What Fiction are you reading this week, January 7, 2024?

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

37. Eco wrote it so that the first 100 pages were very difficult

His idea was to make you feel a little disoriented and even bored from being lost upon entering a monastery, and I can understand that point. It would be a jarring experience to go in there and try to penetrate the culture and norms of it right off, even for someone used to monastery life. Every monastery was different in its practices and interpretations of doctrine from others, never mind differences between orders, so there would be an adjustment before getting the hang of things.

While I can live with that, now that I understand the reasoning behind it, the one part that's making the read a slog is the extensive use of Latin. I actually studied it in secondary school...over 4 decades ago. Meaning I've forgotten a whole bunch of it, although I retain just enough of what I learned to be a little dangerous with it. So I'm okay with some of the simpler phrases, but you get into the weeds of the kind used in abstruse medieval Catholic doctrine, as NotR does, and I definitely get lost with it.

A little bird told me how to make all the foreign terms bandied about into quick work. A website (https://marco.tompitak.com/notr/) has translated every foreign phrase used in NotR--and in chronological order, separated by chapters. The reading is going much faster with that site kept open on my tablet.