The Da Vinci Code
I don't particularly read novels; let me be honest here, I don't read too much outside of the Time magazine I get every week and random articles in the news. So when I borrowed The Da Vinci Code from Adana last Saturday night, I was wondering if I would actually take the trouble of reading the book or just return it unread like the other books I'd borrow from the library. I had heard myriad reports about the book; "The best book written in 2003" wasn't the most glowing recommendation since every book seems to have that distinction. But to have 458 holds placed against a book at ipac.kcls.org, that's something. Thought, lets give this a shot...
When I was done with the Prologue, the clock read 4:54am, Sunday morning/Saturday night (it's still night if I haven't slept yet :) When I eventually slept at 8:45 Sunday morning, I had been transported to another world in Paris marvelling at the adventures of Robert Langdon and his unlikely accomplice, Sophie
Princess Nevue, a cryptographist with the Judicial Department of French Police. The story starts with the murder of an elderly curator of the Louvre. Left to die in the Great chamber of the Louvre, the curator has just enough time to leave an encoded cipher right by his dead body and calls on the attention of Robert and unbeknownest to the police, his grand-daughter. This single act sets the pace for the pair's treasure hunt through Paris and London, the cipher being the first clue in an involved puzzle that could potentially lead them to the location of the Holy Grail. Two things helped me battle sleep that night; the subject matter of the Holy Grail has become the source of inspiration for a number of books that question the Church's message that Jesus was divine, not human and the actual puzzles that lead to the next clue to actually finding it.
Brunch with the Karans was the only other intermission in the unabated reading spree that ensued that Sunday afternoon. My interest in the book was sustained by virtue of the plausibility of the plot and the manner in which the author enmeshed reality with fiction, to a point that I couldn't tell one from the other. Often times, I'd do my own research to corroborate what I'd just read to determine whether Dan Brown had crossed the line and everytime, he had walked the line to perfection. The chapters were short and unlike many books I've read in the past, each page took the story to it's next logical juncture, dead-end or precipice. And trust me, the protagonists had to pit their wits against some insurmountable odds at some points in the book; solving puzzles with archaic and obscure clues and at times, facing imminent death but living on only to hit their next roadblock. When I was done with the last page, it was near 5am Monday morning and I was exhausted, more from the intensity of the material I had just read rather than from sleep-deprivation... In closing, here is one of my favourite lines from the book:
What is history, a fable agreed upon
A must read... And yeah, the fact that both a Harvard Professor and a cryptographer can be hot gives me hope - I'll find a pretty geek girl too ;)
