Currently reading and recently read....

Current:
Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco

Recent:
AA-1025, The memoirs of an Anti-Apostle, by Marie Carre


I thought I first saw FP on my parents' bookshelf in the early 1980s, and the title struck me--and with an author named Umberto, it was just exotic enough to hold my interest--but I was too young to read it then, and as it turns out, it was first published in 1988, so I don't know what I thought I saw.

As for AA-1025, it's a collection of autobiographical notes from a communist agent who became a priest in order to subvert the Church. It's an interesting read--I particularly enjoyed #1025's dismay at Vatican II not being as postmodern/secularly materialist in its results as he'd hoped--but the reader reviews at Amazon are almost as interesting. They're divided between folks who ascribe all the "modernizations" that accompanied the Novus Ordo to the likes of #1025, and folks who find the plot too convenient, and the story elements too trite, to be anything but fiction. In the words of one of the few uncategorized reviewers, "True or not, what it claims has actually come true."

*** UPDATE ***
I forgot to ask: Does anyone have any idea why Belbo's home town is only written as ***, and never actually named? Maybe it does in the last hundred pages of the book, but by now I'm skeptical.