There’s a cartoon in I believe the current New Yorker which shows an all DaVinci Code bookstore, selling only the book, and the books about the book.
You can always do what I did – read just the last chapter. People kept urging me to read the damn book, and I was kind of interested in knowing the big secret, so one day I picked up my parents copy and just skipped right to the end. It was very badly written and annoying, but the big plus is the reaction I now get when people ask me if I’ve read The DaVinci Code. Just watching them go apoplectic when I tell them that I only read the last chapter makes the grief well worth it.
It get kids to read. But gives the idea the religion might not be all good, and furthermore proposes a cool conspiracy theory that I always found to be cool, back when I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
Sorry for the confusion, jsgoddess. However, you understood me correctly when you figured my statement is ambiguous, able to be applied to HP books or the DC, minus the last line. I love the Harry Potter books. However, when post 56 said:
I figured that was expressing the sentiment I jokingly expressed in my previous post. I might have been wrong about how gigi feels, but that is how I read it.
I just don’t get the majority of the complaints about The Da Vinci Code (except, of course, for the fact that his name was Leonardo, and Da Vinci just refers to where he’s from). Is it great literature? No. Is it true? No. But it was an enjoyable book. I liked the previous book (Angels and Demons) better, actually, but DVC was a pleasant way to spend a long plane trip.
I have rather eclectic taste in books. I enjoy things like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime (best piece of fiction I read last year), A Mathemetician Reads the Newspaper, The Illiad, The Soul of a New Machine, and Under the Banner of Heaven. I also, however, enjoy James Bond novels, Janet Evanovich’s silly mysteries, and (yes) Dan Brown’s books.
Why is enjoying Dan Brown’s books pitworthy? It’s the anti-DVC people I want to shake sometimes and say, “It’s fiction, people! It’s just a novel! Get over it!” The fact that I enjoyed reading the book doesn’t mean that I believe any part of the storyline. I just thought it was fun to read.
And yes, by the way, it’s gotten a lot of people more interested in history, and specifically in religious history. Is that really such a bad thing?
