Alex's Book Club: The DaVinci Code

Pages 77-148:

Sophie hits on a daring escape plan to get Langdon out of the Louvre. After discovering a tracking device in his pocket, she jams it into a piece of soap, and throws it out of the window.

And because the French police are idiots, they follow the piece of soap, which has safely landed in a truck, instead of checking the last known location of Langdon and Sophie.

Meanwhile, as they are about to leave the Louvre, our heroes figure out that Saniere left them a far more devious clue than they thought. A simple word jumble, his message to Langdon decodifies as, "Leonardi Da Vinci! The Mona Lisa! I use too many exclamation points!"

So off to the Mona Lisa Langdon and Sophie go, discovering another clue, which leads them to another DaVinci painting, where they find a secret key to a secret box.

Meanwhile (and meanwhile, these meanwhile's aren't all me. There's constant cutaways in the book for no reason. A sample: There's a paragraph at the end of a chapter that delivers no more information than Bishop Arangarosa has LANDED IN FRANCE! Sacre Bleu!), the police have discovered Langdon's ruse, and headed to block him off at the museum, AND the American Embassy.

So our intrepid academics, not knowing this, escape to the Embassy! But they find the police waiting for them, so Sophie hits on a brilliant plan: they turn around and go to the train station. Because the French police are stupid, and can't go to train stations.

Back with our buddy Silas the Evil Albino, he discovers that he had been following a fake trail, and kills a nun because of it. There's a lot more words and at least five chapters there, but that's what it boils down to, which makes sense, since we, the reader, were already well aware that Silas was following a fake trail, and its not like those five chapters gave us any additional information. Although, we did learn that Silas is evil, and an albino.

End of page 148!

Okay, I'll give Dan Brown this. There's SO much information in this book, that some of it is bound to be interesting. Every two pages or so, he's kind enough to stop the breathtaking action to have a flashback, either to Sophie learning about cryptography, or Langdon lecturing about religious iconography, or Silas being albino.

About one of every five of these flashbacks actually has some mildly interesting information (again, probably gleaned from a word-a-day calendar), even if the framework of the scene is terrible and insulting (i.e., when he flashes back to a college class, there's a huge nerd, and some dumb blondes. When he flashes back to a prison class, they all are dumb and can't stop talking about sex. And invariably, they end up being TOTALLY AMAZED by Langdon's knowledge.)

And also, you sort of have to appreciate the fact that the first 150 pages of the book keep telling you how terrible the Catholic Church is. For a mainstream bestseller, it's kind of surprising this hasn't been boycotted more. So hats off to you, Dan Brown.

Question for discussion: Who is more evil, albinos, or religious people?