I just finished reading this a couple of days ago. It was a fairly enjoyable book, but it certainly wasn’t as fantastic as some of the newspaper reviews would have you believe. There were parts that stretched believability to new lengths, and the whole thing was fairly predictable. Having said that, the mix of fact, superstition, legend, and fiction works surprisingly well, and I did learn a thing or two about art from reading this book. It was just disappointing that the author felt the need to leave so many clues as to the ending that it was hard not to guess.

It is something of a formulaic bestseller, a sentiment beautifully expressed by Mark Lawson:

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, 450 pages of irritatingly gripping tosh…

It’s certainly worth reading, but don’t expect a masterpiece.

I read the ebook version, since most of the books I read now are in that format. It’s one of the many uses of my Pocket PC. But you can buy the paperback from Amazon.co.uk by clicking on the graphic above.

And if you want to join the sjhoward.co.uk book club (!), or basically just read the same books as me, I’m currently working my way through Shooting History: A Personal Journey by Jon Snow, The Guardian Year 2004 edited by Martin Woollacott, and The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (which is an absolute bargain).

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The Times’s review:

the silliest, most inaccurate, ill-informed, stereotype-driven, cloth-eared, cardboard-cutout-populated piece of pulp fiction that I have read

Slightly harsher than ‘utterly gripping tosh’, then.

» This comment was received at 23:36 on 28 February 06

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