Foucault's Pendulum

My interest in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum was born out of a comment made by my brother-in-law regarding the The Da Vinci Code. I was mentioning to him that I had just become aware that some of the theories picked up by Dan Brown in his bestseller had been around for ages and had a steadfast group of believers. On confirming this, he said that indeed those theories had already inspired a much deeper and richer book: "Foucault's Pendulum".

So, what did I think of it ? Well, sometimes the book is difficult, dense and demanding but it is also thoroughly rewarding. It is a daring intellectual thriller with a lot of goodies (tasty chunks of erudite trivia) thrown in. As soon as you finish reading it, it shouts back at you "Read me again !". And you will.

Synopsis

Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth.