I have very mixed feelings about this book. The collection is deep, well written (obviously) and at time humorous reflections on our society. Though like most posthumous publications, they're always put together a little bit too quickly and could use a bit more thought and/or editing. That said, the contents are beautiful, but the organization and selection could have used more care.

I adored this book. Yes, it was very much like getting a book of thoughts from a grandfather, and many of those thoughts were picking on millennials, but it is so full of wisdom, humor, playfulness and some downright cool stuff. I read this and immediately read it again because I wanted to catch those little nuggets I might have missed the first time. Sadly, I had never read any of Eco's work before receiving a copy of this book, but I will make a point to find any and all translated pieces by him moving forward. What a gem!

*ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

Deep and witty reflections on the current state of our Western society. Things are not too bright, but reading this book could be the first step towards awareness and the search for solutions.
for several decades, Umberto Eco wrote a weekly column in the Italian weekly magazine L’Espresso. This posthumous collection, Chronicles of a Liquid Society, gathers together over 110 of these columns, on a large variety of topics. Eco prefaces his work by presenting these vignettes as “reflections on aspects of this ‘liquid society’ of ours”.
The title is based on the expression coined by Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) in his work State of Crisis. According to this Polish sociologist and philosopher, in Eco’s words, “the crisis in the concept of community gives rise to unbridled individualism… a situation with no points of reference, where everything dissolves into a sort of liquidity.” To come to terms with this “liquidity”, one needs first to become aware that we are living in such a context, and then try to develop new instruments to overcome it.
I believe the goal of Eco’s collections of short essays on modern life, on society, on social media, on education, etc., is precisely to develop awareness in his readers.
I really enjoyed these deep and often witty reflections on the state of our current Western society. If several passages could give the impression that Eco is not too happy with modern development, they reveal that progress is not the culprit, the way we handle it is the problem. “Progress doesn’t necessarily involve going forward at all costs”.
I was totally fascinated by his analysis of social media and our desire to be seen and recognized, hence people trying to appear on the camera whenever they see a tv reporter around them, or the sickly propagation of the selfie obsession.
Eco argues this behavior stems from the fact that people no longer believe in God. When they believed there was a God, they knew at least there was One person who knew all about them. Take God away, and you enter into the “black hole of anonymity”. Thus you feel the need for people to see you, and you insist on your appearance, you constantly post pictures of your every new look.
Lots of his columns are related to social media, including the issue of privacy.
When we think social media and the Internet, we have to think hacking.
Eco also connects the use of the Internet with education, and the fact that the government is planning to replace textbooks with material taken directly from the Internet. The problem is the absence of filters. “Not all Internet users are able to judge whether a site can be trusted”. This can me a major concern for education. “It’s a skill that’s hard to teach, since those who teach are often as unprepared as students”.
Besides, “education is about not only transmitting information but also teaching the criteria for selecting… Unless pupils are taught that culture is not accumulation but discrimination, then what they’re learning is not education but mental clutter”.
And along with education, he highlights how “people’s ideas even about the recent past are vague… At one time we had great interest in the past because there wasn’t much news about the present… In American culture this flattening of the past onto the present is viewed casually, there is a failure to use the experience of the past as a lesson for the present”.
To say the least, Eco is not too positive on the way humanity is going.
Another issue he sees in our evolution is the fact that “new human beings are no longer used to living in nature… This is one of the greatest anthropological revolutions since the Neolithic Age”. Nowadays, children “live much of their lives in the virtual world. Writing with just the index finger rather than with the whole hand no longer stimulates the same neurons or the same cortical areas”.
Eco covers lots of other themes.
There are of course several essays on books.
- My full review on my blog is even more detailed
- it's also on amazon, the link is not live yet

This book may have well been entitled "Millennials Need Not Apply." Baby Boomers will find themselves here, but anyone who was not alive for the WWII or the Vietnam War need not bother. I think even my husband, a fervent Gen-Yer, who is constantly teasing me for just making it into the Millennial category, would be put off by quite a bit of this.

