Wednesday, December 30, 2009

How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays by Umberto Eco

★★½

I just re-read this book, which I first read maybe 10 years ago. I'm not sure why, but before re-reading it, I had it in my head that it was a really great book, and I gave it 4 stars from memory. Maybe because I was younger and less well-read when I first read it, so it made a bigger impression on me? I don't know, but anyway, after reading it again, I'm downgrading it to 2 1/2 stars. :P

There were a handful of essays, mostly towards the beginning and end, that I thought were clever. He uses various types of humor, drawing on wit as well as absurdity. A few essays could probably be qualified as "intellectual", but others might as well have been written by Dave Barry or Douglas Adams - not a dig, as I actually do enjoy both of those writers - but just not as ingenious or hilarious as I previously thought. I thought a couple of essays belabored the point, and were a few pages too long.

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