Rating: 
Summary: Amazing Rubbish!
Review: This books start out very well but truly disintegrates in the end. Sloppy, poorly believable plot and no story. The very end is a mess. Avoid this book.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Believe the Hype
Review: This could have been a really great read. The premise is fascinating-- a centuries old mystery and conspiracy come to light in the modern world. Unfortunately, the writing is so disappointing. The writer never met a cliche he didnt like. The characters are wooden (the reluctant professor, the feminine but strong young woman, the evil conspirator, etc). In addition, the writer, so confident of his own cleverness, uses the same puzzles over and over again. There is some interesting word play, as the characters solve a puzzle left for them by the enigmatic dead man. But the writer makes use of the same puzzles in repitition until the reader is skimming pages quickly to get to the next new revelation.
In some senses this book is a page turner-- because the premise is engaging, the reader does want to know the answers. Its just that the ride along the way is so annoying, and the characterizations are so rushed.
One final problem with this book is the number of art history errors it contains! For example, a Da Vinci painting which dramatically "bends" around the body of one character is actually painted on wood! A good researcher would never have made this mistake. There are legions of these little errors, which art historians have gleefully pointed out in many newspaper articles since this book's publication.
Rating:
Summary: Brown
Review: This country needs educated people now more than ever!Please, people. The man is laughing at this argument - the supposed facts of this book people are taking so literally simply are not true. Do some research please! Forget about religion for a moment, History is being lost. I think the passion and frustration of this debate stems from the irrational fear that the author's claims cannot be disproven. You don't need to go far to do so. Look up the history of the Olympic symbol. Do some superficial research into the origins of Paris. Find some articles that recount the activities of the Priory of Sion in the 20th century. Research cathedral architecture. These are historical issues that everyone should care about and quite simply the accounts given in this book are not incomplete they are overwhelmingly False. This is not a matter for debate. It is not opinion. Does anyone read anything besides pop novels? Did anyone see the program on abc at least? Is this the twilight zone? Wanting it to be true does not make it so. IT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED. Truth = an accurate report. Don't be such easy prey! World history is being blurred and revised and erased. With it goes our hopes of finding real solutions for our current problems.
Rating: 
Summary: Learn to Write
Review: This editors / publishers of this book should be ashamed of themselves. The pointlessly long book is in drastic need of editing and the author should take a course in English composition so he can write chapters longer than 1 page and distance himself from the "stunning", "frozen", "wrenching" school of writing, a sure sign of laziness on the part of an author unable to forge his own style.
Rating: 
Summary: Catholics: this book will open your eyes!
Review: This exposes truths the vatican wants to hide.
Rating:
Summary: great ride
Review: This fast pace novel will keep you going to the end. Its one of those novels that you don't know who to trust as everyone has their own secret agenda. I can't wait to go back and read his earlier works.
Rating: 
Summary: Ruined
Review: This fine book was ruined for me from the first. Dan Brown should have been told that Da Vinci is not a part of Leonardo's name, but only signifies his city of origin. To refer to Leonardo simply as Da Vinci is a serious misnomer which succeeded in spoiling the story for me.
Rating:
Summary: Read Angels and Demons first!
Review: This guy knows his stuff, this is my second book about Robert Langdon, Angels and Demons was first. I loved it! Dan Brown is the writer of the moment! I could not put down the first or the second!
Read it!
