“How to Travel with a Salmon” is a highly engaging collection of what Umberto Eco calls his diario minimo—minimal diaries—after the magazine column in which he began “pursuing the pathways of parody.” These essays are his playful but unfailingly accurate takes on militarism, computer jargon, Westerns, art criticism, librarians, bureaucrats, meals on airplanes, Amtrak trains, bad coffee, maniacal taxi drivers, express mail, multi-function, watches, fax machines and cellular phones, pornography, soccer fans, academia, and—last, but definitely not least—the author’s own self. “How to Travel with a Salmon” gives us Eco’s acute vision of the absurdities of modern life.