[books: the davinci code]
The following post contains spoilers for this book. Big spoilers. I will put my general thoughts on the book overall in one cut tag, and then I will put my complaints with the ending in a different cut tag, so that if you haven't read it but want to read my overall thoughts without ruining the ending, you can do so.
You have all been duly warned. Proceeding from here, there will be spoilers for this book. (I may be overwarning, here, but media fandoms and the total insanity over the death in Order Of The Phoenix have made me paranoid about spoilers. Better safe than sorry, baby.)
So. The DaVinci Code. I really, really enjoyed this book, and yet I don't think I liked it at all, and I don't think it was particularly good. It's the sort of book that you can't put down once you pick it up, but my trouble was, I kept forgetting to pick it up - when I wasn't actively remembering that I was reading it, it wasn't such a compelling book that I wanted to go seek it out. I think that's the first problem I had with it. I wanted it to be a puzzle so complex and interesting that I would read the entire thing in one sitting. It wasn't, I didn't, and that was disappointing.
Secondly, I'm not sure if it was the cleverest book I've read in ages, or if the author thought everyone reading it was utterly stupid. Because that's the way it was written - either it was far more shrewd than rollick or I noticed, or it was a simpering, pandering piece of tripe intended for people who are far less intelligent than the majority of my friends list.
One of rollick's major complaints was the way ideas and knowledge were exposited in the book, and I have to concur with her. A lot of the background information necessary to the story was presented in Langdon's lectures to his Harvard students, and the students were so simple-minded and utterly unlike what most Harvard students would actually be like, that the passages in which he explained these things we needed to know where terribly simplistic and unengaging. I felt, well, condescended to, and the way the rest of the book is put together, it seemed unecessary. Yes, you need the information in these scenes. But yes, again, it certainly could have been presented in a much better way.
The puzzles. I enjoyed the puzzles. (I solved the puzzle regarding the tomb much quicker than Langdon and Sophie, which irritated me, but I'm also a rather large fan of the poet in question, so. Well. Anyway.) I enjoyed the puzzles for their simplicity, in fact. The puzzles are constructed in way that they are either impossibly simple or impossibly complex, depending on how your mind works, and I found that engaging. My father is a mathematician; there were several that I grasped right away, and several that I worked out with the characters. I liked that.
Overall, I enjoyed the book because I thought it was a clever plot that was, for the most part, put together reasonably well. I find the Grail mythology tenuous and not really my cup of tea, but an interesting topic for a novel of this sort. What I didn't like, however, is outlined above, and I concur with rollick once more - the problem was mostly in the style of address to the reader. Brown can't seem to make up his mind if his audience was highly intelligent people, or people who wanted to read something "intellectual" without having to strain their brains. He ends up pandering and simpering and condescending to his audience, and it's irritating and distracting.
Dude. And Bishop Aringarosa could have been really, really fascinating and he turned out to be completely useless and pointless, and that frustrated me. I suspect his character was an attempt to distract from other characters and their real motives, but it was poorly done and thinly veiled, and I would have liked to have seen him used better.
So overall: it's worth a read, but it's not as great as everyone says it is. At least not if you have half a brain. I prefer not to be talked down to.
Don't read past here if you don't want to spoil the ending, okay? Good.
The fact that the Teacher was who he was was painfully, bitterly obvious to me before it was revealed, and I want to know if I was the only one who felt that way. I said as much to Michael when we first met him in his house in France. Lame, lame, lame. That was the most disappointing part of the book.
Wait, wait - except for Sophie getting a family. Which made me want to wretch. Then again, I didn't find either Sophie or Robert particularly sympathetic characters. My personal favorite was Teabring because he was so deliciously evil and morally confused. Mmmmm, moral confusion. I almost wanted him to win.
This ends my ripping apart of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. I am not sure that it's particularly sensible or logical, so really, just go on about your business.
You have all been duly warned. Proceeding from here, there will be spoilers for this book. (I may be overwarning, here, but media fandoms and the total insanity over the death in Order Of The Phoenix have made me paranoid about spoilers. Better safe than sorry, baby.)
So. The DaVinci Code. I really, really enjoyed this book, and yet I don't think I liked it at all, and I don't think it was particularly good. It's the sort of book that you can't put down once you pick it up, but my trouble was, I kept forgetting to pick it up - when I wasn't actively remembering that I was reading it, it wasn't such a compelling book that I wanted to go seek it out. I think that's the first problem I had with it. I wanted it to be a puzzle so complex and interesting that I would read the entire thing in one sitting. It wasn't, I didn't, and that was disappointing.
Secondly, I'm not sure if it was the cleverest book I've read in ages, or if the author thought everyone reading it was utterly stupid. Because that's the way it was written - either it was far more shrewd than rollick or I noticed, or it was a simpering, pandering piece of tripe intended for people who are far less intelligent than the majority of my friends list.
One of rollick's major complaints was the way ideas and knowledge were exposited in the book, and I have to concur with her. A lot of the background information necessary to the story was presented in Langdon's lectures to his Harvard students, and the students were so simple-minded and utterly unlike what most Harvard students would actually be like, that the passages in which he explained these things we needed to know where terribly simplistic and unengaging. I felt, well, condescended to, and the way the rest of the book is put together, it seemed unecessary. Yes, you need the information in these scenes. But yes, again, it certainly could have been presented in a much better way.
The puzzles. I enjoyed the puzzles. (I solved the puzzle regarding the tomb much quicker than Langdon and Sophie, which irritated me, but I'm also a rather large fan of the poet in question, so. Well. Anyway.) I enjoyed the puzzles for their simplicity, in fact. The puzzles are constructed in way that they are either impossibly simple or impossibly complex, depending on how your mind works, and I found that engaging. My father is a mathematician; there were several that I grasped right away, and several that I worked out with the characters. I liked that.
Overall, I enjoyed the book because I thought it was a clever plot that was, for the most part, put together reasonably well. I find the Grail mythology tenuous and not really my cup of tea, but an interesting topic for a novel of this sort. What I didn't like, however, is outlined above, and I concur with rollick once more - the problem was mostly in the style of address to the reader. Brown can't seem to make up his mind if his audience was highly intelligent people, or people who wanted to read something "intellectual" without having to strain their brains. He ends up pandering and simpering and condescending to his audience, and it's irritating and distracting.
Dude. And Bishop Aringarosa could have been really, really fascinating and he turned out to be completely useless and pointless, and that frustrated me. I suspect his character was an attempt to distract from other characters and their real motives, but it was poorly done and thinly veiled, and I would have liked to have seen him used better.
So overall: it's worth a read, but it's not as great as everyone says it is. At least not if you have half a brain. I prefer not to be talked down to.
Don't read past here if you don't want to spoil the ending, okay? Good.
The fact that the Teacher was who he was was painfully, bitterly obvious to me before it was revealed, and I want to know if I was the only one who felt that way. I said as much to Michael when we first met him in his house in France. Lame, lame, lame. That was the most disappointing part of the book.
Wait, wait - except for Sophie getting a family. Which made me want to wretch. Then again, I didn't find either Sophie or Robert particularly sympathetic characters. My personal favorite was Teabring because he was so deliciously evil and morally confused. Mmmmm, moral confusion. I almost wanted him to win.
This ends my ripping apart of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. I am not sure that it's particularly sensible or logical, so really, just go on about your business.