[amishler]

Has anyone read "The da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown? I finished it today, and it is amazing! I had forgotten how much I love a good mystery, and this book delivers in spades. It's extremely well written, with an intricate storyline (fictional but based on real people, places and historical events), likeable and believable characters, excellent dialog; really, everything I like in a book. By the end of the 3-page prologue, I was hooked.

In fact, the early part of the book had me thinking, "This would make a great adventure game!" And I still think it would. (There are even slider puzzles in the book! ) But before I got too far in, I realized it shared a plot element with many an adventure game, and might be considered just another exploitation of an overused AG cliché. Without giving too much of the book away, let's just say that Dan Brown would probably like Broken Sword. (You know, there's a reason the Knights Templar are a popular plot device. It's a really intriguing story, and it can be taken in a lot of different directions.)

So, no adventure game (though I wouldn't say no to it if somebody made one). But it's a great book, and I recommend it to people who like any or all of the following:

• Broken Sword's story
• Mysteries
• Reading

[remixor]

I read it. The whole time, I was thinking "This would make such a better adventure or movie than book." The author has a very good hold on creating suspense and unraveling a story, but the book practically read like a movie script. I believe they currently ARE making a movie, actually. I completely agree with amishler on his list of people who may enjoy reading it. I must unfortunately disagree with amishler saying the book was "extremely well-written"--I honestly couldn't disagree more. The story itself was quite interesting, and the characters were certainly believable, but the actual prose was very bland and fairly standard. But one doesn't read a book like this looking for great writing; one reads it for the mystery, and the little historical tidbits. Bear in mind, however, that, unlike in Broken Sword, there is no supernatural elements of any kind in The Da Vinci Code. And speaking of the title, it really bothers me that Dan Brown chose to name his book so. Leonardo da Vinci would never have gone by "da Vinci"--that wasn't his last name, it was merely an indicator. He went by Leonardo da Vinci, or, just as commonly, Leonardo. I suppose that "The Leonardo Code" wouldn't have sounded quite as catchy, but it still annoys me


(geez, speaking of poorly written text, this post is a bloody mess)

[Jake]

In the book I thought they made reference to him being just "Leonardo." Maybe not... I agree that the writing itself was suspect but the story told and the research that was done and the way they were both combined was really good. It was fun. The "intelligent action blockbuster of the summer" of books for sure.

I'm sure they'll fuck up the movie.

All proper borderline-cheese suspense/mystery novels get turned into crap movies (and I admit that I like to read borderline-cheese or pure cheese suspense/mystery novels a bit more than I should... or a lot more than I should), the most recent example of the horrible failure being the Borne Identity, where they wrote the villan character from the book straight out of the script.

[Tom_K]

I just happen to be reading the Da Vinci Code now - and enjoying it. One thing I have to air out though: It always bugs me when a writer uses the character description cop-out:

"He happened by a mirror on his way out and paused, brusquely looking himself up and down. His 30 year-old body taut with years of fitness training, His gaunt face was topped by tossled blonde hair that yada yada yada"

The whole protagonist self-description-according-to-the-nearest-reflective-surface formula just gets old. Ah well, it's a little peeve, but a pet one nonetheless.

Definately a fun read though. Speaking of language and grammer usage, try "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker.

[Kingzjester]

Knowing what I do of Leonardo and his mind and his art - I am reluctant to read something that while giving his art some deeper meaning, banalizes it to the level of a secret message. Templars! Secret message! Spooky! Wooooh!

BTW, da Vinci means from Vinci. It is kinda silly to name the book Da Vinci Code - when it is in the spirit of the English language to put the prepositional phrase after the bit it modifies; Code da Vinci would work better - even though Leonardo really lived and worked in Florence, Milan and shortly before his death in France... He was born in Vinci and hence the name...

I am not liking this book, the very title annoys me...

[twifkak]

Originally Posted by Kingzjester

Knowing what I do of Leonardo and his mind and his art - I am reluctant to read something that while giving his art some deeper meaning, banalizes it to the level of a secret message. Templars! Secret message! Spooky! Wooooh!

