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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

A terrific author whose philosophical work informs his fiction, but not in a heavy handed or didactic way. I only wish there were more novels.

If you haven't read anything by him, I'd start with In the Name of the Rose. The beginning is a little tough to get into, but if you persevere you are amply rewarded (in the afterwords it is disclosed that this was a deliberate literary choice, I won't spoil it by explaining the rationale, but it does make sense). Foucault's Pendulum is the magnum opus.

Edit: after In the Name of the Rose I'd probably go with Baudolino, but FP is a valid choice as well.

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Absolutely correct reading list.

For those who's giving Name of the Rose a try, just bear with the first 100 pages. It gets extremely better. I liked the first 100 pages anyways.

Your reading list for Eco is perfect, I can recommend his essays as well, his intellectual range is amazing. BUT, as you said, above all of this stand Foucoults pendulum. A book about being human and fearing, history, human believe system and and and. A masterpiece.

I've read _The Name of the Rose_ and really enjoyed it. What should I read next?

definitely Foucaults Pendulum. it's like the DaVinci Code but for medieval history buffs plus the plot is wickedly clever

I disagree - I found reading it was like being hit over the head repeatedly by the same point. The point isn't very profound either. It's more like a database dump of what Eco researched over the last few years on conspiracy theories. Huge sections could have been skipped without affecting the plot or anything else. I think he missed the point of writing a novel, which is telling a story. It came across more of an exercise in style, rather than a novel. It's one of the few books where I wish I'd never started reading it. I enjoyed the Name of the Rose, but not the other two books I read of his.

I rather agree with you, though I did enjoy the book. But, as I've had occasion to say about other books, I felt I "enjoyed it under false pretences," i.e. that I was enjoying it because I thought these flights of fancy, various subgroups, characters, etc, would be wrapped together tidily like The Name of the Rose (although it too was something of an, admittedly purposeful, anticlimax).

> Huge sections could have been skipped without affecting the plot or anything else.

The same could be said of Dostoyevsky. Those long, drawn out passages are often there to make a psychological impression upon the reader rather than adding anything to the plot line per se.

I rather think the point is startlingly profound.

Though at times it did read like a database dump (albeit a fascinating one), the intricacy of the background of theories and history is all in service to the ridiculousness of the plot. Without it, the profound stupidity of the formulation of the meta-conspiracy would not have been believable.

I really liked the The Island of the Day Before. Truly fascinating. Foucault's Pendulum is good too, but like all his work, it's not an easy read. If you want something more intellectually rewarding than Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code), Eco is your guy.

If you want something more intellectually rewarding than Brown you have many, many options.

You are of course right that Eco pushes a number of the same buttons that Brown does, yet without being ridiculous.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte is the poor man's Umberto Eco. Dan Brown is the very poor man's Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Not a novel but the _Postscript to The Name of the Rose_ is really interesting. It has been written a few years after the novel and published at the same time as the english translation. It's a short book published independently. Eco writes there about the writing of the novel but also other topics.

http://umbertoecoreaders.blogspot.de/2007/11/postscript-to-n...

Foucault's Pendulum gets my vote too if you want to read something that is as straight forward as Eco can get.

The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana felt more like he was trying to test you, in each of those books, to see if you are worthy of consuming the entire book. Every time you feel you have a reasonable grasp of what is going on, he'll descend into a phase where you'll be lost again.

The Prague Cemetery, on the other hand, was utterly fascinating. Really enjoyed it.

I read the Prague Cemetery after everything else and found it incredibly boring.

Perhaps not even Mr. Eco is immune from repeating clichés.

His works, after The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, had become significantly mode self-indulgent. TPC is no exception to that, except that it is considerably less indulgent than the books between FP and TPC.

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