I recently finished reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, after looking for something to read and remembering the episode where Angela, from The Office, vehemently despises the book:
Season 2 Episode 4 "The Fire"
Jim: "OK, so, three books on a desert island. Angela."
Angela: " the Bible... Purpose Driven Life..."
...
"Phyllis: "The Da Vinci Code"
Angela: "The Da Vinci Code. I would take The Da Vinci Code, so I could burn the The Da Vinci Code."
So essentially this is what drew my curiosity to read the book. I read the book not having any pre-knowledge of what it was about, except for the short summaries included on all books. I am not a huge reader but this book kept me interested and exceeded my low expectations.
I was instantaneously drawn in from the beginning and could not put the book down. Without going into too much detail about the book, and without giving anything away, I thought this book exceptionally delivered the message it seemed to want to deliver. Spoilers. Some people might be underwhelmed by the ending, thinking that the holy grail perhaps was documents and historical records that show that Jesus was indeed married and had a child. But when it was not that I was immediately disappointed because I didn't get the satisfaction to find what Langdon had searched for the entire book, but I began to understand the true meaning of what it perhaps meant.
The holy grail is not documents or a chalice, but, rather, the idea of what is unknown is what drives the curiosity of people to figure out what exactly is unknown, therefore keeping Mary Magdalene's truth alive.
Overall, I thought the book, as aforementioned, accomplished what it sought out to do in a well-executed manner. I found out after reading the book that this is actually the second book from a series from the author, Dan Brown. I was wondering why Langdon would mention he was so scared of tight spaces, or claustrophobic, but never landed in a situation that pushed his trepidation of enclosed spaces. The "plot-twist" wasn't anything revolutionary but what was revolutionary were the ideas that Brown introduced main-stream.
There have been many books that say the same cliches "Book of the year," "A must read," and even in the introduction to Stephen King's Pet Sematary "This [book] crossed the line," but none of them "lived up to the hype" or high expectations. However, this book did just that. It challenged a thousand year old idea, and did it in such a way that was mind-boggling. When Langdon and Sophie were learning the "truth" about Jesus Christ, I was astonished. I had never heard or learned anything about this, but to read it was incredibly intriguing and thought-invoking, to say the least. Ultimately, the book was an amazing read, nothing too terribly difficult and Brown seemed to hit all the points he sought out to hit in this book: the truth about Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene being the focal point purposefully shadowing the ending, bordering bathetic.
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