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I'm trying to plow through "Foucault's Pendulum" and struggling for some of the same reasons.

Martha, I think I told you something similar when you told me you were going to read "The Haj." I agree totally. And thank you for pointing out the reference to humiliation. I didn't make that connection.

Kathy

I spent more time throwing that book against the wall than I did reading it. I think it has more to do with his translator than anything else. I read "Cathedral of the Sea" by Idelfonso Falcones and his translator is a guy named Nick Caistor. It was almost like reading poetry, honest. I have more trouble with Eco than anyone and I really think it has to do with his translator.

Try "Cathedral of the Sea", I think you might enjoy it more.

My second hospital reading was Sarah Addison Allen's Garden Spells, which I started three times, then ploughed through to the finish. And ultimately wished I hadn't bothered.

Garden Spells was a Tessa recommendation in the beach book category. When I finished it, I said it reminded me of Alice Hoffman. I read my way through her books after being blown away by her atypical At Risk. IMHO she never came close, her other books being basic romance with a touch of magic. Tessa agreed and told me what Hoffman started was now a subcategory of romance novels, all having a magical element. She should have told me before.

Anyway, I agree with Tessa on the book's one strength: there is an amazing apple tree that throws apples at people when it wants them to learn something. That was cool, but not cool enough to carry a whole book—let alone a whole subcategory of literature.

I've just purchased a couple of big honkin' reference-type books that this crew might be interested in (especially if the local library has them) -

A New Literary History of America, Harvard Univ. Press
From an Amazon blurb -
"This magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture...Neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too...This book is not so much a history of our literature as it is a literary version of our history, told through the culture we've created to recount our past and conjure our future..." Laura Miller, Salon

and

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein

Certainly more readable and more lift-able. Both are good for browsing & dipping into.

I've been reading the #1 Ladies Detective Agency series. I saw the series on HBO and now I'm reading the books. They are an easy, gentle read and nice to fall asleep with, perfect after a day of reading research studies.

EmmaG

Emma, I love that series (of books) -- I was half-afraid to order the tv show, but did - and I'm pretty pleased with it. Hard when I had Mma Ramotswe completely defined in my head - but I like what they've done with it. I wish they had skipped the stereotypical hairdresser; he isn't in the books and I don't think he adds a lot to the tv show.

Alexader McCall Smith has at least two more series, both set in Scotland. They are also easy, gentle reads, and probably excellent after the kind of reading you describe! Not much happens but you get to know the characters, and he's good at describing places as well.

Hi Julia, I liked the HBO series a lot, but of course,I didn't have a "visual" of the characters already in my head. I did like Mma Makutsi and Mr. J.L.B. Matakoni a lot and think they are pretty close to the book. Unfortunately, I've had to get the books from the library out of order, so it's a little strange.

I did read one of the Philosopher's Club books in the summer and really didn't like it.

EmmaG

Hmm...really didn't like it, or didn't really like it?

I'll agree they're not the same. I've read a couple of them, probably continued only because of the location - I had the good fortune to stay in a B&B in that part of Edinburgh so the books always bring good memories.

But yes, the Botswana novels are better.

And I say that as a traditionally-built woman!