Rating: 
Summary: Excellent read, mind the snobs below!
Review: I am slightly taken aback by some of the negative reviews here. This is a good book in my opinion. Yes, it's got some classic formulas, reads like a movie script, has some great tidbits of known conspiracy theories and yes the chapters are short and sweet... But if you want a great, fast and easy read that will keep you well entertained for a few days, then this book is for you. If you're looking for a complex novel with intricate characters and countless silly details that will take you a month to finish, then you'll be disapointed. Give this book the credit it deserves. It has mass appeal, it is well written for what it is and the story is intriguing to those of us who have not read the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. In fact, I found it to be a great introduction. I was actually quite surprised when I looked more closely at da Vinci's Last Supper fresco. John is not a man but indeed a woman. Anyone can see this. Does that mean Leonardo knew something we didn't? Perhaps but probably we'll never know. It's still a good mystery to me! So all of you scullers from Oxford who are majoring in English, don't bother and don't write a critique here. For the rest of us mortals, this is a great read.
Rating: 
Summary: Give me a break
Review: People that you know who have read this book, share knowing looks and invite you, rather cautiously, to take part thereof and be one of them. Enlightened by the great knowledge that is hidden between the covers of the Da Vinci Code. So you do and although you find the writing surprisingly mediocre, you continue hoping that the secret it holds will make you one in the Fellowship of Da Vinci heads. And what, dear reader, is the great secret that has been kept from us for 20 centuries? Women are receptacles! Containers, that's what we are. For what you might ask? I'll give you one guess. Quick someone alert Betty Friedan!
Rating: 
Summary: HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, HOLY COW
Review: Well, it's interesting to see by his remarkable new bestseller, THE DA VINCI CODE, that author Dan Brown has been reading many of the same books I have. Not sure if I should congratulate or pity. In 1984, I bought my first copy of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln's controversial and much maligned HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, a veritable Pandora's box of secret societies, heretical orders, medieval murder and intrigue involving (supposedly) an astonishing array of some of the greatest artists and thinkers in Occidental history. Aside from some particularly sensational claims, the book did host an impressive measure of very scholarly research into certain shadowy avenues of history I had few ideas about. I was, in a word, hooked. In the years since then, along with my regular diet of novels and mainstream nonfiction, I consumed a good deal of HOLY BLOOD spin-offs. Too many, really; a few were quite fun, but most were just strange and preposterous crackpot pseudo-histories. Like the flying saucers of the fifties and sixties, suddenly the whole of ancient and classical Christendom was somehow encoded with one great secret message after another, and amateur symbologists and geometers were having an endless field day. Never naive enough to become disillusioned in any real sense, still I was disappointed that more serious research wasn't being done, but it seemed the whole tainted business had become anathema to the powers that be in our present-world academia.
Dan Brown is, undeniably, well read in this area. What he lacks in prose style--which is considerable--he almost makes up for in his use of all this anecdotal history, this mudslide of minutiae, a manic, relentless assault upon the reader. I can only imagine how this all might affect someone who has never read of or heard any of these theories before.
If, as a fiction writer, Brown has mastered anything, it's the trick of the twist, unexpected turns of events stacked so densely one atop the other here as to be mind-numbingly humorous. Reading DA VINCI, I thought of nothing more than old James Bond movies--then it occurred to me how Oliver Stone had done much the same thing with his movie JFK. Recipe being, you get yourself a juicy conspiracy, gather together every known crumb of theory and leftover tale concerning it, throw in a few more or less interesting characters (the wooden variety will do just fine; no time to waste), sprinkle in a few exotic, historically drenched locales, stir and heat to a rolling boil until the lid goes through the roof.
If the function of art is to arrest the mind, Dan Brown succeeds only in testing it. And if the pace of his novel were not so astonishingly quick, he would succeed also in trying our patience. He seems to be betting all along on a sure hand of keeping one step ahead of the reader and in that I'm quite sure he has not failed himself.
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: This is the BEST!
Review: This is a great book for all ages. My friend's dad is reading it and so am I(30 year age difference). It is eductational, tense and wants you to keep on reading.This book tells you about many interstings things you probably never head about such as the Priory of Sion, Mona Lisa, and the magic number. To fiind all about this you NEED to read this!
