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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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).
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.