Well that was unfortunate.

I just think it is hard for me at this point to believe that Professor Robert Langdon saved the world 5 times and that symbology is the key to all life problems.

I loved the first book I read by Dan Brown, the second I liked less and the third was very predictable for me. I guess it is the usual formula with the blonde girl, the Mickey watch and the "Unpredictable" twists that I can see miles before they come.

Nothing's personal but I am trying to clean my shelves and add books I am really interested in.

I accidentally deleted this from my books. So that sucks. I don't remember when I read it anymore. It was horrible.

EDIT:
...But not quite as horrible as the idiotic discussion which this review spawned. I hate this book. That is my opinion. Many people share that opinion. I do not claim to be capable of writing a better book (although I suspect I already have written better pieces of literature, for some school assignment or something). You can like this book if you want. But if you do, please do not embarrass yourself by stating such a thing publicly. Especially on this review's comments. Because I'm deleting them all.

PS
The whole "if you can't do better, you have no right to criticize" thing is not a valid argument. So please stop making it. Please.

OKAY PEOPLE…someone let me in on the gag because between the cries of "Greatest Book of Greaty Greatness EVER" and the screams of "Lamest Load of Lamey Lameness EVER", my itty bitty brain is left very… n  n
So post Hype-a-ganza, I finally got around to reading this popular, polarizing, pop culture icon and thought it was….drum roll……………………FINE(sigh). It was a solid read with a slight lean towards the “eh” side of MEH and few moments of genuine “that’s neat.” I don’t see all the love and I don’t see all the rage. Other than the obvious religious flavor of the content, it reminded me of your typical page-turning, popcorn beach read and I thought it accomplished its goal in decent, if unremarkable, fashion.

Now I have a strict “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t mock, don’t preach” approach when it comes to religiousness so I am going to ignore the bird-flipping Vatican bash aspects of the story, though I can certainly see people on both sides of the fence having “epic rah rah” or “epic fail” reactions and I respect that. For me, it didn’t move my needle much in either direction beyond my fondness for the “big hidden history mystery” which is something I generally really enjoy.

The plot of this one has been talked to death and beyond so rather than adding one more jelly bean to the jar, I thought I would just run down a few likes and dislikes about the story and leave it at that.

n  TURN ONSn

1. Conspiracy theories: are just fully fun and I am a major sucker for plots concerning “shadow” histories and secret people doing secret things behind secret doors for reasons that are SHHHHHHH. I love a good conspiracy. Find me a rumor involving Kim Kardashian being a Bilderberger and using a secret banking pipeline running from Area 51 through Microsoft to the Saudi Royal Family and laundering vast monies to be used to coordinate the sale of Boise, Idaho to a mysterious consortium headed by Jay Z and Justin Bieber who will then turn the city into a giant quasi-government facility used for the testing of alien “cloning” technology………….and I am glued to my seat and ONE HAPPY FELLA.

2. Knights Templar: As much as I love conspiracies in general, when you throw the Knights Templar into the mix, it’s gonna perk me up better than a latte enema. I am always in favor of having them show up as a lynch pin to any massive global plot. The Knights Templar are like caramel on ice cream and just make a good conspiracy better. I had a lot of fun with the rehash of the Templar’s place in the center of EVERYTHING.

3. Symbology, Da Vinci and the Holy Grail (the IDEA): I thought the major plot components themselves were interesting and I enjoyed following the hidden clues, messages, riddles and the tie in to all of the famous historical artifacts. It was fun. I also liked the “historical significance” of the search (i.e., the “big reveal”) and the implications to the world if revealed.

n  TURN OFFSn

1. Symbology, Da Vinci and the Holy Grail (the EXECUTION): As much as I enjoyed the plot concept, the execution of the story was often frustrating and occasionally insulting. I’m not talking about the clunky, “serviceable at best” prose as that’s gotten enough play without my squirting lighter fluid on the bonfire. My issue is more with Dan feeling the need to “spoon feed” me details about his “oh so clever plot” so that my economy-sized brain could grasp it.
n  n
For example, there would be a “reveal” that I thought was interesting….and then Dan would exhaust me with explaining EXACTLY what that meant and EXACTLY what the implications were and make sure I knew EXACTLY what he had told me. I get it Mr. Brown, heard you the first time.

