The six related essays collected in this book are the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_...) Eco delivered in 1993. I mostly enjoyed them, but I enjoyed the later ones more than I did the first. The earlier ones reminded me too much of the struggle I had with my philo esurvey course back in college. I expected that philosophers would use the rules of logic as tools so they could work effectively with some content they found worthy of attention. I was taught to look only at the form of the argument and assess the effectiveness of the logic, never mind the content. Since I had signed up for content, I was not terribly happy with the course.

Beginning with the first of these lecture essays, Eco talks about the goals of “model narrators” and “model readers”. Model readers are somewhat like model philosophy students, more engaged with the abstract intention of the author and the structure of the document than with the actual narrative content being read. They interrogate it rather than “go with the flow” of the narrative. Sounds painful.

My own idea of relationship with a piece of writing is one of conversation without abstraction of the details of either myself or the writer out of the discussion. I am not “… a voice without a body or sex or any history …” nor am I terribly interested in trying to fake it. I am not a “model reader”, I teeter back and forth between whole hearted engagement with the work as it is, on its own terms, and intruding myself, my life and my meanings into the conversation.

Nevertheless, as I continued through the essays, I began to engage more and more and found myself fascinated. Once Eco began talking about the permeable boundary between the real world and fiction and how fiction can invade and alter actual events, he had my attention. He included a fascinating discussion of the historic evolution of what are now known as [The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion].

I will re-read this book and I am planning to continue to read both his fiction and his non-fiction. ( )

Nominally a book about reading, this collection of six lectures by Umberto Eco also yields insight into writing. Philosophical, thought-provoking, but often funny, the lectures use literary examples from Dumas, Nerval and Flaubert, but also from Fleming and Christie. It considers the way fiction manipulates us, the way we use fiction, and even the ways we expect or force our world to conform to narrative. Fascinating. ( )