My Bedside Book

I always sleep with two or three things beside me on my bed -- books, my journal, and a shirt that I am hiding from my sisters because I want it to be available when I feel like wearing it.

Why not keep it in the closet, you ask. Well I have three sisters and we are notorious for borrowing each others' clothes without permission. So we’ve taken to hiding them in rather clever places. My sister stashes them in her car. I put them under my pillow.

Anyway I was going to talk about one of the books I have bedside:

The Name of The Rose by Umberto Eco. When I was in college, I was in love with our Communication Theory Professor. That was enough reason to immerse myself in all of the Semiology books I could get my hands on, and of course Umberto Eco’s name is almost synonymous with Semiology.

So I tried reading his most famous work – The Name of The Rose. It was soooo tedious. The main characters were a Franciscan and a Benedictine monk. It was set in a monastery. Some of the dialogue was in Latin. After about 50 pages, I gave up. My non-fiction teacher said that Eco purposely made the first 100 pages boring, to weed out the serious from the casual reader. The rest of the book, he said, was a wild ride. So you can imagine that now, 6 years later I am reading with a conscious effort to go beyond the 100 page mark.

And so far, it has been…one ride that sends me straight to sleep, each night. I'm past the 200th page and I'm still waiting for the "wild ride." I remember reading somewhere that it's The Da Vinci Code for smart people. Guess this is how geniuses get their kicks - Latin dialogue, verbose discussions on heresy, religion and history.

I've decided to keep reading though. I can never walk away from a murder mystery without first finding out the culprit.