And in religious news...

[felis_ultharus]

You know, I know lots of wonderful, open-minded Catholics. But the Catholic Church itself seems to be one giant machine for spewing evil. It was only a matter of time before they'd take a break from their homophobia, anti-safe-sex tirades, and sexist tirades, and rear their ugly head towards the environment:

"But in a speech to US Catholic

Comments

[jenjoou]

Reducing Co2 emissions is just like human sacrifice. :P Just when I thought the church couldn't get scarier and more apalling.

And yes, I must admit to the same kind of snobbery. My coworker was raving about the book but I had my doubts. From what

[felis_ultharus]

I'm trying to get past my snobbery. I've been trying to encourage my colleagues to read more sci-fi and fantasy, and pick up Harry Potter.

Most of them are under the impression that anything popular is automatically bad. Unfortunately, popular things are not automatically good either :/

[ubergreenkat]

I feel that a comparison between Harry Potter and Dan Brown is unfair. That's because Harry Potter is good, and easy to read because it's written also for kids. Dan Brown is cotton candy for your brain. It tastes good at the time, it's not especially filling, you plow through it quick, but you're also not going to eat it more than once a year.

for lit types, this is how I sum up reading the Dan Brown:
"Little did he know that in less than sixteen hours, that piece of information would save his life." (Paraphrased from the third or fourth chapter Angel & Demons, but a similar phrase appears in the DaVinci Code, as well)

That said, I liked Angel & Demons much better than the DaVinci Code, it's got more to chew on, even though both sort of feel like what happens when they turn a movie into a book.

[felis_ultharus]

I'm not sure I'd want to read it, just because the bits and pieces I read really turned me off.

I think some novels get popular not for their artistry, but for the ideas they express. Questioning the official Christian version of history is getting more and more mainstream, and I think that's Brown's major contribution: mainstreaming the debates that have been raging for ages about how accurate the historical stuff in the Bible is.

It is getting people to ask questions, and that's not a bad thing.

Now the Holy Blood, Holy Grail thesis is very shaky. But the version of history it's attacking is also very shaky, and I think that's what the public is picking up on. From there, it might lead them to other, more solid attempts at reconstructing this stuff.

I don't know anything about Angels & Demons.