The Da Vinci Code

Just finished reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. I'd been thinking about picking it up for a while - probably next time I took a long trip - since it's been a bit of a hot topic of late. Let's face it spawning a cottage industry in books that try to debunk a work of fiction is no mean feat. 

Anyway turns out my sister is a bit of a fan so I borrowed it and saved some money - and shelf space. I read it this afternoon and evening. It's 600 pages or so but has that undermanding style that is easy to read, each chapter is only a few pages. It travels at quite a pace also - the action takes place over a period of only around 18 hours.

It's quite fun and although I think the final (well next to final I guess) mystery is a bit of a letdown - as in I'm not convinced it actually makes sense - the puzzles up to that point are enjoyable. One thing that struck me was its resemblance to some older science fiction books I've read. The kind that are written by real scientists and have frequent digressions into info dumps on the science behind things that you don't really need to know. This kind of does the same in that the author doesn't want to waste all the research work that he's done so it all had to go down on the page - even if it doesn't really add anything.

And I know it's been a while but I didn't think you could see the Houses Of Parliament from St James Park (excepting Big Ben of course).