Now It's Millions, Plus One

As promised, I finally read (or rather, listened to) the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. You may be wondering why, as such an avid reader and librarian, I didn’t read it in 2003 when it came out and the hoopla began. Right off the bat let me say that it wasn’t because it was so popular. I am not one of these people who refuse to get into something because it’s too mainstream. If anything is good, I don’t care if half the world loves it. Mostly, it was due to the fact that several of my trusted book-recommending sources said that it had plot-holes and the writing was pulpy. If that was the case, then I had better things to read. I always knew I would get to it eventually, however, and so I did.

When I first started listening, I was rather annoyed at how much it resembled the author’s previous title, Angels and Demons. It began in the same way, with a phone call waking symbologist Robert Langdon up in the middle of the night informing him that there’s been a murder of a prominent figure, and could he come right away. Brown’s formula has a beautiful but brilliant girl, and then a revealed twist about three-quarters of the way through. All the action is crammed into one day in both books. He likes using the Catholic Church in one way or another, and—this is what he popularized for the world—the gradual solution of some code or problem. It felt like Brown had written Angels and Demons, then it didn’t take but the author loved the concept, so he wrote the Da Vinci Code in the same vein, which, as we all know, soared.

In terms of overall enjoyment, I would say that yes, I did think this worth reading. It is fast-paced, it carries the reader, it is intelligent in terms of concepts, and the actor who performs the audiobook, Paul Michael, is terrific.

What’s more important to me than the actual literary quality of the book (which is average), is that it spawned a whole slew of titles like it, launching what is practically a genre in itself—the “code-breaker” suspense tale. While the Da Vinci Code started the phenomenon, it has already been surpassed by what I at least deem better books, such as The Rule of Four Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (incidentally, excellent in audio format as well).

I greatly respect any book that is able to generate so much publicity and get people reading and talking about it in the thousands, if not millions. Kudos to any author that can make that happen.