I just finished reading The Da Vinci Code and I’m quite glad that it’s over. I didn’t totally want to read it in the first place, but a casual mention of it turned into Bret lending it to me graciously. The main reason I wanted to read it is because I consider it to be “market research.” It deals with quite few topics which I’m interested in, and have researched and written on extensively. Of course, it approaches them from a very different stance. But that stance has proved to be enormously popular for whatever reason, and has catapulted the book to enormous success, including best-seller lists, an upcoming movie and a whole slew of Christians who are up in arms over what they perceive as yet-another assault on their faith.

Personally, I wish it were actually a stronger assaulton their faith. Maybe I’m already very steeped in the lore, but I found this book’s concepts to be rather toothless. And worse than that, the writing quality of it is an absolute travesty. I mean, just a fucking embarrassment. Since I spend my time reading much weirder shit, I always forget about how books that make best-seller lists are often totally watered-down, lowest-common-denominator, slapped-together-for-a-profit steaming piles of monkey poop. And this book was certainly no exception.

And yet somehow it’s been an enormous fucking success, and this just mystifies me. There are currently 3020 reviews of it on Amazon, most of them glowing. For example:

I could not put this book down! Rarely do you find such a readable novel that is intelligently written and filled with thought provoking questions. I can’t wait for the sequel!

But yeah, people’s reactions to it really mystify me, and that’s precisely why I endured all 450 pages of it. I feel like I probably learned something from it, like how not to write expository dialogue, and how not to use flashbacks as another expository device, and how to write really stilted uncreative dialogue. But anyway, I digress.

I guess it really goes back to what I was saying in that latest post about Wayne Dyer, where like everybody is at different levels with shit, and in one sense, it’s kind of stupid to criticize materials and concepts which are useful to people at some level - even if it’s not where I personally am at. And as much as it annoys me, there is something to be taken away from what is done in this book and how it’s done, and probably most important of all, how people react to it. I’ll probably do some more posts about this when I’m back at my computer next week and have all my wits gathered about me. Until then…