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Summary: Eco at his poetic best!
Review: To put it simply, this book is fabulous. It is beautifully crafted, elegantly written, and, as an added bonus, even wonderfully translated. All of Eco's books are remarkable, and each has its own specific merits; this book stands out most for its poetic quality. In a Borges short story there is a line about a noun consisting of the rising sun and the cry of a bird, and Eco has brilliantly suceeded at capturing that particular "noun." All language and images and philosophy, this book is a delight to read and re-read.
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Summary: Prose Perfected
Review: Although Umberto Eco began wonderfully with "The Name of the Rose," "The Island of the Day Before" is truly his crowning achievement. There are few books where the prose so perfectly transcends the plot that the end result is the purified, refined pleasure of reading beautifully crafted writing. I found my self reading and rereading passages of no importance simply because the play of language was so immaculate. If you are looking for the mystery and excitement of "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum," look elsewhere, but if you want to read an example of the finest fiction this century has to offer, this book is as good as it gets.
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Summary: Another masterpiece from Umberto Eco
Review: This is a very entertaining book with a lot of historic references. If you liked the Name of the Rose, don't miss it!
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Summary: Maximus Liber!
Review: This book was wonderful! Eco is a genius; he is a marvelous medievalist, wonderfully knowledgable in historical, philosophical, and theological matters of all kinds, and a brilliant novelist. The only reason I can see for a person to dislike this book (or any others that Eco has written) would be a short attention span or absolute ignorance of history and philosophy. These books are not for those who read Michael Crichton or Danielle Steele -- they are for readers who desire complicated characters, philosophy, beautiful imagery and a sense of a certain time and place over pointless action. I am rather disgusted with reviews that condemn this book for its supposed lack of "plot." Literature is not merely about action and events, and it is sad that many people have missed the point. I would decidedly recommend this book to those who have even a minimal degree of intelligence. It is brilliant.
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Summary: Don't bother
Review: What an appalling bore this book was. 500 pages of a guy on his own slowly losing his mind interspersed with stories about imaginary brothers, what it feels like to be a stone (15 pages, the historical significance of doves in Greek and Roman mythology and wondering endlessly about whether such and such a girl thinks the hero is nice. The lead protagonist is as wet as dishwater. And there is absolutely no pay back from this book. If you want to know about telling the time at sea then read Longitude and give this book a miss. I don't have anything against Mr Eco per se - I have read and enjoyed his books before but this is the most boring history book I have ever read. and the fact that it is dressed up as fiction doesn't do it any favours.
Rating: 
Summary: Bring patience and a good dictionary.
Review: The complex weave of this book requires patience to work through. I read it over a six month period. You can read it glancingly -- just taking what you pick up on the first read, or actually try to understand all of its complexity, including hundreds of historical concepts and words that have long since disappeared from use and require a good historical dictionary (or two or three PhDs) to understand.Overall, I found the story to be rewarding. One chapter, "The Aristotelian Telescope", is in itself worth the price of the book.
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Summary: A really wonderful book requiring historical perspective
Review: What I really like about Eco is the difficulty of reading coupled with the rewards at the end of the effort. In the present case, Island can be better understood if one first reads Boorstin's "The Discoverers" and the discussion of the historical importance of the accurate measurement of time. With that perspective, "Island" comes alive!
Rating: 
Summary: Self-indulgent intellectualism.
Review: The first half of this novel is bearable, even enjoyable at times as Eco tells us the beginnings of a story at a leisurely pace.
But beware the Jesuit priest. His coming brings a thousand boredoms.
Eventually the book becomes one long discourse stuck in out-dated scientific arguments: Does the earth revolve around the sun or vice versa.
Where oh where did the story go?
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Summary: Interesting, but another point on a downward trajectory
Review: Eco's "The Name of The Rose" was a dense but excellent multilayered novel of medieval thought, history and politics cleverly organized by a plot aimed more at revealing the mindset of a changing period than telling a 'story' per se. "Foucault's Pendulum" attempted, less successfully, to do the same thing. With this novel Eco appears to have concluded that history is interesting enough not to require more than the most casual of plots to introduce; he's wrong. We've seen most of these ideas before, especially the thinly-disguised mean-spirited anti-clericalism that fuels the novel's 'wit'. Eco desperately needs the discipline of working in the short-story format!
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Summary: One of the most disappointing books I have ever read.
Review: After reading The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, I could barely wait to get my hands on The Island of the Day Before. However, I was sadly disappointed. Having read other books by Eco, many of the philosophical meanderings contained in the text were not unexpected. But unlike his previous works, many of the long-winded descriptions of philosophy, scientific thought and theology in this text felt out of place. Rather than contributing to the plot, as they did in Eco's previous novels, they simply served to slow down the pace of the novel and leave the reader trying to remember what the book was about in the first place.
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