveals stories of his past. During the first third of the book, when the ship is still largely a puzzle to figure out and Roberto (the survivor) is reminiscing about his childhood exploits as part of a petty battle in northern Italy, the book is very entertaining and readable. I'll not soon forget Roberto's hilarious father, whose wartime rationalizations are the stuff of legend. I also enjoyed Roberto's discussions of philosophy and science with Father Caspar. In all, though, the pace of events was a bit on the slow side, and these discussions and other stories of politics and intrigue didn't really grab me enough to make me want to tear through this book.

Return to the Welcome Page of Doug's Library.