- THE DA VINCI CODE
- by Dan Brown
- [rated by pbs readers as #33]
- 597 pages
I did myself a little favor here. Going through a tough time in my live, personally, I finished a delightful read with Pride & Prejudice and am following it up with another
fun opus, The Da Vinci Code. I know it is delightful because I have already read it before and liked it very much. Yet, it isn’t one of the magical rereads in here that scares me, like Lonesome Dove, which I loved beyond words and didn’t want to suddenly love less.
I roundly liked this before and have every expectation that I will enjoy it again. Given my love for pacing, I picked it up and read 50 pages already. LOVE THAT!
Strangely, the only difference now that I really wish I didn’t have is having seen the movie, which was fine, but I’m now forced to think of this lead guy as Tom Hanks, since he played him. And while I love Hanks and always enjoy watching him work, he was wrong for this part, I felt at the time. And now, picking up the book again, he is this part in my head, right or wrong. Actually though, when Audrey Tautou shows up as the girl, I will love that association, as I love her and thought she made the character richer than in the read.
But who knows what surprises I will receive? I don’t know what they will be yet, but I’ll let you know!
A THIRD OF THE WAY IN…
Now we’re talking!
This is nothing but a wildly fun read! I can’t remember how long it has been since I couldn’t stop myself from jumping into the next chapter. Or looking and realizing I had been reading for an hour. I’m having the greatest time reading this and a few observations have already gelled for me.
The first is that Dan Brown is a diehard researcher. There are an extraordinary amount of researched facts on every single page. This is easy for me to notice since I hate researching anything and he so obviously loves it!
But that’s not even the point. The point is that he is truly equal parts research and thrilling pacing. I honestly can’t remember a time that I have experienced that to this extent. If someone does both, you sense their strain caused by bouncing back and forth from research to pacing, pacing to research. That doesn’t exist in this book and I think the marriage of both is the prime reason that one feels such exhilaration here.
The second thing, which is really fun to experience since I have read this before and remember it fairly well, is the reveal on every page. The way he moves his characters is revealed to them and to us at the same time. That isn’t unusual; it’s just unusual for it to be done this well.
And my last point is the sheer faith Brown has in his information and story. There are thousands of books that incorporate history and historical contexts and then build their plot from there. With Da Vince Code, Brown dares and succeeds in making the history the plot! Each ancient specific factoid matters in what happens on the next page. And if it doesn’t, you know it will! In ten or a hundred pages, you are going to need that factoid! So the result is that each fact and the whole story is more of a jigsaw puzzle than a linear lined plot.
This is nothing but fun. I’m not close to finished with it and I’m really happy about that, due to my pure enjoyment of it, but I can already state emphatically that if you liked it before, read it again!
DONE.
I just finished Da Vinci Code and I feel tremendous gratitude. It held me spellbound till the very last page. And for a second read! How often can that claim be made? Right now, I can’t remember a time.
I already mentioned what a superb balanced mix this book is of intrigue, twists and turns while covertly completely upending Christian definitions. It is a subversive read, an educational read and dang nam it, a blazing fun read.
And that’s where the gratitude comes in. I realize that life is overwhelmingly hard. Though we have distractions of food, wine, and natural beauty coming at us from all angles, we have so few opportunities to turn off our insistent minds and let them roam.
The most consistent and sustained of those opportunities is a good story. A story told well, that allows your mind to be carried. I know this book was all about religion, but in the end, it is the supreme good story that is the holiest thing.
Thank you to Dan Brown for allowing my monkey mind to swing in your reality for a sustained 600 pages.
Isn’t that indeed what this whole project is about? The world’s greatest reads. Nothing more than that.
But much more importantly, in this world of fleeting and inferior distractions, it is nothing less!!
Loved it, couldn’t put it down. But the movie was a disaster.
OH, and I agree wholeheartedly about Tom Hanks in the role. One of my favorite actors, I will rarely say he was miscast, but he absolutely wasn’t what I pictured as the character either!
I can’t really comment on this one because I read it a paragraph at a time while breastfeeding someone or other and then hanging out in their room rocking them to sleep or something, so my memories are fuzzy in the extreme. I remember loving it at first and then my interest flagged and then died somewhere mid-book although I seem to recall finishing it. I think this is a writer that, unlike Rumi ( just to pick someone out of thin air), is not meant to be read a little bit at a time. (which is not even fair because Rumi wasn’t a novelist.) Also, I seem to recall (fuzzily) that the woman was just too perfect, but that too could say more about me, leaking milk from my breasts, and living in comfy clothes, than it says about poor Dan Brown’s character descriptions.