The award for Overrated? You betcha! goes to The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
So it wasn’t the worst book of the year, but it was pretty poor. It was mediocre in terms of excitement. It was mediocre in terms of plot. The characters were mediocre. The startling plot twists made me yawn. If a bunch of excitable Christians had decided to ignore it instead of throwing an eppy and giving it all the free publicity that it could ever want, it would have gone completely under the radar and sold about eight copies.
This book doesn’t introduce anything new to the world. These theories have been known about for years, though perhaps not to as wide an audience as they are now (and the excitable Christians have themselves to thank for that, too). I think Dan Brown probably spent more time copying his “original novel” from text books than thinking about it.
I’m not going to give you any links.
It gets worse. They’re making a movie.
(shudder) Hopefully no-one will go to see it.
Execrable book. Couldn’t put it down. Gave it a 3/5, so it must have been better than I remember it. I don’t feel that the reading public should waste their leisure time on this particular novel.
Haven’t read it. Have a big pile of other things that I would rather read.
I read it in one sitting. Took me about 3 and a half hours.
Utter drivel, but strangely unputdownable.
I hear the lead is to be played by Tom Hanks, which should make the movie even more shite than the book, which will take some doing.
I have to agree entirely with Pixeldiva. And to make it worse, I went out and bought Angels and Demons afterwards for reasons I can’t quite fathom.
For a nice satire on the whole thing, have a read of Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco – kind of hard going in places, but much more of a literary accomplishment and, once you realise where he’s going, intelligent enough to raise a wry smile on your face.