Baudolino

Like all of Eco's books this swirls with dead end intellectual red herrings, thoughts and meanderings but if you enjoy (put up with?) these you get recompensed with a rich tapestry and a good story. I know i will re-read this one in the future to try and catch the shitload of stuff I missed fist time round

This book drove me mad, I so wanted to finish it so I wouldn't have to read the damn thing anymore. I don't even particularly know why I disliked it so, I just found the narrator TIRESOME (sic) and couldn't get the characters straight. I kind of see what Eco was trying to do here, it's a bit of a mash up of the unreliable narrator of the Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy type, going on fanciful adventures then retelling them so that he ends up the hero and comes across all sorts of strange marvels along the way, but I found it hard to care about the five heads of John the Baptist and the hairy satyr woman, probably due to Baudolino's deficiencies as a narrator. He can't carry the storyline himself as he is no good at describing his own relationships and the other characters. The parts I enjoyed were the debates about theology and Prester John. Overall, I thought it was written from quite a male centric viewpoint.