2. THRILLer killing amounts of PLOD: For a page turning, actiony thriller, there was just too much sideways movement of the plot and some really unnecessary amounts of plod to the narrative. Part of this has to do with the excessive “hand holding” Dan does with his audience mentioned above. However, there are also WAY too much time spent slowing down to take a look around and where we are and where we’ve been. I started getting the impression that Brown was trying to hit a particular page count for the book and didn’t have anything but filler to loan the pages with. This is never a good thing for this kind of story.

3. The End: Not a big fan of the final resolution of the story and I found it very un climaxy and a bit of a let down. Once we have the big reveal, very little new information ever really got added to the picture and I felt like my curiosity should have been stroked a few more times than it was in the home stretch. This lack of satisfying climax left me with a serious case of “blue brain.”

Still, overall, this was a good, serviceable mystery-thriller that seems tailor-made for a warm afternoon on the sand. It isn’t great literature, or even good literature, but it is a good thriller, a good concept and, for the most part, fun. It seems to accomplish pretty much exactly what it set out to do.

2.5 to 3.0 stars.

(4.75) es un libro completamente espectacular, pensé que iba a ser pesado de leer pero nada que ver.
me gustó mucho que mezclara el thriller con historia sobre la iglesia, las religiones, obras de arte, etc. en ningún momento se siente tedioso.
el único motivo por el cual no le doy 5 estrellas es porque estuve investigando y no se puede confirmar que los datos que tira sean 100% reales, son más que nada teorías… yo elijo creer.

This wasn’t nearly as awful as I had feared. I had lots of reasons to believe this would be pretty awful, but actually, the story moved along nicely and there was enough to the story to sustain my interest nearly up until the end – in much the same way that any good murder mystery sustains interest. This isn’t the best murder mystery novel I’ve ever read – but it is not a terrible one either.

Having said that it might seem a little strange that I’ll spend virtually all of this review talking about the things I didn’t like about the book. Oh well, if being ‘a little strange’ is all I get accused of I can say with confidence that I have been accused of much worse.

It does not take long for the book to do something I think is nearly unforgivable in any book. I’ll quote the first time this happens in full:

Saunière held up his hands in defense. "Wait," he said slowly. "I will tell you what you need to know." The curator spoke his next words carefully. The lie he told was one he had rehearsed many times... each time praying he would never have to use it.

Needless to say, the lie told here is somewhat important to the plot and we only find out more about it later in the book.

This quote is from the very start of the book, a mere thirteen paragraphs in. This sort of writing happens early and then repeats for much of the rest of the book. This sort of writing really annoys me.

When you read a book there are a number of people who you find are talking to you. There is the voice of the book itself (the narrator), there is often the person whose story this voice is telling you, there are other relatively incidental characters who chime in now and again and, of course, there is the author. Now, each of these people know a bit more or a bit less about what is actually going on in the story. And that’s okay, that’s also the way life works. But you might notice that I’ve made a distinction between the narrator of the story and the author. Obviously, there are times when this distinction if absolutely necessary – for example, where it is necessary to tell a story where the narrator of the story (the voice doing the talking) can’t in anyway be considered the same person as the author. In The Catcher in the Rye, for example, it is obviously a character, Holden Caulfield, who is supposed to be doing the talking – but no one would argue that Holden is Salinger. Holden is clearly a creation of Salinger’s and for the book to make sense it is important to keep that distinction clear. But behind the voice of Holden, if you listen carefully enough, you will hear the whispering voice of Salinger.

In this book that might seem to be a less important distinction to make. This is because the text is written in what is called ‘omniscient narration’. In this book the narrator is a kind of God and he can see into the hearts of all of the characters in ways we lesser mortals can never do in the real world. When he says that a character is happy or confused or lustful – then there is no possibility that that character can be anything else. If the Christian God really is interested in giving us free will, then an author of a piece of omniscient narration has even more power than God. But even so, I think it is important to be able to distinguish between the author of a book and the omniscient narrator within the book – even in cases where they would seem to be very closely aligned.

Let’s go back to the quote above and why it does something that really annoys me. When I read a mystery story I want the mystery to be intrinsic to the story. The writer should know where the story is going, but I don’t need the narrator to necessarily know. All the same, I do need to be able to trust the narrator.

