Billy Bob's Book Review Corner

This, the 4th edition of Billy Bob’s Book Review Corner, was originally written in 2025, making it SIGNIFICANTLY less old and stale than the three previous reposts. Isn’t that generous of me? You can thank me later, let’s get to the reviewing.

Today’s book is from 1988, a year in which the politics of today were nearly entirely irrelevant, so please enjoy your break from the current news cycle.

I recently finished reading Foucault’s Pendulum, one of the more famous books by one of my favorite authors, Umberto Eco, who you might remember from his extremely popular book about the Catholic Church, The Name of the Rose. If you have read any of his books you’d know that Eco is, at heart, a historian, and he seems particularly preoccupied with seldom-talked-about periods of history involving Europe. To read one of his books, you have to accept to some extent that you’re being lectured at about a topic you probably don’t know much about.

This book firstly concerns the titular Foucault’s Pendulum, a real device invented by a French scientist named Leon Foucault, a completely different and unrelated person to the philosophical Foucault you are probably imagining. This device is simply a weight hung from a substantial height which demonstrates the reality of the earth’s rotation by moving on its own over a period of time. Not a terribly complex concept, but innovative enough in its time. It’s important to note that the pendulum is neither a mystical nor religious construct. It’s just basic applied science.

The book’s main narrative follows the lives of three intellectuals with questionable motivations and low ambition, much like many people you have probably met before. College educated, very smart, dead end job, out of touch with what’s normal. You know the type. The main narrator joins the other two after hanging out with them frequently at a neighborhood bar. Eventually, the trio winds up working together in publishing. The conceit of their publishing company is that it has two distinct faces: a branch that publishes more serious and professional works of scientific interest, and a second branch that is a basic vanity press that bilks money out of wealthy clientele in exchange for printing their biography that no one is ever going to read.

The theme of the book throughout revolves around the main trio’s obsession with esotericism and secret societies, even though it is made abundantly clear over and over again that all three of them are extremely cynical people who think everything involved with said esotericism is bullshit. Eventually, their love for this kind of fringe material, combined with a distinctly 1980s resurgence of esoteric popularity (remember when new age bookstores became a thing?), resulted in them hatching a plan to publish questionably historical material about secret societies dating back to the OG of all of them, the Knights Templar.

I can’t really say anything more about the book’s plot without spoiling it. This book is basically the grandfather of other semi-religious adventure works like Da Vinci Code. In fact, it often feels like a satirical version of that book (even though it’s substantially older) or even Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where people are piecing together clues to find some hidden treasure, but in this case, all the main characters are constantly making fun of the contrivance of it all.

Toward the end of the book, Eco starts huffing his own farts a little (not unusual for him) and he takes some of the historical stuff a little too far, especially considering that the “history” in this book is probably 25% real at best. The last 100 pages were a little painful. Still, though, if you want to read about bored intellectuals deliberately publishing bullshit to make money off of esoteric nutjobs, I haven’t so far come across a better example of that than Foucault’s Pendulum.