"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" by Umberto Eco

Before I started reading this book, I read some reviews in Amazon.com and they were pretty scathing. I have to agree. The book is pretty much a waste of time unless you are really  interested in Italy during the war, and in the type of reading that someone like Eco did. One thing I can say of it is that the illustrations are very nice. I skimmed the book and did not do it justice, but there are other books I would much rather be reading. One useful thing I gained from it was a good idea of what it's like to have no memory of who you are after a stroke. Ah, the challenge of rediscovering yourself based on clues such as old books and comics! And then he has a second stroke and his memory comes back while he is in a coma. And then he realizes that all his life he has wanted to finish off a scene from Cyrano de Bergerac with a girl he met in high school, who, just before his first stroke, he found out had died at 18. His wife and family were secondary to this goal. And then he dies. Gross book!