With the crazy schedule I have, I didn’t believe
I can read a book so fast… but I consumed “The Da Vinci
code” (~ 440 pages in its Hebrew version) in 3 days.

As you can guess from this pre-amble, the book is very
good. I’ll magnify this - the book is excellent. Definitely
one of the best I’ve read, at least in some time.

It’s hard to mention anything from the plot without spoilers,
so I’ll just explain what I liked about it - that it has
the two virtues I love most about non-fiction books.

First, it is very readable. A page-turner, as some call it. The plot is so
exciting that you just can’t put the book down. The “Just one
more chapter” syndrome hits hard. The author doesn’t spend
time using overly fancy language, present un-needed characters,
etc. Everything is clear - the characters are well built and
fit their roles precisely. The feeling that there is a great
mystery you don’t understand, and almost every chapter reveals
some parts of the puzzle is enthralling and you just can’t
stop reading.

But high readability is also a virtue of some authors, whose
books “fly through” but feel empty once you’ve read them.
Read another couple of the author’s books, and you feel it’s
all the same thing, and you didn’t gain anything bar some
entertainment time.

And this is my Second point: “The Da Vinci code” is different.
The book is full with interesting information, and general
knowledge about history, symbols, religions, riddles, etc.
Naturally, some of the (more speculative)
things may be innacurate, but there are all the reasons to
believe the historic facts. I personally learned a lot about
Jesus Christ and the history of Christianity (don’t let this scare you,
the book presents quite agnostic views, but the history of the great
religions is still very interesting), and even about art
(especially Da Vinci’s).

The book has some weak points, but they are negligible comparing
to the good points, so I don’t feel they’re even worth mentioning.

In short: highly recommended

Related posts:

1. Book review: “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown
2. Book review: “Digital Fortress” by Dan Brown
3. Book review: “The Last Templar” by Raymond Khoury
4. Book review: “Beautiful Code”, edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson
5. Book review: “The feast of the goat” by Mario Vargas Llosa

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2003 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Book reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.