Umberto Eco's “Foucault's Pendulum” is another of the books recommended to me by Yumpee. Any novel that features a complete program in BASIC for generating all the permutations of the letters of God's name in Hebrew (“Yahveh”) has to be interesting.

Three rather clever editors in a little publishing house invent a plan, just for the kicks of it, supposedly of the Knights Templar scattered throughout the world after their trial, after having read through several manuscripts of dubious merit on occult and esoterica submitted for a forthcoming compilation to be published by the publishing house. Unfortunately for them, their creation takes over their lives when others get wind of their creation. I found the novel a great read on the whole, except for a couple of irritants that it shares with all such books that I have read in the recent past: there are a lot of background characters, organisations and events spread over several centuries that become difficult to remember and there are a lot of sentences in French and Latin that are not at all accompanied by English translations. Either people happily ignore such things or the average reader has faculties of intelligence far beyond those of yours truly.