I want to trust that the narrator will tell me something like the truth (or not, but in a way that can be fun for me to see where the narrator is distorting the truth), but I really don’t want the narrator to mess me about. I want the voice of the book to tell me stuff that the voice knows and to be clear with me about that.

So, in the quote above where Saunière tells his captor what he knows BUT WE ARE NOT TOLD what he says, there can be only one reason for this – the narrator has decided that telling us what is being said at this point in the story will somehow spoil the mystery. And, to me, that is the weakest form of mystery story telling. To me, the mystery should be in the story itself, something deeply embedded in the very nature of the story and how the story needs to be told. In this case it is as if the narrator is saying, “I’ll explain to you what gets said here in my own good time”. And look, that would be fine, except that a mystery that needs the narrator to effectively tell the reader that they are keeping something secret from them to create the mystery is, to quote my daughters, a bit lame.

Actually, there can be two reasons for this kind of secret keeping, the other is more likely in this case – it is to ‘heighten suspense’. This is a very dangerous game for a writer to play. Suspense that is artificially created, not by the story, but by how the story is told can quickly become very irritating.

The distinction between the writer and the narrator is perhaps best shown by this little piece of self-congratulation in the book. "A brilliant ten-digit code that Saunière would never forget." Now, think about what is actually being said here. The narrator has explained a code that was created by one of the characters called Saunière – all well and good – except, of course, we all know that really Dan Brown actually created the code. The code’s brilliance is that it links in with some mathematics that is seen as somewhat important to the plot (Fibonacci sequences). But behind the voice of the narrator congratulating Saunière on his brilliance is the author who came up with this plotting point in the first place. So hearing the narrator say how brilliant Saunière has been is really nothing more than the writer saying how terribly clever he thinks he has been in coming up with this idea in the first place. If you are thinking of writing a novel, avoiding this sort of self-congratulation would be one of my main pieces of advice.

This is a work of fiction, and so I guess it makes little sense to criticise it for the historical or factual inaccuracy of large slabs of its subject matter – nevertheless, I prefer my fiction to be in the story, rather than in what are presented as historical facts.

The one that annoyed me the most was this bit about the Mona Lisa:

Langdon nodded. "Gentlemen, not only does the face of Mona Lisa look androgynous, but her name is an anagram of the divine union of male and female. And that, my friends, is Da Vinci's little secret, and the reason for Mona Lisa's knowing smile."

Effectively we are told that Da Vinci was very clever in naming the painting because it fits nicely with one of the main themes of this book, the union of the male and female. The only problem is that Da Vinci never called the painting the Mona Lisa. As my mate Wiki points out:

The painting's title stems from a description by Giorgio Vasari in his biography of Leonardo da Vinci published in 1550, 31 years after the artist's death.

There are other historical inversions of this kind in the book, but my personal favourite is the fact that Catholicism is held up to scorn for its rejection of the ‘sacred feminine’. But of all of the Christian sects, I would have thought the Catholic Church, with its idolatry of Mary, the mother of God, would be the least deserving of this charge. The other Christian Churches seem to refer to ‘the Mother Church’ as the ‘Cult of Mary’. I would have thought the Catholic Church would have been a much more difficult target for the charge of rejection of the female than any of the Protestant Churches as they are purely interested in male divine beings with no mediation of the feminine possible or permissible at all.

I don’t think I’ve included any spoilers in this review, although that might depend somewhat on what you want to read this book for – I don’t think I’ve said anything that would destroy a reading of the book as a murder mystery, which is where I believe this book works best. I mean, as philosophy it is nonsense, as theology it is a smile on a doll and as Symbology (even if that is a ‘discipline’ Dan Brown made up all by himself) it is pretty shallow stuff. The bit at the end where Langdon needed the Star of David explained to him really did make the premise that Langdon is an expert in this field ring somewhat hollow.

It may be that I am the last person in the world to have read this book – as such the whole question of spoilers is somewhat academic. All the same, if you have not read it already I need to stress that it is not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Sure, some of the writing will make you cringe, but at least the story moves along at a decent clip – and of what is pretty well trash, there is little more you can ask than that.

