[russkayatatu]

Well, I found that the book had action, thrill, romance, mystery, suspense, and even humor... what more do you need a book to be?

Everything! Everything, everything ... I wish I knew how to describe ... books should be challenging, an axe to shatter our notions, our way of looking at the world. Books should be dynamite! Dan Brown is a storyteller, not a writer. When I read THE DA VINCI CODE, I felt my world shrinking. It's entertainment only: there's no substance; it might show the door to something deeper, but there's nothing nourishing; it has no heft, it has no weight, it leaves a pleasant impression, a sand castle that the waves consume before the kids have been gone even a half-hour.

It reminds me of a passage from Kerouac's ON THE ROAD: "Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious."

There are some books, for me, that know that life is holy; in which no time is wasted, every sentence is precious and talks about souls, my soul, the author's soul, souls of people I don't know, souls that exist only in the between-life-and-death state of Schroedinger's poor cat ... and then there are those that are ephemera, gone in an instant, to be forgotten.

If you cannot tell the difference between these two kinds of books, I don't know how to explain it to you ... but it is THERE, believe me, try to see it; it is magical when you see something that affects you like those books. When I used to go to the theatre, if it was a good performance I would walk the streets for miles, by myself, when it ended - and it would give way to half-formed dreams and transcendent observations and all of it, all of it filled with awe, and gratitude that I'd seen it, and the desire to transmit it to somebody else somehow, let them feel what I'd felt.

I am a rotten writer and I don't know how to explain. But there is nothing like that in Dan Brown's book ... It reminds me of something I read that Kafka said about Chaplin: "Chaplin is a technician. He's the man of a machine world, in which most of his fellow men no longer command the requisite emotional and mental equipment to make the life allotted to them really their own. They do not have the imagination. As a dental technician makes false teeth, so he manufactures aids to the imagination. That's what his films are. That's what films in general are."

That's what I find Dan Brown's book is, an aid to the imagination - nothing more. Like "Star Wars," maybe, like Spielberg's Indiana Jones movies. Like screenwriter, TV-writer, short-story-writer Harlan Ellison said, "We suffer, these days, in Hollywood, from a great many writers whose background is not in literature, but in television upbringing. They were raised on I Love Lucy. When some of these people go into theatrical features, they use as templates the shallow devices of the sitcom. Spielberg and Lucas make films that are hommage to Saturday morning serials, pop goods that are amusing for children but certainly cannot be considered great art."

This is exactly what THE DA VINCI CODE is, in my opinion. There is a direct line, from Saturday morning serials to Spielberg and Lucas to THE DA VINCI CODE. "Action, thrill, romance, mystery, suspense, and even humor" ... It's shallow, deadening reading - for me deadening.

I am tremendously depressed today because in the paper there was an article about a man who read 101 books last year and concluded "you can never read too many books." The problem is that what he read is mostly crap ... And he did not say anything about what he gained, how his horizons were stretched by reading - he read a lot of nonfiction, facts on human cadavers, a lot of memoirs about activities like fishing, one book on the sort of guns to hunt big game in Africa, and a lot of lightweight novels, the kind that belong in the same category as pallid imitations of BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY (yeah, I read that too) - only that he really enjoyed the year. Bloody hell! The number of books you read isn't important; who cares about this guy who read 101 and has practically nothing, judging by his article, to say about it? It reminds me of something that Arthur Koestler wrote and I've thought about a lot in the past 2 months:

"If you were to ask me what a writer's ambition in life should be, I would answer with a formula. A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years and for one reader in a hundred years [...] Religion and art are the two completely non-competitive spheres of human striving and they both derive from the same source. But the social climate in this country [USA] has made the creation of art into an essentially competitive business [...] I am convinced that a century from now the historian will regard the degredation of art to the competitive level as one of the main aberrations of contemporary American culture and the bestselling chart as its grotesque symbol."

What you gain, how a book made you think, how you would have been different if you hadn't read it, that's what matters to me when I think about reading in general and anything that I read. I'm sure that THE DA VINCI CODE will have a great effect on some people. I do not mean to lessen this at all; in fact one of the books I remember most from those I read before college is FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, by Ian Fleming - and whenever I read a book that I think is junk, I stop and wonder if for someone it's not as influential and as enjoyable as the James Bond books were for me.

For myself I agree with Sullen.Kloun, I had heard of almost everything in the book before - a rehash of religious theories - I am not so impressed by all the research he did - now that I think of it, even the Indiana Jones books that I read as a kid had a section at the back for "further reading on this topic"; why not Dan Brown?

