The first couple of hundred pages were slow to get through. I actually turned down this book to start reading and finish a non-fiction on geopolitics instead (David Harvey's the Enigma of Capital to be precise, highly recommended). I hadn't read a historical novel for years, but remembered really liking Umberto Eco's Baudolino as a teenager, so I was expecting this one to be a pageturner. Didn't happen that way. 
 I picked up reading The Name of the Rose two months after stopping and I'm glad I did. It only turns into the pageturner I expected in the last hundred pages or so, but there's a lot in this book. Not that I will, but it's the sort of book that you can re-read many times and find different interpretations and discover Eco's own philosophies. There's also a lot of Latin used in it. As I've never learned Latin, I just skip it and to be frank, I frequently skimmed over other lenghty prose. No matter how well-done, and I understand why it is important and ought to be included, I'm not really interested in reading a full chapter of an old monk remembering his first and only sexual encounter in his life back when he was a novice, and whether it was the devil that lured him or not. I get the idea. 
 What I really like is that the novel is written from the perspective of an old monk that writes down this important story of an eventful and disastrous week of an old abbey. It is a devout god-fearing monk that never truly understood the events and the logic of his master. But you, as a 20th(/21st) century educated reader, interpret 'his' (or well, Umberto Eco's protagonist, of course) story in a different manner. Understanding the nuances that the original writer who wrote it all down did not. 
 What I also liked was the insights it provided in all these struggles within the Catholic Church I had never heard of. The whole Poverty of Christ debate, the power struggle that is behind the discussion on heresy, how the Vatican both coopts and destroys dissenting thought in order keep up its hegemony. In particular, I found the discussion on whether Christ had property or not fascinating, as it related to a fundamental political conflict, but is then through all the ideological filters merely discussed as a theological dispute, with nobody stating what it truly is about; namely, class struggle. I can think of some real world examples where you can see the same thing.