Dude, it's fiction.

And da Vinci's also a name.. of this painter dude.. Just like we call it the Haley-Bopp comet or whatever.

[Kingzjester]

Originally Posted by twifkak

Dude, it's fiction.

And da Vinci's also a name.. of this painter dude.. Just like we call it the Haley-Bopp comet or whatever.

Dude, that don't change jack shit.

[remixor]

Originally Posted by Kingzjester

the very title annoys me...

Yeah, same here.

Originally Posted by twifkak

And da Vinci's also a name.. of this painter dude.. Just like we call it the Haley-Bopp comet or whatever.

The point is that it's NOT his name. It was just a way to differentiate him from someone else named Leonardo. He was just from Vinci, as Kingz said. (And it's actually the Hale-Bopp comet.)

Originally Posted by jake

In the book I thought they made reference to him being just "Leonardo."

Brown used "da Vinci" entirely interchangeably with "Leonardo", and in fact used "da Vinci" much more often. Calling him such is entirely incorrect, however, which is where Kingz and I take issue.

[Phil25]

Wow, I'm sorry guys, didn't realize you knew that many people from Vinci that you were confused as to who they were referring to. I'm sure the sheepherder Paul da Vinci would be happy to know that he was popular enough to be confused with Leo.

[remixor]

Phil--it's not an issue of confusion. It's just that you don't refer to people as "from Vinci", which is what "da Vinci" translates to. It wasn't his name at all. It's almost absurd to refer to him as "da Vinci", when you consider its meaning. It's either "Leonardo da Vinci" or "Leonardo"--that's it. Not that hard.

[Zygomaticus]

While "da Vinci" may very well mean "from/of Vinci" in his native language, isn't it normally considered his last name in English? If so, then isn't referring to him as da Vinci okay?

[remixor]

NO! That's the whole point!

[Phil25]

{shrug} It ain't my book.

[Zygomaticus]

Originally Posted by Phil25

{shrug} It ain't my book.

Mine neither.

Oh well.

[Tom_K]

I think the title of the book has sufficiently accomplished what it intended, and that is associate Leonardo Da Vinci with a secret code revealed in a work of pure fiction with some historical merit thrown in for spice. Perhaps if the man were alive today he would give the book a pedantic smirk and demand justice for the misnomer, or dismiss it altogether. Also, had Brown asserted his work to be a scientific document I could understand taking issue, as it is, I think it's a little silly. After all, fiction is about theatrics, and rarely about accuracy.

[Kingzjester]

Originally Posted by Tom_K

I think the title of the book has sufficiently accomplished what it intended, and that is associate Leonardo Da Vinci with a secret code revealed in a work of pure fiction with some historical merit thrown in for spice. Perhaps if the man were alive today he would give the book a pedantic smirk and demand justice for the misnomer, or dismiss it altogether. Also, had Brown asserted his work to be a scientific document I could understand taking issue, as it is, I think it's a little silly. After all, fiction is about theatrics, and rarely about accuracy.

Silly rabbit, trix are for kids.

[twifkak]

According to this page, his name is Lionardo, though I still can't find out what his last name is, if not da Vinci (or even if it exists). So I take offense to all the posts that wrote otherwise, and refuse to read them.

Oh, wait.


Crap.

[ysbreker]

Just read cryptonomincon if you want to read a good book


second blatant spam post by me for this book

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and the rest of the band are up on the deck of the Nevada one morning, playing the national anthem and watching the Stars and Stripes ratchet up the mast, when they are startled to find themselves in the midst of one hundred and ninety airplanes of unfamiliar design. Some of them are down low, traveling horizontally, and others are up high, plunging nearly straight down. The latter are going so fast that they appear to be falling apart; little bits are dropping off of them. It is terrible to see--some training exercise gone miserably awry. But they pull out of their suicidal trajectories in plenty of time. The bits that have fallen off of them plunge smoothly and purposefully, not tumbling and fluttering as chunks of debris would. They are coming down all over the place. Perversely, they all seem to be headed for the berthed ships. It is incredibly dangerous--they might hit someone! Lawrence is outraged.

