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I've finally gotten through Dark Souls and Focault's Pendulum. For the record, I enjoyed both, but they were pretty arduous experiences.
I've actually talked about Dark Souls before, and I'm not sure that I have a whole lot to add since I'm not typically in the business of doing full game reviews (though I think I'd be pretty good at it if I put my mind towards it). It was long, but I made it much longer than it had to be because I brought my past gaming experiences with me. I didn't need them, it turned out. Dark Souls is very much its own thing. I wasn't impressed with its much-vaunted difficulty level, either, but I grew up with Nintendo games. If you want the full review, leave a comment, otherwise I'll assume you're not concerned.
Pendulum's something like 530 pages, and for a rusty reader like myself, it was a little daunting. Like a lot of former students who took their education pretty seriously*, I got pretty good at reading and writing. A 10 page rough draft got done in a night, and 500+ pages is a weekend of serious reading. Not so, anymore, and it took me a pretty long time to get through it.
Umberto Eco's a professor of semiotics. I've read The Name of the Rose and a collection of his essays, and he's really quite interesting but, for better or worse, you can really see the effects of it in his fiction. I think that being in the middle of academia for so long eventually leads to a writing that's as cynical about the cyclical, self-feeding nature of some types of research, and Pendulum really reads to me as a deeply interested but cynical manuscript.
Three academics and researchers work for a publication company - one legitimate publisher and one that's basically a confidence game. They've got a lot of self-financed writers on their rolls for the scam company (whos' inner workings are explained in fairly good detail in the depths of the book), and in order to draw them back in, they begin to publish and re-publish documents relating to the Knights Templar and other occult shenanigans. The information released is ostensibly bullshit but the researchers, as a game, make a habit of tying one piece of bullshit to another to fabricate a whole cloth of occult history. For a certain reason (as pertinent to the plot), the story is released to the public, and it gets far, far ahead of the researchers themselves.
Dangerous shenanigans result.
If I want to be critical (but not particularly bright), I'd probably say that you could cut about 100-200 pages without too much difficulty in order to tighten up the plot and better the pacing, but I'm not really sure that's the type of text that Prof. Eco wanted to produce. For me, it was interesting but not snappy. I didn't fall in to the pages like I've done with other books I've been interested in. First, I don't speak French, Portugese, Spanish, Italian, or Latin, and my lack of education in the Romance languages hurt my ability to understand the nuances in certain passages, quotes, and chapter headers. Second, I must admit that the bulk of the pages scattered clues as trees shed autumn leaves; in the detritus of the protagonists' personal history, we have clues to his inner workings. Do we need them? Possibly not. I say that the book is larger than the sum of its plot points, but the beginning goes on too long.
Where The Name of the Rose reads like an excellently researched adventure game from the player's perspective, Focault's Pendulum reads like it were almost the narrative of the storytellers making the game. The protagonists enthusiastically pen a secret history full of sorcerers, thaumaturges, assassins, knights, and harlots fit for any World of Darkness campaign. When it's leaked, it's convincing to those who have already lost their grip on reality. Like Mulder, they want to believe, but unlike The X-Files, there never were any aliens. The conspiracy is a lie fabricated by three con artists who got too wrapped up in their games.
Once again, the plot is fair, but the book only becomes a page turner at the 300 pg. mark. The exposition is probably the key. Prof. Eco provides page after page of fake information for the reader to wade through, making one feel that there is a story-in-a-story that one is reading, as if the writer couldn't decide which story he would rather tell, and so he puts one in the other so he doesn't need to decide. At one point, I nearly lost patience because the information provided wasn't of any real use to me, before I realized that neither was the book I had opened in the first place.
If books were Russian nesting dolls, I suppose. I can set Foucault's Pendulum next to House of Leaves.
Personally I liked it. It's a good book, but here's my suggestion; this is a book for someone who actually enjoys their academic reading and is willing to read an extensive and dense piece of fiction about someone doing a lot of academic reading and the effect of that on their personal lives. If I knew a little better, I'd say that it has a fair amount to do with the nasty politics of academia, but that's speculation. I can think of a few people who read this journal that this book is relevant to, but I think my warnings are the same as the warnings one receives upon asking if one ought to pursue graduate studies. The very thing designed to warn you away beckons you closer, providing you're into that kind of thing.
