Alex's Book Club: The DaVinci Code

Pages 23-37:

Okay, first off, an apology. I had only made it to page 23 by the last post, not 25. However, as a consolation, absolutely nothing happened between pages 23 and 25.

Now, on with the "story"!

When last we left our intrepid hero, he was with a fat french guy. Now, he travels in an elevator with that French guy. But also, he's afraid of snakes! I mean, closed spaces.

They go upstairs to the main gallery of the Louvre, slide under a metal door, and find the Louvre Dude (named Saunier), dead! Shocker!

Actually, the shocker is that he arranged himself, naked, on the floor, with a pentacle painted in blood on his chest. We are then treated to a lengthy explanation of what a pentacle is.

Meanwhile, an archbishop of Opus Dei, a religious organization, and therefore evil organization, travels from his Manhattan strongold to Portugal, all in the space of 3 pages. Seriously, first paragrpah he's in Manhattan. Then, next paragraph he's in a plane. Then, two pages later, he's over Portugal. I'd complain, but this is the fastest this book has moved in a while.

Couple of things that strike me in this section:

1) This book reads like Tom Swifties. Tom Swifties, in case ya doesn't remember from Elementary School, are sentences where the character describes how he's feeling, and then so does the author. For example:

"I'm running very fast!" Tom said swiftly.

Which is maybe more didactic of an explanation than I was going for, but you get the gist. Another way of explaining the above: The writing is repetitive. And yes, I realize I'm being repetitive by explaining the same thing twice.

2) Dan Brown (the Author of the "book"), clearly owns a guide book for the Louvre. The amount of stupid, boring detail that's put into this book to make dumb readers think it's a smart book is overwhelming. There is no way any of this info is important, except to make the book flesh out to the length of a book. Because at the end of the day, this detail will be unimportant.

If you want to read a book where detail is important, read "Time and Again," by Jack Finney. Not only is it a rollicking time travel adventure, but it has an insane amount of detail about turn of the century New York City, including beautiful drawings. However, not only is it interesting because I'm totally fascinated by the history of NYC, but it's also important to the plot.

Which the fact that the grand gallery of the Louvre is the length of "three Washington Monuments, laid end to end," is not.

3) Dan Brown owns a computer with access to the internet/a word of the day calendar. Again, the amount of detail about religious artifacts/everything would be great if it didn't read like he cut-and-pasted it from dictionary.com. Seriously, whenever he goes into an explanation of something, it sounds like another author wrote that paragraph.


That's it for me... Hopefully, I'll have more excitingness for you tomorrow. Anybody else in the book club have comments on pages 23-37?