Oh, and by the way, I like to collect ‘best first lines in novels’ – Calvino’s If On a Winter's Night a Traveler comes close to the best, but Jolley’s Miss Peabody's Inheritance has a good first sentence as does Carey’s Bliss. But this book has given me a new hobby, that is in finding the worst last line of a book. How is this for terrible? “For a moment, he thought he heard a woman's voice... the wisdom of the ages... whispering up from the chasms of the earth.” I know what you were thinking Dan, but unfortunately, I don’t think it quite came off there.

رواية مثيرة رائعة تشد اهتمامك حتى أخر سطر

الرواية هي ابرز واجمل ما قرات في حياتي مع تحفظي على الافكار التي يريد الكاتب بثها من خلال روايته ولكن الحقيقة ان هذا الرقم الخيالي من المبيعات للرواية يجعلني اقف له وقفة تبجيل واحترام .رواية مرتبة الاحداث ورائعة وانصح الجميع بقرآتها

I read the Baigent book a decade before I read this novel.

Somehow, Brown managed to "dumbify" everything.

Afterwards I read Eco to wash the taste out of my brain.

No, I am not!

No, I am not going to write a review about this piece of nonsense just because I had yet ANOTHER of those incredibly annoying conversations (in a bookstore to top it off!).

No, I am not.

Oh, for goodness sake!

It is NOT a great book to broaden your cultural horizons, and whatever the humbug mentioned on Leonardo - it is NOT equivalent to reading a book researched by a REAL art historian, - which is something entirely different from a blind-folded arrogant gold digging bestseller author.

It is not a well-written, exciting thriller.

It is Brown in Wonderland, minus the humour, the wit and the beautiful language of the Wonderland Alice visited, and minus the credible plot.

It is not something a bookworm like me HAS to read! Okay? Once and for all, no!

"Lisa, you as a book lover and art historian must love Dan Brown!"

No! Period. I don't. I read three ... THREE! ... of his arrogant idiocies posing as novels. I DON'T love him.

It makes me furious to get the question, over and over:

"How much of what he discovered on Leonardo is true?"

I did not write a review, I hope. It would have been a bad one. Let's forget it.

A mi, me gustó.
Tal vez no es un prodigio de literatura, pero me resultó interesante y entretenida. Es verdad que se permite ciertas licencias, pero es ficción, ¿no?
Todo lo que sea plantear puntos de vista diferentes sobre un dogma que lleva más de 2000 años sin moverse ni un ápice, a mi me parece bien.
Después, cada uno tendrá su propia opinión. De eso se trata.

To me, I liked it.
Maybe it's not a literary prodigy, but I found it interesting and entertaining. It's true that certain licenses are allowed, but it's fiction, isn't it?
Anything that raises different points of view on a dogma that has been standing still for more than 2000 years seems to me to be fine.
Then everyone will have their own opinion. That's what it's all about.

Was that the book that made the Vatican tremble? This detective story builds like a TV movie where a handsome guy and a girl strive to solve a schoolboy's riddles to discover the scandalous secret that everyone already knows. The fact that Jesus was a man, that he fucked Mary Magdalene and impregnated her (why not?), and that he was not God's son. Dan Brown was ignoring, in a novel that uses and abuses the notion of mystery, the mystery of the identity of Christ, true God, and true man.
Let's move on. The Da Vinci Code is nothing more than a new version of Indiana Jones, in the American style, with the initial murder, the police error, the (so little) incredible escape of the heroes, the betrayal of the good guy becoming Machiavellian, the hidden microphones, two or three deaths lying around, the reunion of the lost grandmother and brother and the final kiss, prudish, without the slightest trace of eroticism. Yet, simultaneously, the whole book applies itself to magnify the Sacred Feminine.
How, then, to understand the dazzling success of this novel? Let's face it: I let myself take. This feeling of collaborating in the truth's discovery upsets the world's order by deciphering anagrams. This satisfaction of feeling oneself the discoverer as if the solution of a sodoku could collapse an entire civilization. At this little game, the end of the book can only disappoint. Nothing. This scum. Virgo worms. That's to designate only the cup, the chalice, and the Holy Grail. The real mystery is undoubtedly there: by what miracle can a little detective story of nothing become a world affair? Revealing this secret seems much more complicated than Dan Brown's treasure hunt.