Reading The Da Vinci Code is interesting - this was, I gather, a pretty popular little book a while ago. I got to it slowly.

I’ve been accused of being an elitist reader, and a snob. Both of these things are true, and I’ll take them as complements in a world where Time Magazine is increasingly considered literature and the 30 second attention span is considered long. Reading is the best way I know to stretch your mind, and most people don’t do it.

I don’t read a lot of “popular” fiction. I read a lot of fiction, but it tends to be of the literary popular variety. I’ll read John Irving but not Stephen King.

So what does all this have to do with The Da Vinci Code?

This book is 449 pages in length, as published in the original hard cover, and it contains 105 chapters. That’s right - 105. That’s more chapters than appeared in the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.

This bugs me, because it’s written for a TV generation. At 4.27 pages per chapter on average (and the pages are not densely packed with a small font, by the way) the action, activity or character development all happens in bullet time. The book’s plot is outlined in explicit detail on every page, with not much left to the imagination as you jump from scene to scene.

The Harry Potter books felt the same to me - the authors of these books don’t want you to think, they just to lay their story out in front of you. It’s just plain bad writing, that fails to recognize the most powerful aspect of the written word - the human brain.

All of this is not meant to imply that I’m not enjoying the book, but I’d have a hard time recommending it to many of my friends.

And if Time is your idea of literature, try reading either The Walrus or The Atlantic Monthly for a change. You might enjoy it.

Posted by skooter at 3:58 PM This entry is filed under Books.