This year is apparently cursed. It's not even the end of February and many brilliant people already died.

Indeed.

It's a sad loss but his legacy won't be forgotten. I've Foucault's Pendulum high on my to-read list along with How to Write a Thesis.

Agreed. There just isn't enough time to read, game or watch movies in a lifetime. There is always something out there you haven't done. I read constantly but still there are so many books, so many authors, so many genres that its impossible to do.

Requiescat in pace!

I'm really sad since i first heard about his passing this morning. A great intellectual and writer. Haven't read all of his novels but loved Name of the Rose, Baudolino and The Prague Cemetry as well as the non-fictional work i read.

Two great literary and human observing minds parted that day, with Lee, too obviously.

I read and liked "The Name of the Rose" - but I always thought of Eco as European humanist, and thinker - before and after the literary title. At least this was the respect that was accorded to Eco in the Finnish press.

I do not know whom would inherit his mantle...

(Finnish saying literally, "manttelinperijä" - inheritor of the coat, mantteli coming from German. Means someone to take over an intellectual legacy. Yuup, we Finns have been, and maybe are again, poor!)