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Jan. 14th, 2004 01:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clayhornikThis is from July. I was going to attempt to do book reviews on a regular basis. I gave up on that, but people are still asking about this book, buying this book and I can't take it anymore. The damn book. I was hating it back then, I'm hating it now. There are people who take it 'seriously.' Read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, dammit. Here's the review:
I've read a lot of crap in my life, but I've been able to finish most books, even the completely wretched ones. Until now. Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code is a mishmash of stuff cribbed from the works of Henry Lincoln and Michael Baignet, specifically Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Thrown in a dash of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, then dumb it down by about 50 points, and voila, a best seller that people are raving about.
It starts on a good note: a curator at the Louvre is found dead, his body sprawled like DaVinci's Virtuvian Man drawing. A linguist/symbologist is called in to help the Parisian police decipher it's meaning. It goes South from there. He swiftly becomes a suspect. There's a chase through Paris. If the world works the way I think it does, soon to be a major motion picture, starring Harrison Ford.
The dialogue is wooden and the characters are little more than cardboard cutouts we've seen in similar circumstances a million times before. No wonder it's so damn popular. The only reason I picked it up in the first place was an interesting article on Morning Edition and it's entheuastic reception from the general populace. I should have know better. It's not totally irredeemable. The website for the book rocks, a puzzle solvable mostly with out the use of the book. Go a head, try it. When you get to the part where you have to look up something in the book, come back here, here's what you need: 1123581321.. Otherwise, it's all there. Not a bad way to spend an hour or so.
I think people who haven't read the above two books would enjoy this. It's a good summer thriller tailor made for the screen or the beach. But if you want something to think about while you're reading, go with the Eco.
Further Suggested Reading: The works of Catherine Neville: The Eight, the search for the lost chess set of Charlemagne; A Calculated Risk, a bank heist caper computer crime thriller; and The Magic Circle, conspiranoia aplenty in a globe trotting thriller. None of these are hardly Eco, but they're clever. The Eight actually got me to try chess after a couple of decades of being intimidated by the little horses that move funny.
--
POST SCRIPT:
People seem taken by this book's 'new' approach to Mary Magdelene, something I've know about for years. It reminds me of the reaction people had toward The Celestine Prophecy. I tried reading that and found the 'truths' it dealt with no deeper or meaningful than some of the 'cosmic' notions from old Doctor Strange comics.
I've read a lot of crap in my life, but I've been able to finish most books, even the completely wretched ones. Until now. Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code is a mishmash of stuff cribbed from the works of Henry Lincoln and Michael Baignet, specifically Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Thrown in a dash of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, then dumb it down by about 50 points, and voila, a best seller that people are raving about.
It starts on a good note: a curator at the Louvre is found dead, his body sprawled like DaVinci's Virtuvian Man drawing. A linguist/symbologist is called in to help the Parisian police decipher it's meaning. It goes South from there. He swiftly becomes a suspect. There's a chase through Paris. If the world works the way I think it does, soon to be a major motion picture, starring Harrison Ford.
The dialogue is wooden and the characters are little more than cardboard cutouts we've seen in similar circumstances a million times before. No wonder it's so damn popular. The only reason I picked it up in the first place was an interesting article on Morning Edition and it's entheuastic reception from the general populace. I should have know better. It's not totally irredeemable. The website for the book rocks, a puzzle solvable mostly with out the use of the book. Go a head, try it. When you get to the part where you have to look up something in the book, come back here, here's what you need: 1123581321.. Otherwise, it's all there. Not a bad way to spend an hour or so.
I think people who haven't read the above two books would enjoy this. It's a good summer thriller tailor made for the screen or the beach. But if you want something to think about while you're reading, go with the Eco.
Further Suggested Reading: The works of Catherine Neville: The Eight, the search for the lost chess set of Charlemagne; A Calculated Risk, a bank heist caper computer crime thriller; and The Magic Circle, conspiranoia aplenty in a globe trotting thriller. None of these are hardly Eco, but they're clever. The Eight actually got me to try chess after a couple of decades of being intimidated by the little horses that move funny.
--
POST SCRIPT:
People seem taken by this book's 'new' approach to Mary Magdelene, something I've know about for years. It reminds me of the reaction people had toward The Celestine Prophecy. I tried reading that and found the 'truths' it dealt with no deeper or meaningful than some of the 'cosmic' notions from old Doctor Strange comics.