* for an 18-20 year old, which is really not 'adult' seriously like I've come to understand it.
I've actually talked about Dark Souls before, and I'm not sure that I have a whole lot to add since I'm not typically in the business of doing full game reviews (though I think I'd be pretty good at it if I put my mind towards it). It was long, but I made it much longer than it had to be because I brought my past gaming experiences with me. I didn't need them, it turned out. Dark Souls is very much its own thing. I wasn't impressed with its much-vaunted difficulty level, either, but I grew up with Nintendo games. If you want the full review, leave a comment, otherwise I'll assume you're not concerned.
Pendulum's something like 530 pages, and for a rusty reader like myself, it was a little daunting. Like a lot of former students who took their education pretty seriously*, I got pretty good at reading and writing. A 10 page rough draft got done in a night, and 500+ pages is a weekend of serious reading. Not so, anymore, and it took me a pretty long time to get through it.
Umberto Eco's a professor of semiotics. I've read The Name of the Rose and a collection of his essays, and he's really quite interesting but, for better or worse, you can really see the effects of it in his fiction. I think that being in the middle of academia for so long eventually leads to a writing that's as cynical about the cyclical, self-feeding nature of some types of research, and Pendulum really reads to me as a deeply interested but cynical manuscript.
Three academics and researchers work for a publication company - one legitimate publisher and one that's basically a confidence game. They've got a lot of self-financed writers on their rolls for the scam company (whos' inner workings are explained in fairly good detail in the depths of the book), and in order to draw them back in, they begin to publish and re-publish documents relating to the Knights Templar and other occult shenanigans. The information released is ostensibly bullshit but the researchers, as a game, make a habit of tying one piece of bullshit to another to fabricate a whole cloth of occult history. For a certain reason (as pertinent to the plot), the story is released to the public, and it gets far, far ahead of the researchers themselves.
Dangerous shenanigans result.
If I want to be critical (but not particularly bright), I'd probably say that you could cut about 100-200 pages without too much difficulty in order to tighten up the plot and better the pacing, but I'm not really sure that's the type of text that Prof. Eco wanted to produce. For me, it was interesting but not snappy. I didn't fall in to the pages like I've done with other books I've been interested in. First, I don't speak French, Portugese, Spanish, Italian, or Latin, and my lack of education in the Romance languages hurt my ability to understand the nuances in certain passages, quotes, and chapter headers. Second, I must admit that the bulk of the pages scattered clues as trees shed autumn leaves; in the detritus of the protagonists' personal history, we have clues to his inner workings. Do we need them? Possibly not. I say that the book is larger than the sum of its plot points, but the beginning goes on too long.
Where The Name of the Rose reads like an excellently researched adventure game from the player's perspective, Focault's Pendulum reads like it were almost the narrative of the storytellers making the game. The protagonists enthusiastically pen a secret history full of sorcerers, thaumaturges, assassins, knights, and harlots fit for any World of Darkness campaign. When it's leaked, it's convincing to those who have already lost their grip on reality. Like Mulder, they want to believe, but unlike The X-Files, there never were any aliens. The conspiracy is a lie fabricated by three con artists who got too wrapped up in their games.
Once again, the plot is fair, but the book only becomes a page turner at the 300 pg. mark. The exposition is probably the key. Prof. Eco provides page after page of fake information for the reader to wade through, making one feel that there is a story-in-a-story that one is reading, as if the writer couldn't decide which story he would rather tell, and so he puts one in the other so he doesn't need to decide. At one point, I nearly lost patience because the information provided wasn't of any real use to me, before I realized that neither was the book I had opened in the first place.
If books were Russian nesting dolls, I suppose. I can set Foucault's Pendulum next to House of Leaves.
Personally I liked it. It's a good book, but here's my suggestion; this is a book for someone who actually enjoys their academic reading and is willing to read an extensive and dense piece of fiction about someone doing a lot of academic reading and the effect of that on their personal lives. If I knew a little better, I'd say that it has a fair amount to do with the nasty politics of academia, but that's speculation. I can think of a few people who read this journal that this book is relevant to, but I think my warnings are the same as the warnings one receives upon asking if one ought to pursue graduate studies. The very thing designed to warn you away beckons you closer, providing you're into that kind of thing.
* for an 18-20 year old, which is really not 'adult' seriously like I've come to understand it.
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