Rating:
Summary: Good idea, mediocre writing, lazy editing
Review: This has all the makings of a bestseller (mystery, conspiracy, murder, romance), but the quality of the writing handicaps this book. Although Brown obviously scoured books and other sources to piece together his plot, he ought to have put the same effort into studying the general layout of Paris and the psychology of her people. Although it might look great in a movie, it's not physically possible to drive into the Tuileries Gardens from the direction the hero, Langdon, did in Chapter 4 (It's ringed by a twelve-foot wall on that side; there are switchback steps of course, but....). I am also unsure of why the DCPJ officer who drove Langdon from the Ritz to the Louvre left the hotel (located in Place Vendome) drove past Opera Garnier and then back through Vendome before actually heading toward the Louvre. And during Langdon's and Sophie's escape from the Louvre in Chapters 32 and 33, they might have saved an awful lot of time and actually made it to the Embassy before the DCPJ officers if they had just driven straight down rue de Rivoli (which becomes avenue Gabriel at the same exact place where the Embassy is located)...and when Sophie "cuts sharply past the luxurious Hotel de Crillon," had she looked to her left, she might have seen the Embassy just on the other side of the (very small) street, a whole lot closer than "less than a mile away." (Brown is also not quite up with the times; it took several references to a "rotary" before I realized he was talking about a "roundabout" and the heroine's "SmartCar" is generally referred to as a "Smart.") There are many symbols of France, and to a symbologist, perhaps, the Eiffel Tower would reign supreme, but not in the opinion of the general Frenchman-in-the-street. As far as Brown's general writing, I kept forgetting that Sophie was French, because her dialogue was written in American vernacular, and I had trouble imagining that Langdon felt anything more than brotherly toward her (her patronized her, he protected her, he educated her...hmmm, strange chauvanistic behaviour for a believer in the sacred goddess...but he never seemed to truly be attracted to her.)The protaganist, Robert Langdon, "senses" things at least twenty times in the first 100 pages when Brown should have been more precise, allowing his character to see, hear, guess, assume, deduct or even *know* those very same things. As other people have mentioned, the (non)religious aspects of this book are rehashed, centuries-old heresies and conspiracies, but I wouldn't have minded so much if I hadn't wasted my time reading such a poorly edited book. I wonder how many unpublished authors with outstanding manuscripts were turned down so that Doubleday could pour money into marketing "The Da Vinci Code"? Skip this book. If you're interested in the Holy Grail, the sacred goddess, or any of the other fringe religion aspects of this book, you could find the information much more quickly by doing a search on the internet...and it would probably be a better read.
Rating:
Summary: I don't get it
Review: This has been on the top seller's list for a while, everyone is talking about it, and I don't understand what the big fuss is. I don't really see where the controversy comes in because people with at least some education or who do even the littlest amount of research (google, anyone?) will easily pick up on how genuinely ridiculous some of Dan Brown's "facts" are and understand that it is a work of fiction. But, I don't care about the factual validity to it because it *is* a fiction book. It looks to me that because he isn't the best writer, Dan Brown had to take (very) generous license to make everything to fall into place. What I care about is that it isn't even incredibly entertaining. It has an extremely formulaic approach and is filled with little "puzzles" to solve throughout. Maybe it's just me, but I grew bored with puzzle-solving before I even hit high school, which worked out well because these puzzles seemed to be at junior high level in difficulty. His main character, Robert Langdon, has more knowledge of what is going on than the reader, which always feels like a cop-out on the author's part. If an author won't reveal to the reader what the character already knows, it's usually due to an attempt to keep the reader turning the page to find out the tidbits that are kept secret since the story won't retain their attention; this does work, but it never makes a good book. Dan Brown seems to excel in this technique and I must admit that I found his writing so mediocre that if it wasn't for my irrational desire to figure out certain plot points that Robert already knew and wouldn't tell us, then I would have stopped reading. A good book should be able to reveal everything to the reader that the main character knows and still keep the reader hooked, because otherwise, why bother telling Robert's story if the author's not even going to tell it? Also, I hate chapters that end with "dun, dun, dun!" so you have to start the next chapter to see if the person really loses his or her head or if the hero really caught the bad guy only halfway through the book. Yet again, another writing stunt I thought I had left behind when I stopped reading Nancy Drew. I did like the historical sites sprinkled throughout, from museums to cathedrals to chapels; it was fascinating to learn about some places I've never heard of. Again, he took great license with the historical facts, but at least, because of my curiosity, it led me to do research on the locations and find out some interesting facts about medieval landmarks. The only reason I can figure that such a poorly written book is doing so well is because of all the publicity generated over the "controversy." The reason I picked up this book is because I bought into the "everyone is doing it, so it must be good" mentality. My recommendation? Don't bother.
| 