I wish I could tell you what books mean to me, Kate, how much they CAN mean ... because there is so much more that is possible than what Dan Brown reaches ... you know, when I heard of the man who read 101 books in a year, I started to wonder how much, exactly, I read, and counted (by the way, everything by the numbers again, just as Koestler said). From the beginning of May I've read around 20 books and have watched somewhere around 30 movies. I've been on vacation so I've been reading a lot - I am trying to understand very many things. It seems like I never started to understand before; not in class and not out of class. About America, mostly. I've read:

A BOY'S OWN STORY by Edmund White
THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY by Edmund White
THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY by Edmund White
MYRA BRECKINRIDGE & MYRON by Gore Vidal
STRANGER ON THE SQUARE by Arthur Koestler and Cynthia Koestler
THE VOICE OF THE MARTIANS by George Marx
MIDDLESEX by Jeffrey Euginides
AND THE BAND PLAYED ON by Randy Shilts
JOE COLLEGE by Tom Perrotta
MISS LONELYHEARTS & THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
"THE NORMAL HEART" by Larry Kramer
DULUTH by Gore Vidal
ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac
COUNT DOWN by Steve Olson
THE DA VINCI CODE by Dan Brown
JULIAN by Gore Vidal
I, ROBOT by Harlan Ellison (screenplay)
THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT by Norman Mailer
MARRIAGE UNDER FIRE by James Dobson
THE CITY AND THE PILLAR by Gore Vidal

This list does not include a number of books which I read deeply but only parts of, like Sylvia Plath's CROSSING THE WATER, Allen Ginsberg's SPONTANEOUS MIND, a collection of Anais Nin's essays, interviews with V.S. Naipual, a Noam Chomsky reader, a memoir by Gore Vidal. It also doesn't include books that I'd already read and that I returned to, like Andrew Hodges's ALAN TURING: THE ENIGMA, James Watson's DOUBLE HELIX, James Gleick's GENIUS.

Now I'm reading Philip Roth's THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE. At first I didn't like his hero at all - he's too literary, too conventional in his approach to culture & mental life, like most professors of literature I know That's not what I want to advocate, necessarily ... (not snobbishness) ...

But I read MIDDLESEX, THE DA VINCI CODE, and JOE COLLEGE mostly because some people I knew recommended them and I wanted to see what they were about, and these are the only three books that I despised while I was reading them: I wanted them to END, I didn't want my thinking to be colored by their simplistic rendering of the world. Maybe I can't say anything about their artistic worth, but I know that I felt the world shrinking when I read them and relief when I put them down ... The world is a subjective creation, as Anais Nin wrote, and there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements ... I would rather limit the selection of these sorts of elements. MYRA BRECKINRIDGE is a nearly flawless book; that and MYRON are two of the funniest and most brilliant satires I've ever read. THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT tears me apart; Jack Kerouac is incredible for what he was attempting; a NEW KIND of writing, Allen Ginsberg too, and all of them - Vidal, Mailer, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Chomsky, Ellison - at the same time, and amidst chaos in the country! Thinking about sex and writing and life and America and history and gods and women and men - and their writing that's their testament; that I find, that I read, that I can feel through their words the tenor and the quality of what they think and experience. It is crazy, crazy, I would like to share it with somebody, and the only person here, my dad, who thinks THE DA VINCI CODE is fabulous and has all of Dan Brown's books, too, announces what he learned about tigers in reading THE LIFE OF PI and how Kerouac is great, of course, but after a while he himself got bored reading about a bunch of guys in a car. This is not what reading means to me! It's that when I look at the list of all the books I've read I realize that this, together with the one of the movies I've seen, is a snapshot, nearly, of my mental life over the last few 2 months. There is a life outside, of course, incidents, people, memories and new happenings, which is not at all insignificant and swarms together with the "lists," but it shows most of what matters to me, what I have been thinking of, what I am looking for.

"Draft cards continued to be burned - each one a flutter of anxiety in everyone's heart, a release of fire on wings. Contemplate the humiliation to a college student if he hates the war and keeps the card in his wallet - how it says to him each time he looks for an address: you are yellow, buddy, for you keep me. So the cards burned one by one through the night, each man sitting in his position on the steps, the plaza, or the Mall, with his own card burning inside him, his stomach a glut of elation and woe as each new card went up from the dark in flame, suddenly it is his own, he - wild revolutionary youth, conservative middle-class boy, keeper of draft cards - his schizophrenia is burning and the security of the future with it. He looks for a girl to kiss in reward." - from THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT

That is what more I need a book to be