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Book Club #6: Tell Me How You Really Feel
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Ok, Paul, now it's up.
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Yay!
Tell me where Marwan is! -
CURSE YOU AND YOUR UNDERAPPRECIATION OF A CLASSIC. You will RUE this day, gentlemen.
(Of course, I haven't read any other Eco books, so it could be they're all way better than this one, but still, I loved this book). -
I go to download the show and get a craving for some whiskey. I'm now afraid to listen to it before class.
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I don't think I talk about the bourbon so much as I just get progressively drunker as the show unfolds. =D
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Any objections to me putting this in my podcast feed as bonus content? I'm feeling lazy this week.
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None here.
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Another great Book Club. Paul, stop making me to want to read the Illuminati Trilogy.
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It was nice to hear your thoughts about this book being almost the same as mine. I finished it though, not that I feel it matters. I don't recall wackyness with foreign languages, but that may have been skipped in my translation (swedish).
The circumstances I read this book was probably not the best - read it right after the Illuminatus-books, so my expectations was of more like that, only more serious.
Years later I read In the name of the rose, and liked it. -
Now, having finally had time to listen to the podcast, there are a few points I'd like to make certain of:
a) Having not read to the end, I can understand why you guys might miss this, but you do realize that the entire thrust of the book is not that of The Plan being real and actual supernatural occurrences happening in a fast-paced thriller setting, but that The Plan is a bullshit game that all these various occult societies and sects latch onto as being real? And that therein lies a good part of the satirical bent, as the whole thing is basically a blackly comic misunderstanding where people end up dead? Cuz from the way you were talking about it, it seemed like you were expecting something that was still a send-up of Dan Brown-style everybody's-out-to-get-you fiction only in a more traditional mold.
b) The ending you skipped ahead to, Jon, seems to be the epilogue rather than the climax proper. The book is a cocktease, to be sure, but it does pay off big in the end, as you do find out what's going on in the museum. In fact, the bits in the museum are happening in the present, so the ending of the book happens in real time, as it were, as opposed to the flashbacks that are the rest of the book; it's not the Lovecraft-style recounting the event after the fact sort of thing. Basically, the majority of the book is one long, looooong slow burn of a setup to that event.
Having said that, the complaints about the book you bring up are completely valid, and I will readily admit to all of them, they just happened not to be a problem for me; I was actually rather shocked with myself for both finishing and enjoying this book as much as I did. Basically, this book requires a degree of patience it may be unreasonable to expect of the reader. -
Grubbing bandwidth leech that I am, I linked this episode in my RSS feed directly to Dave's hosting. Mwa ha ha.
And yes, both Jon and I got the idea that the The Plan was a bullshit game gone wrong. We talk about that quite a bit. We just felt that the idea of a fabricated conspiracy taking on a life of its own was a more interesting idea than what we got in the novel. -
Linking to the mp3 is exactly what you should do, for usage statistics.
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2 weeks late but I just caught up with this podcast. Of the 4 Eco books I've read, this is by far my least favorite, basically due to all the points mentioned by the both of you. I forgot how much of a trudge it was until hearing it being discussed so long after I read it.
But-Dont let this one put you off him as Boudolino is a must-read.
Also, Satanic Verses is well worth completing as it pays off in the end (at about 3/4 the way through). But read Midnight's Children first. A far superior, if not perfect, novel. -
What Jon said about The Satanic Verses made me want to read it.