Rating:
Summary: anti Catholic bigotry in a dime novel 'thriller'
Review: Mr. Brown spends nearly the whole book just slamming the Vatican, the Pope(s) and especially Opus Dei. Then on the last few pages he sort of lets the Vatican off the hook, revealing how they were just being framed by the bad guy.
Up front he lays out a statement of 'facts' and gives the reader the impression that, while the book is a fiction novel, the historical details are true.
But at one point he states outright that on the famous Friday 13th, Oct. 1307 the Pope sent 'his army' to round up and kill all the Templars.
Hmmmm. In 1307 the only 'army' the Pope could try to command in France was the Templars themselves. Maybe the Hospitallers and Tuetonic knights could have been available to some degree in France, but in much smaller numbers. Yet one order was not likely to raise a hand against the other.
The fact is that the king of France, Phillipe Le Bel, hatched the entire plan and executed the whole business through his own seneschals. It did not go off quite as planned with only a relative handful of knights being arrested and many of those 'escaped' or were released. None of the portable wealth was confiscated, just real estate. The Pope's only complicity was in loosely worded Bulls charging heresy, which while unproven in the modern sense, there is a fair amount of evidence that the Templars were indeed a heretical order. This book was a good reminder why I don't read fiction much anymore.
Rating: 
Summary: Why, oh why, is this book a bestseller?
Review: I found _The Da Vinci Code_ to be a badly written, formulaic thriller sprinkled with some interesting historical and scientific tidbits. I found myself reading very quickly through the muddy "plot" in order to get to these tidbits. One of my favorite passages was the explanation of the Golden Ratio, 1.618, which appears everywhere in nature. I re-read that part a couple of times because it was so interesting. The discussion of symbols in Da Vinci's artwork also was very interesting to me, and something I'd not known about before. And I'd never heard the alternate Grail story, so this book was an interesting introduction to that school of thought-- I even found myself researching online to find more information about it. Sadly, the other 80 percent of the book was just so badly written that I couldn't sustain much of an interest. The characters are utterly one-dimensional. Every chapter is about two pages long, in an attempt to sustain the reader's interest, and every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, kind of like an episode of "24." This device works well occasionally in a novel, but throughout an entire book, it gets to be monotonous. In short, this book reads more like a plot synopsis for a movie proposal than an actual novel. I'm looking forward to the inevitable movie because, with a little luck, some scriptwriter will see fit to flesh out the characters and clear up the plot-- too bad Dan Brown's editor didn't do the same.
Rating:
Summary: Just like movie blockbusters!!
Review: I think overall the book contains a lot of educational information but the attempt for suspense failed. I was able to read it and put it down for a number of days. The suspense parts were ok but they are so mainstream and not original, it is all something that we have either seen in movies or read in other books. And of course, the mass appeal it is not very attractive.
Rating:
Summary: I tried! I really tried!!
Review: I had heard so much about this book and about how fantastic it was. I tried, I really tried to like the Da Vinci Code, but I could not finish it. It has a great story line, and Mr. Brown could have created great twists and turns with it--but he ran out of gas. His style included a big twist (like a murder) in the story--then for twenty pages, the characters would talk about it. Another big twist; and another twenty pages of discussion. That, and the fact he took true facts, tweaked them considerably, and then presented them to the reader as fact. I would have even liked if the book if it had been well written, but it was not. Run on sentences, changes of person and numerous other discretions of writing made for a very choppy read. I really tried to like this book, but could not.
Rating:
Summary: I TRIED....I really did
Review: After hearing all the buzz about this book, I picked it up at the library to read. To be honest, I'm not much of a mystery buff, but if the writing is good, I can get sucked into a good read in any style. I gave this book 75 pages before I gave up. I have to say I often find best-selling books to be duds, so I wasn't totally surprised. I wasn't impressed with the writing style....it didn't pull me in. I wasn't impressed with the characters....none were compelling or interesting to me. Gruesome, bloody details didn't entice me...I hate horror/gore films. So, this book went back to the library unfinished. My most recent 5 star read: 'Reading Lolita in Tehran'.
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