There is a short-lived phenomenon taking place in one of the ships down the line. Lawrence turns to look at it. This is the first real explosion he's ever seen and so it takes him a long time to recognize it as such. He can play the very hardest glockenspiel parts with his eyes closed, and The Star Spangled Banner is much easier to ding than to sing.

His scanning eyes fasten, not on the source of the explosion, but on a couple of airplanes that are headed right toward them, skimming just above the water. Each drops a long skinny egg and then their tailplanes visibly move and they angle upwards and pass overhead. The rising sun shines directly through the glass of their canopies. Lawrence is able to look into the eyes of the pilot of one of the planes. He notes that it appears to be some sort of Asian gentleman.

This is an incredibly realistic training exercise--even down to the point of using ethnically correct pilots, and detonating fake explosives on the ships. Lawrence heartily approves. Things have just been too lax around this place.

A tremendous shock comes up through the deck of the ship, making his feet and legs feel as if he had just jumped off a ten-foot precipice onto solid concrete. But he's just standing there flatfooted. It makes no sense at all.

The band have finished playing the national anthem and are looking about at the spectacle. Sirens and horns are speaking up all over the place, from the Nevada, from the Arizona in the next berth, from buildings onshore. Lawrence doesn't see any antiaircraft fire going up, doesn't see any familiar planes in the air. The explosions just keep coming. Lawrence wanders over to the rail and stares across a few yards of open water towards the Arizona.

Another one of those plunging airplanes drops a projectile that shoots straight down onto Arizona's deck but then, strangely, vanishes. Lawrence blinks and sees that it has left a neat bomb-shaped hole in the deck, just like a panicky Warner Brothers cartoon character passing at high speed through a planar structure such as a wall or ceiling. Fire jets from that hole for about a microsecond before the whole deck bulges up, disintegrating, and turns into a burgeoning globe of fire and blackness. Waterhouse is vaguely aware of a lot of stuff coming at him really fast. It is so big that he feels more like he is falling into it. He freezes up. It goes by him, over him, and through him. A terrible noise pierces his skull, a chord randomly struck, discordant but not without some kind of deranged harmony. Musical qualities aside, it is so goddamned loud that it almost kills him. He claps his hands over his ears.

Still the noise is there, like red-hot knitting needles through the eardrums. Hell's Bells. He spins away from it, but it follows him. He has this big thick strap around his neck, sewn together at groin level where it supports a cup. Thrust into the cup is the central support of his glockenspiel, which stands in front of him like a lyre-shaped breastplate, huge fluffy tassels dangling gaily from the upper corners. Oddly, one of the tassels is burning. That isn't the only thing now wrong with the glockenspiel, but he can't quite make it out because his vision keeps getting obscured by something that must be wiped away every few moments. All he knows is that the glockenspiel has eaten a huge quantum of pure energy and been kicked up to some incredibly high state never before achieved by such an instrument; it is a burning, glowing, shrieking, ringing, radiating monster, a comet, an archangel, a tree of flaming magnesium, strapped to his body, standing on his groin. The energy is transmitted down its humming, buzzing central axis, through the cup, and into his genitals, which would be tumescing in other circumstances.

Lawrence spends some time wandering aimlessly around the deck. Eventually he has to help open a hatch for some men, and then he realizes that his hands are still clapped over his ears, and have been for a long time except for when he was wiping stuff out of his eyes. When he takes them off, the ringing has stopped, and he no longer hears airplanes. He was thinking that he wanted to go belowdecks, because the bad things are coming from the sky and he would like to get some big heavy permanent-seeming stuff between him and it, but a lot of sailors are taking the opposite view. He hears that they have been hit by one and maybe two of something that rhymes with ``torpedoes,'' and that they are trying to raise steam. Officers and noncoms, black and red with smoke and blood, keep deputizing him for different, extremely urgent tasks that he doesn't quite understand, not least because he keeps putting his hands over his ears.

