I finish the greatest and mostest controversial novel since the Bible!!! Or something like that. Because your dying to know what I think, I’ll start with the fiction.
It was okay. I don’t read much fiction, but I kept turning the pages. It helped to have the Special Illustrated Edition. I got annoyed with Brown a couple times. First, he spent to much time preaching to me. He’d launch into these long inner monologues where Teabing or Langdon would expound on the Grail Conspiracy. Basically, it felt like an excuse for Brown to preach at me. At least wrap it up in dialogue, so i pretend you’re not talking to me! Oh, wait… he does that a bunch, too. Oh well.
[SPOILER]
Finally, the ending was weak and cliché. The book assaults you with the lost divine feminine and a great patriarchal conspiracy; yet at the end we have a young, attractive Sophie Neveu expressing her attraction for the much older and bookishly handsome Robert Langdon, complete with the promise of sex the next time they meet. So much for female empowerment. I fully expected to find a remark about Langdon’s throbing manhood in there.
Finally, Teabing, the world’s foremost expert on the Grail legend, and Langdon, an internationally known symbologist, seem awfully dim at times. Whatever. Let’s just chalk it up to a lack of sleep, since the novel begins late one night and races thru one or two frantic days.
Bald Truth: A fair, fluffy summer read.
I’ll put my comments on the religious stuff in another post.
On the Bedside Table: I’ve got a ton of books from the library, so it’s a good thing I’m not watching much TV. I’ve started Supernanny: How to Get the Best from Your Children, which I’m reviewing for another of my blogs.
I’ve also started on The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. I saw the author, Tom Friedman, on Charlie Rose a couple weeks back, and it reminded me I wanted to have a look. Have you seen this book? Am I the only one thinks it’s ironic that a book called The World Is Flat is really damn thick?