At first, I respected what he was saying--there was quite a bit of nostalgia for his childhood, and it made sense, the way he felt about the world. Fascism, remembering the bomb shelters, a general paranoia about how the world was starting to resemble those days. But then he really started digging into the Internet and how detrimental it was to society and it went from a slight paranoia to total lack of respect and absolute conspiracy.

In many of the essays, I would think "Okay, I know what this is going to be about, let's see what Eco has to say." But by the end, I would be thinking "Does he even know?" He completely loses the thread on his own thoughts. Plus, they are totally outdated. It's a posthumous collection, so I kind of understand that. But I'm not really interested in reading about your hatred of the Internet when you're ranting about Windows Vista.

Not to mention, the guy was just an asshole. There's a story he tells--no, brags--where he is walking towards a girl with a cellphone, and just stops right in front of her so she runs into him and drops it. "I only hope her cell phone broke when it fell, and I advise anyone in a similar situation to do as I did." I read a few more essays after this, but that was pretty much it for me. The next section was all about the conspiracy of 9/11, and well, no thanks.

This is a collection of short essays written by Eco for an Italian publication. The essays are observations of life often reflecting on a popular culture topic. The essays span over a good number of years and are best taken one or two at a time. Overall, interesting but not as fleshed out or engaging as his fiction.

This collection of over 100 short newspaper columns is an excellent choice to download to your phone reading app of choice in case you find yourself with a few minutes to spare. Whatever uninformed opinions and clickbait that might appear on Twitter or Facebook at the moment you are occupying will not be a fraction as edifying and entertaining as even the dumbest thing the late Umberto Eco had to say.

When an author passes away, his or her estate usually gets busy hustling out in book form whatever leftover odds and ends they can. This is one of those books. This is not to imply that the contents of this book are unworthy of publication or that greedy relatives are cashing in. However, these are columns from a first weekly, and then semi-weekly, column that Eco did for a major Italian newspaper. If they are read one after another, there is a certain sameness. Still, Eco is not to be faulted, I feel, as even the most creative person may have difficulty coming up with fresh perspectives week after week, and many opinions we hold are sincerely held for long periods. The upshot is occasionally the same point gets made two or three times in this collection, a shortcoming that Eco freely admits to in the book’s foreward. Hence the recommendation for optimal consumption above.

Of course, in a collection like this, quality will vary, as happens when people are writing on deadline. There are a two essays that I felt, simply, should not have seen the light of day again.

One is “Return to Sender” (Kindle location 3419), which contains an error of fact so preposterous that somebody, somewhere, should have prevented it from be published once again. Here it is:

I read recently in La Repubblica that the Federal Reserve are worried about deflation: people are not spending as much, prices are falling, a crisis worse than in times of deflation. So they propose a perishable dollar -- in other words, a banknote with a magnetic strip that gradually loses value, and also loses value if you keep if in the bank.

I’m sure Eco was telling the truth when he said this absurd proposal appeared in an Italian newspaper, but he should have had enough sense to check for himself. Failing that, the editor or publisher should have either cut this essay out of the collection, or noted this silly mistake for what it was.

(BTW, I actually checked with the public affairs office of the US Federal Reserve which confirmed that they never considered such a proposal.)

The second essay that really didn't deserve revival is “The Miraculous Mortacc” (location 3699). There are no errors of fact in this essay. It’s just sort of a lazy one-joke piece. Summary: Eco gets some prescription medicine. The medicine comes with the comprehensive required but gruesome list of side effects which could conceivably occur in a tiny minority of cases. This list is the bulk of the essay.

But far more essays are delightful and will brighten any unexplained delay in public transportation. I especially enjoy when Eco writes about the vexing questions of popular culture, like, “Is Harry Potter bad for adults?” (l. 2844), and why does the home address of detective Nero Wolfe on West 34th Street seem to slide up and down, east and west, seemingly at random?

