It will make you feel that is real. And you wanna research about it, I’ll tell you, you will research about it. Fast-paced. Great. ;)

Okay. I recognise that the Da Vinci Code is a fictional novel. However, at the very beginning of the book, Brown makes the claim that “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”

This is simply not true; his descriptions are speculative at best, and just plain false at worst. This is especially obvious in his description of Da Vinci’s original Madonna of the Rocks painting, and how it differs from the later version:

Oddly, though, rather than the usual Jesus blessing John scenario, it was baby John who was blessing Jesus… and Jesus was submitting to his authority! More troubling still, Mary was holding one hand high above the head of infant John and making a decidedly threatening gesture—her fingers looking like eagle’s talons, gripping an invisible head. Finally, the most obvious and frightening image: Just below Mary’s curled fingers, Uriel was making a cutting gesture with his hand—as if slicing the neck of the invisible head gripped by Mary’s clawlike hand.

It doesn’t take a scholar to point out that this isn’t so. Not only is Uriel blatantly pointing, rather than making a “cutting gesture”, but it isn’t even John that Mary is supposedly holding her “clawlike hand” over. The child on the left is clearly identical in both versions, and is marked out as John in the later version by the reed cross he’s holding. Note also how Jesus is blessing John in both paintings.

But even putting aside Brown’s severe bending of the truth, it was an awful, awful book.

The characters are utterly two-dimensional, the writing is uninspired and fraught with clichés, and the shocking twist towards the end not only feels unnaturally tacked on, but the manner in which it is revealed makes absolutely no sense.

I simply cannot understand how so many people like this book.

i wanted to like this book because lots of other people do. although the plot is great, with plenty of twists and turns, the storytelling is dull.

with the exception of maybe Teabing, the characters are flat. we don’t really get to know them because Dan Brown relies too heavily on dialogue to tell the story and move the plot, rather than the characters’ actions (in addition to the dialogue). by the end of the book, what do we really know about Langdon or Sophie? have their characters developed during the course of their quest? no.

the characters’ interior dialogue was annoying. i especially found it irksome when Brown has the European characters thinking to themselves in American idioms.

i thought, too, that this was going to be an intelligent story. rather, i felt that my intelligence was insulted. though i appreciated the historical references, the puzzles and clues Langdon and Sophie had to solve were way too simple. i found it hard to believe that these scholars couldn’t figure some of these things out.

i sure hope the movie is a lot better!

Well…

It is a tad uppity, and those that are looking at it as something other than a FICTION book, are going to be upset and confused. However, for what it was, a pop fiction book for Hollywood to jump on the band wagon with, it was pretty entertaining…. if you can past the first 100 or so pages.

If you have ever visited and consumed the Louve, I think you get more out of it. I know that I enjoied it more because of that than my DH did.

But if you have a few days to kill… than yeah, I would sya pick it up.

It’s a good way to spend a few days if you like to read. No…no one talks like that for real, and it’s a bit condescending, and the fact that a Harvard scholar can’t for the life of him read English text backward is a bit frightening… but eh. It’s pop lit. You shouldn’t treat it like it’s anything more.

Personally, I thought the historical information was really interesting, even if it did mean a few pages on the meaning of the number PHI. And it’s nice to get some background on a bit of this stuff.

If you want to feel like you’re one of the crowd but don’t want to feel intellectually bogged down, watch the movie. the end.

Finished The Da Vinci Code a few minutes ago, and not a minute too soon. Reading it was like listening to an know-it-all relate the story of a Jerry Bruckheimer film without a time limit. Consider:

”... Langdon noted with uneasiness that these particular cloisters lived up to their Latin ties to the word claustrophobic.”

Do you know anyone who talks like this all the time? Do you like to spend time with this person? There are whole pages of discussions of things like the golden ratio and fibonacci sequences that come off as masturbatory. Plot twists and puzzle solutions are condescendingly telegraphed with marquee lights pages ahead of time as if reaffirming the idea that Langdon (and by extension, Dan Brown) is just that much smarter than the reader.

Still, I’ve no-one to blame but myself. Despite the silly plot and tone I still stayed up late and finished the whole thing, if only to witness unbelievable moments such as three supposed Da Vinci scholars staring at a “code” of clearly-reversed cursive lettering and not recognizing what was going on. That’s not all of it, however — I guess I’m a bit of a sheep after all.

Summary? Let’s just say that it was about as entertaining as National Treasure with 3x the time investment.

It’s possible that I’m just feeling annoyed at a book that has yet to be released in paperback after two years in print. I doubt it, though. Thank goodness for the library — where I also picked up some Mishima as a palate cleanser.