John writes in with this question:
Anyway, I have a question about a book: As an Umberto Eco fan, and having read Foucault’s Pendulum and loved it, I am skittish about becoming physically ill if I read The Da Vinci Code. Should I be worried? Did Eco already write the book and Brown stupidize it? That’s the impression I get.
I haven’t read The Da Vinci Code, but I suspect that you would find it entertaining but not, shall we say, satisfying. Read it, or don’t. But how about some other books that you might enjoy which are more substantial and pleasurably complex (and much of this is just speculation because I haven’t read all of these books): First, I’d like to recommend two childrens’ series that – though they are written for kids – are loaded with allegory that make them rich reading, or rereading, for adults. They are the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman and CS Lewis’ classic the The Chronicles of Narnia. I know, Narnia, it sounds ridiculous, but I reread the series as an adult and found the books to be full of intricacies to be mined. From the grown-up side of things, I’m told that Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon might fit the bill, as will his more recent, and enormous, Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, & The System of the World). If you don’t mind a bit of a tropical lilt to your complex, fantastical fiction, I highly recommend trying out some magical realism. The The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis is a terrific, meandering tale, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is similarly enjoyable, and you can’t go wrong with the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. I may be getting a bit far afield here… anyone else want to chime in?