Eco also has interesting thoughts on fake news, the cell phone, conspiracies, racism, Catholicism, unread books, book collecting, and being quoted out of context. In general, each essay in this book is like going straight to the most interesting column in the newspaper and reading it, but without having to start and abandon all the less interesting columns first.

Many people and historical events are referred to in this book which I did not recognize. In some cases, this is probably due to my inadequate education, and others surely reflected Eco's erudition and love of the obscure. However, I did not feel bad at failing to recognize certain politicians and popular culture figures which may have been familiar to Italian newspaper readers at the moment of original publication. Below, I attempt to corral the references that I did not understand and link them to explanatons, for the possible edification of those of us condemned to live in English-speaking culture. I left out references to people and things which I did not recognize but which I felt were adequately explained in the text, for example, “politicians like Urbano Ratazzi and Francesco Crispi” (l. 542) and “Michel Serres is the finest philosophical mind in France today” (l. 563).

Milingo (l. 179),the Republic of Salò (l. 260),
Redonda (l. 330) (Eco actually tells readers to look it up in Wikipedia – I did it for you), pataphysical (l. 331), Stendhal Syndrome (l. 465), Donna Haraway (l. 477), Charles Sanders Pierce (l. 496 and numerous other places), Alcide De Gasperi (l. 539), Pietro Badoglio (l. 539), Luigi Facta (l. 541), monocotyledons (l. 832), Countess of Castiglione (l. 838), Palmiro Togliatti (l. 846), Padre Pio (l. 853), Wanda Osiris (l. 868), Roberto Saviano (l. 941), non possumus (l. 977), Ugo Foscolo (l. 977), the Prix Italia (l. 1308), Theodor Adorno (l. 1318), Countess Pia Bellentani (l. 1571), Piacenza (l. 1594), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (l. 1840), Evola (l. 1890), Montanist (l. 1925), Mario Appelius (l. 2066), “Sister Lúcia's letter about the third secret of Fatima” (l. 2139), Chaldeans (l. 2197), Champollion (l. 2205), Benedetto Croce (l. 2228), Richard Rorty (l. 2242), Quine (l. 2249), Pictura est laicorum literatura (l. 2389), “mulier amicta solis” (l. 2489) (apparently the final word in this phrase was misspelled by Eco or misprinted, should be “sole”), Burchiello (l. 2505), Nerval (l. 2518), Leopardi (l. 2518), Mario Luzi (l. 2518), Eusebius of Caesarea (l. 2530), Lateran Treaty (l. 2631), respondeo dicendum quod (l. 2778), bravoes (l. 2825), the Fox and the Cat (l. 2878), incunabulum (l. 2940, 3130 and 3731), babirusas (l. 2992), Tex Willer (l. 3174), Totò (l. 3181), the Tupamaros in Uruguay (l. 3608), the Thebaid (l. 3618), the Salton Sea (l. 3678)

I received a free electronic galley copy of this book for review. Thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for their generosity.

Book of pithy observations that I didn't find as engaging and meaningful as his fiction.

This was my first Umberto Eco and I loved the essays, his style made me feel like we were having a chat or I was eavesdropping on someone in the pub. Although some of the essays are nearly 20 years old they are still shockingly relevant.
This is a book to dip in and out of as the topics are similar but is a great read.

I've always been a fan of Eco's fiction and now I'm a fan of his non-fiction too.

Drawn from Eco's short columns for L'Espresso over the last 30 years, these are his reflections on modern life, technology, Italian politics and his own experiences--from hiding in an air raid shelter in WWII, to the birth of his grandchildren. Unfortunately, many of them have a 'get off my lawn' curmugeon-ness that sours his observations on the adaptations of society to new innovation, although his dislike of celebrity culture and reality TV is well-founded.