February 15, 2006

Not Suffering From Da Vinci Fever

I finally finished The Da Vinci Code over the weekend, and I guess I'm still wondering what all the fuss is about.

It's not the worst book I've ever read, but I found the entire first half extremely slow and tedious. And even though as they said on "Family Guy", the chapters are like two pages so you feel really smart, I really had to force myself to get through it. And I only did that simply to figure out where the hell Dan Brown was going with all of it. There was a complete lack of characterization for the two main characters. Aside from their jobs, and that one of them wears a Mickey Mouse watch, I felt like I knew nothing about them. The author was constantly placing them into intense and dangerous situations where it seemed like we were supposed to care about their welfare, but how can I when I don't know anything about them?

The book covers a lot of information about art and the history of the masons and Christianity and Da Vinci and Mary Magdalene, and on and on, and did I mention on? about the sacred feminine. Some of the theories advanced in the novel have previously been published in other works and others are crazy outlandish. I was fascinated by the theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, seeing as how Jesus was a 30-year-old-man living in Israel 2000 years ago, it made sense to me that he wouldn't have been a bachelor. However you can find just about every theory in the novel debunked has been by someone or another.

I thought the novel came to a satisfying conclusion, considering its shortcomings. However, I've really read better trashy romance novels. As entertaining as a modern thriller can be, it's amazing how worked up people have gotten. It really is as if the whole world suddenly remembered "Oh yeah! Pages with words on them! And instead of watching TV, you actually just read the words." Good thing the upcoming movie will take care of that whole pesky reading part.

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