Umberto Eco

has a fairly large brain. Still, I can't help wishing he dedicated more of the digressions to philosophy than history (or rather than history in particular, history that doesn't have to do with Christianity). Name Of the Rose has been just as good as I expected, but before reading it, I thought of picking up Baudolino, and that might have been the better pick, since I've heard it has a heftier touch of the imaginative about it. I misunderstood the topic a little bit before picking it up--not that is hasn't been fantastic so far (I'm about 200 pages in). Still, it's been very informative so far, and I've never before been convinced that Christianity and Western Europe were quite so poor a match as I am now; not to mention that Eco reads fairly well despite translation. There's even a character based on Borges, even if, for some reason, that character happens to be a close minded, fundamentalist Christian. At the very least, he has the voice of a prophet.

I originally decided to pick up Name Of the Rose (after putting it off for years) after hearing Delany discuss Eco in 1984.

Thomas Pynchon and Inherent Vice

This new book looks really, really bad. I'm going to pick it up the day it comes out and do nothing else until I've finished it--but still, I'm going into it with really low expectations. Going off what I've heard about it so far, that's the only safe choice (and did anytone read that excerpt that was available? that was NOT Pynchon).

That said, I'm still fairly excited. It's not everyday new Pynchon comes out. In the last forty years or so it's happened what... six or seven times? Especially after Against the Day (which was more of a post-Gravity's Rainbow masterpiece than I had ever allowed myself to hope for), I'm willing to forgive him about anything.

It's always possible he might be putting out another book in the next few years. In that big ten-year gap before Vineland, there's no telling how many projects he might have begun. (If Joyce is any indication, the stress if writing a masterpiece can be rather difficult--and Pynchon, of the two, has always been the one more inclined to sloth.) I'm figuring he probably worked most of them into Against the Day, but there might be a few left, right?