Foucault's Pendulum

Eco makes no excuse for his books being a challenge to read. He spells out his expectations of the reader in "The Role of the Reader (Eco, 1979). I don't mind a book that makes me think or for that matter takes me a while to get through. My wife and read Foucalt's together with a dictionary at hand. Well worth the time in the end. I think that I really found the book to be most enjoyable when read aloud. My daily commute to work is 65 miles one way and I discovered that there was an unabridged audio of Foucault's Pendulum. I've read the book now several times that way and each time I enjoy it more.

I've read some commentary on Eco and Brown and comparisons of "The Da Vinci Code" to Eco's work. I can't find any comparison. I found the characters in Brown's novel to be unbelievable. For their education, backgrounds etc. their actions throughout the book were just not congruent. That said the book was a good read but nothing I'd bother to read again.

Dan Brown - read and learn.

exactly what i think, comparing the two books. Dan Brown's is a pale, populistic, fashionably shallow babble. Eco's is deep, rich, effort demanding (and his book deserves the effort) and as Jack-Cade said brilliant.

I'm not gonna lie: this is a very dense book, and at times I found it impossible not to skip the incredible tangents Eco goes off on. But it's all there for a reason. It's part of the effect. The novel is concerned with how obsessed we become in trying to unravel an ultimate truth, and how seductive a complicated, intricate solution can be. So every time a character explains to us the links between the pyramids, secret cults, the Grail et cetera, it has to be discussed in detail, firstly because the character has to sound authentically zealous, and secondly because it has to half-convince us.

I mean, what Eco's essentially doing, in segments of the book, is replicating in miniature the kind of argument you might find in 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail' or other conspiracy texts. So the story in 'Foucault's Pendulum' can then undemine them. Thing is, in replicating them, we get the whole 'blinded by learning' effect that makes 'scholarly' texts simultaneously authoritative and alienating.

So you have to navigate hundreds of words and historical events you'll probably never have heard of before, unless you're very learned yourself. There is also, however, a pretty exciting slow-burn action story going on underneath it all, and the voice is poised and lyrical. Plenty of brilliant passages. Worth the battle.