In today's New York Times, A.O. Scott has a wonderful review of The Da Vinci Code which is described as "Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence". The review features a number of observations that you don't read every day, for example "movies ... rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Jesus or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema such matters are best left to Monty Python."
In short, the movie gets panned. Not surprising really. I thought the book was overated, pseudo-historical, chewing gum for the brain.
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I read Guy Gavriel Kay's newest book, Ysabel a while ago, but I've been dithering about what to say in the booklog entry.
Tim Powers is one of those authors who has carved out a niche for himself telling a particular type of story, sort of like Guy Gavriel Kay with his pseudo-historical fantasy novels.
Jon Rowe and I have spent a good deal of time over the last couple years documenting the numerous fake quotations from the founding fathers that circulate among the religious right continually, almost all of them traced back to David Barton and his pseudo-historical books and videos.
I've been trying to find out what was said at that press conference called by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools - you know, the one with Chuck Norris - earlier this month.
I hated the book. It was Umberto Eco Lite. Eco has a much better grasp of both irony and the historical facts - he really likes his alchemists and Kabbalists. Brown seems to have the historical sense of a political journalist.
I agree about Eco. I tell anyone who raves to me about Brown's book to read Foucault's Pendulum (and indeed The Name of the Rose, which is one of my favorite books).
Yes indeed. Reminds me that I need to read The Name of the Rose again; it's been far too long.
What I thought was a shame about The Da Vinci Code was that a competent author probably could have made a halfway decent thriller out of the concepts and characters, but Brown's writing is just painful.
I had a number of problems with this book, mostly based on its lack of originality, and the fact it is not that well written.
And a conspiration with a grand total of three members, from which one is a traitor, sounds somewhat, well, cheap...