Da Vinci Code - Archive

I wasn't going to get this book, but the name just kept poping up in more interesting places than Readers Digest and Entertainment Weekly, so I figured there has to be something going on here. Even my mom recommended it. I finished this in early March, 2004

Basically, this book is a bunch of Holy Grail theories glued to an anxious thriller plot. As I listened, it seemed like Brown was writing a screenplay, not a novel, since the action was very scene oriented and would take very little work to translate the action to film. Big suprise. I'm not sure, however, how the director will deal with the long discussions of Grail theory. Probably by just skipping them and focusing on the action.

Back to the book. The collection of theories are the interesting parts of the book, and compelling enought to want to do a little research to see what is fact, what has been speculated by others, and what is fiction specific to this book alone. Another thing Brown does well is describing the locations, especially sites of historical significance. He makes the Louvre, and various chuches seem interesting enough to want to visit. The characters are interesting enough, but not too distracting to the real subject here, Brown's Grail dissertation. Next time Brown releases something, I probably won't wait so long checking it out, as long as sample pages are available on amazon.

The Da Vinci Code © 2003 Dan Brown.
2 Audible files, 08:24 and 07:29 long.

Instant archive

I'm going to make entries for some books I already finished. With audiobooks, I'll estimate when I listened by my audible account, others will be wild guesses. These will be marked as "archive"

Neuromancer

I'll start off with what I'm currently listening to. Finally found the Neuromancer audio book CD on eBay. Its an abridged version of the cassettes, with Gibson reading and various artists' music. I just started disk 3 of 5 and so far it's interesting. Gibson reads every character as if they don't give a shit what happens to them, although I suppose this is not surprising since it was produced in the middle of the ironic 90's. I was worried that the sentence structure would be too dense for an audio book, but Gibson's reading is laid back enough that this is not a problem at all. Doing all the listening in the car, I will probably finish this by April 3rd. The link goes to alternate editions.

Neuromancer, © 1994 William Gibson, Time Warner AudioBooks, 2-520599
5-CDs, Approx. 6 hours.