katbeidar, I apologize, I didn't mean to sound proud.
I don't think it's wrong to enjoy a "mainstream book," as you say, and I don't deny that Dan Brown wrote something that many people do enjoy, but I personally would not have said it was "fantastic" and "truelly mind-blowing" and say "you owe it to yourself to read it," and, later, that it has everything one could need in a book. I find it impossible to get that worked up about it even when I look at it as generously as I can (I still think it would make a great computer game
). You asked, "What do you think?" Well, and I answered; I wasn't intending to "go around ruining it" for people the way you did not do for your friends and Harry Potter, but I guess I've said enough
I doubt you have read books by Russian authors I wouldn't recognize, and it's not very kind to assume I wouldn't
But now we are getting into personal territory, so I back out
I still think The Da Vinci Code is badly written, and it reads like a novelization to me. But that's just my perspective, and as you said our tastes differ