Pendulous Reading

I am about 2/3 of the way through Umberto Eco's excellent Foucault's Pendulum, which I started during the cruise last week. I hope to get most of the way to the end tonight after I stop blogging here.

A couple of thoughts so far:

I wish I knew Italian so that I could read this in its original form. It is multilingual anyway, with lots of French, Latin, and Old French. But I can tell that there is lots of clever wordplay, which never translates perfectly.

Best way to summarize the story and style? Imagine that Neal Stephenson had written The Da Vinci Code instead of Dan Brown.

I would like to see them try to translate this to film, since I rather enjoyed the movie version of Eco's The Name of the Rose. But Da Vinci Code (in both book and film form) has probably oversaturated the market for Holy Grail/Templar/Rosicrucian/Illuminati conspiracy stories.