I find myself doing the same thing with Pynchon. Other than “Crying of Lot 49”, I have never finished a Pynchon novel, yet I talk about “Gravity’s Rainbow”, “Bleeding Edge”, and to a far lesser extent “Against the Day” all the time.
And Linear Algebra was nearly impossible for me too.
And there was much rejoicing!
I just have to say how much I appreciate you, Rob Bechizza. This is such a great tidbit from Eco, and I love your weird/obscure posts too. 
You could talk very convincingly about any film you never saw as long as you had read the spoof on it in MAD Magazine. Thanks to Mort Drucker, you even could hold your ground when talking about the visuals.
Anyway, I think I will re-read Foucault’s Pendulum during the holidays.
Agreed! 
I know that Rob at least sometimes reads the comments on his blog posts, but I’m quoting you and adding an @beschizza to increase the chances that Rob sees your post
“V” is good, have you tried that one? In fact it might be the longest book I’ve ever finished, usually more of a novella type.
Cheers!
I feel like there are crucial bits in amongst all the tedious long-post comments. Ones that could transform my life if I took time to examine them. I’ll never know for sure because I’m not going to dig through all that, of course.
I think I’ll just make a policy to find the longest comment in each topic and “like” it in the hopes that somebody else can benefit.
Non-readers might declare readers to be pretentious if the latter talks about books they actually have read.
I suspect those analogous memories are the things that eventually become allegory (read: dreams).
I think that depends on how and how ‘hard’ you learn it.
I have certain things where I recall the actual page (certain physics things) and can see all the data. The first 7 digits of pi are ingrained in my memory, without any context. Formulae are a mix, dependant on how often I have used them and how I stored them to use them (things like F=ma and all those ‘triangles’ I always ended up reducing to x/yz so to find x, y or z I could just ‘cover’ one and the formula to find that one would be what remained … I wrote them out that way and internalised them to a point of abstraction).
A book I love can thus be in my mind ‘to abstraction’. Or I might remember the sentence in the page, on the page (not remembering the whole page as a photographic memory). OR I might only remember the gestalt of the book.
Mostly it’s a mixed bag: the story with it’s chapters/beats etc are this (as you say) analogous memory of it. Yet some things might be ingrained and some I can see the page/sentence. Some are copied into my memory, some things are remembered ‘fuzzily’ as a gestalt/analogy.
But to say that knowing all these things about something is as good as the actual thing? That is like saying seeing pictures of the Grand Canyon, knowing maps and sizes and geographical surveys of it is the same in any way as actually having been there yourself.
You wouldn’t know what you don’t know, because you’ve never been there …
It’s been a while since I read it, but this post reminds me of the presence of this topic in The Name of the Rose…books read or unread.
If I remember correctly, the murders surrounded THE book by Aristotle that everyone wanted to get their grubby hands on, that was so long out of sight nobody really could back any claims about what it truly said…
I think the main point was that the book was actively denied existing because of its counter-doctrinary content. I could elaborate, maybe even regurgitate. But I suggest interested readers to digest it themselves.
Thanks, @beschizza, for reminding us how comment sections including the BBS work! I love this post, and wouldn’t have found the text otherwise, I think.
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