Probably half an hour goes by before he hits upon the idea of discarding his glockenspiel, which is, after all, just getting in the way. It was issued to him by the Navy with any number of stern warnings about the consequences of misusing it. Lawrence is conscientious about this kind of thing, dating back to when he was first given organ-playing privileges in West Point, Virginia. But at this point, for the first time in his life, as he stands there watching the Arizona burn and sink, he just says to himself: Well, to heck with it! He takes that glockenspiel out of its socket and has one last look at it, it is the last time in his life he will ever touch a glockenspiel. There is no point in saving it now anyway, he realizes; several of the bars have been bent. He flips it around and discovers that chunks of blackened, distorted metal have been impact-welded onto several of the bars. Really throwing caution to the winds now, he flings it overboard in the general direction of the Arizona, a military lyre of burnished steel that sings a thousand men to their resting places on the bottom of the harbor.

As it vanishes into a patch of burning oil, the second wave of attacking airplanes arrives. The Navy's antiaircraft guns finally open up and begin to rain shells down into the surrounding community and blow up occupied buildings. He can see human-shaped flames running around in the streets, pursued by people with blankets.

The rest of the day is spent, by Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and the rest of the Navy, grappling with the fact that many two-dimensional structures on this and other ships, which were put into place to prevent various fluids from commingling (e.g. fuel and air) have holes in them, and not only that but a lot of shit is on fire too and things are more than a little smoky. Certain objects that are supposed to (a) remain horizontal and (b) support heavy things have ceased to do either.

Nevada's engineering section manages to raise steam in a couple of boilers and the captain tries to get the ship out of the harbor. As soon as she gets underway, she comes under concerted attack, mostly by dive bombers who are eager to sink her in the channel and block the harbor altogether. Eventually, the captain runs her aground rather than see this happen. Unfortunately, what Nevada has in common with most other naval vessels is that she is not really engineered to work from a stationary position, and consequently she is hit three more times by dive bombers. So it is a pretty exciting morning overall. As a member of the band who does not even have his instrument any more, Lawrence's duties are quite poorly defined, and he spends more time than he should watching the airplanes and the explosions. He has gone back to his earlier train of thought regarding societies and their efforts to outdo each other. It is very clear to him, as wave after wave of Nipponese dive bombers hurl themselves, with calligraphic precision, at the ship he is standing on, and as the cream of his society's navy burns and explodes and sinks, putting up virtually no resistance, that his society is going to have to rethink a thing or two.

[remixor]

Originally Posted by Tom_K

I think the title of the book has sufficiently accomplished what it intended, and that is associate Leonardo Da Vinci with a secret code revealed in a work of pure fiction with some historical merit thrown in for spice. Perhaps if the man were alive today he would give the book a pedantic smirk and demand justice for the misnomer, or dismiss it altogether. Also, had Brown asserted his work to be a scientific document I could understand taking issue, as it is, I think it's a little silly. After all, fiction is about theatrics, and rarely about accuracy.

I relaize taht TeH tITtLE UV tHa b000k acccoMPLISHed iTs, intenshun butt th!At iz n0 raison 2 juztif'ffy. it

[Tom_K]

Originally Posted by remixor

I relaize taht TeH tITtLE UV tHa b000k acccoMPLISHed iTs, intenshun butt th!At iz n0 raison 2 juztif'ffy. it

I see your point, honestly. So the title sucks, big deal. Yet, if the book is a work of fiction, don't the same principles apply to the title? If indeed 'da Vinci' means from Vinci, wouldn't The Da Vinci Code indicate that the code, since it was Leonardo's brainchild, is also from Vinci? If we can plead the language barrier, give the same courtesy to Mr. Brown. The first ??k advance check from the publisher indicates someone thought this was justified. No beans to me either way, I don't pretend to have the sensitive skin of one higher learned where things like that chaff my intellect.