Sorry to be the one party pooper, but I didn't like it at all; I thought it was highly mediocre
I thought the characters were weak, the plot was improbable and I was sick to death when I finished it that it was so long and so poorly written - overall it reminded me of the sort of books I used to read when I was little, Young Indiana Jones and stuff like that
Which is not bad, but let's not confuse it with real writing.
I suppose that if it makes people want to delve more deeply into Church history that's good. In general, if you want to read something relatively simple and frivolous but still sorta kinda pretend you're thinking, it's a great choice (sorry if that sounds harsh ... )
In other words, this isn't literature, it's a translation of visual media into book form.
I'm not surprised they're making a movie of it, Kate, thanks for the info. The book also has a lot in common with the computer games I used to play when I was younger too. It has the same, drawn-in-one-stroke characters, lots of plot, lots of different places to go to (and they're linked, one leads to the other: Langdon can't leave the Louvre until he finds everything he's supposed to, for example), lots of colorful minor characters, and puzzles everywhere. There are major goals and minor ones: evading the police, solving the mystery. Getting out of the Louvre. Deciphering what her uncle left behind. And there's nothing much to the story except the adventure, after all; overall I think it would make a
brilliant computer game
Plus then we would've had the opportunity to actually solve those puzzles rather than reading how they solve them
None of it was very difficult. I didn't think too much of all the research and theories he mentioned, either ... most of it I had heard before; I kept waiting for the really good stuff, really interesting evidence I didn't know about; I was still waiting when I got to the end ...
I have another question: if his book was so exhaustively researched, why didn't Dan Brown give a bibliography? I was looking for one: Gore Vidal had one for his novel JULIAN, and Graves for I, CLAUDIUS and his other books. Can't he decide whether it's a novel loosely based on historical ideas that takes a lot of fictional license - like those Indiana Jones books - (I think there is nothing wrong with that, by the way) - or whether it should be taken seriously as presenting valid history inside an adventure well within the realm of possibility? He seems to want to have it both ways.
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the crappy reviews are because people are biased because of religion as sci fi
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I think this is simply not true, because ... I didn't like it, and I have no problem with "religion as sci fi" - I haven't read much that I think could be classified that way, but I liked James Blish's A CASE OF CONSCIENCE a lot
I don't mind his choice of subject, what I don't like is the way he treated it. As an adventure it's OK. For people who want something simple it is fantastic. But in general I like books with a little more substance; nothing in this book surprised me or thrilled me or made me glad I was reading it ... it was OK, but I was glad when it was done, so I could get back to something more worth the time.
"Truly mind-blowing" is something like Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD - not this. Really I think it's fluff.
On the other hand, for fluff, it is top of the line