Eco's stories are long and soaked through in the pages with entertaining medieval miscellany, though the endings are let-downs. To understand why, here's a spoiler list (WARNING) of every Eco novel ever except for Prague Cemetery:
The Name of the Rose (1980): The abbey burns down.
Foucault's Pendulum (1988): The secret templar code which everyone was trying so hard to crack turns out to be a laundry list.
The Island of the Day Before (1994): Roberto della Griva never gets to the island. Instead, he drowns himself.
Baudolino (2000): Everything in Baudolino's story turns out to be made-up. Niketas declines to put it down to writing.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005): Giambattista Bodoni dies after spending the whole book in a coma.
Eco's books sit on a shelf near the stairwell, in the same space as Dante and just neighbouring Borges and Neruda, writers from Argentina and Chile whose works I have heard good things of but never read until yesterday. They are just one shelf away from the French authors. ~10 shelves down in the study room direction would be the Russian novels, where Lukyanenko's series are placed side by side with Dostoyevsky and Pushkin and what have you. The German novels are at the far end, some untranslated. I have tried to read some of them, but LAG1201 does not equip you enough for doing that. Laxness' works are in closed stacks, except for this one:
