Remster 30 #26 November 21, 2003 Quote Foucault's Pendulum I was gonna say it sounded like a simplified (I know, the description that was given IS simplified) Foucault's Pendulum.... I enjoyed that book, but boy, I skipped some parts of it....Remster Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kallend 2,150 #27 November 21, 2003 Quote It's just there was a whole "there is no way this could actually happen" with regards to the characters, and that is what I have difficulty with. Not like "Lord of the Rings", eh?... The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Michele 1 #28 November 22, 2003 QuoteNot like "Lord of the Rings", eh? Nope, not like that at all. But that's a bad comparison, because I haven't read the whole series, and the ones I read I did years ago. Let's take Dune, the whole series. Not the movies, but the books. Dune, as in LOTR, is science fiction, and marketed as such. It is fantasy of the most total kind - creations of worlds, galaxies, new species, and so forth. In the first page or two, you are required to suspend your disbelief and commit yourself to the (un)reality of the story to make it to the next chapter. Frankly, that decision is made when you pick up the book, knowing it is scifi/fantasy. In The Da Vinci Code, the setting is realtime/current, our world, with characters that are human, and there is no "time/space" prerequisite of the suspension of disbelief. It is crucial, therefore, that a sense of reality is threaded through. One of the reasons it fails, at least for me, is that there are things happening which wouldn't happen in "real life". It's a cops/murder story, and even given the aspect that I have no idea what happens in French murder investigations, things occur which reek of unbelievablity. Additionally, the characters have behaviors that are unrealistic. The female character starts off being very strong, very smart, very determined and very wily. But within 50 pages, she has become some sort of symbol herself, and the rest of her participation is more "happenstance" than intentional. In other words, she becomes more allegorical in the balance of the story, rather than a vehicle of intention, movement, and participation. This was a huge disappointment. Further, the constant references to something in her past - and I mean constant - are boring. All right already, please don't insult my intelligence and remind me every 5 pages that she saw something important. Either tell me what she saw (propell the character forward) and why it bothered her (instead of letting us assume it), or let it go and use it later. Additional difficulties are some of the supporting characters. There are several scenes which contribute exactly nothing to the story other than gratuitous violence (the nun springs to mind), and the Bishop is a character which could have had more flesh instead of a 'bag of bones", a poorly introduced and stiff character. He could have been more fluid, and far more interesting; his influence and his perspective might have been more clearly drawn, and his humanness explored a bit more directly, which would have allowed us to understand the antagonist a bit better, and would have given the author a manner to demonstrate the influence of The Teacher a bit better and more thoroughly (and yes, I figured it out early, but that usually doesn't bother me too much.). It's that sort of thing which strained the credulity of the story. The storyline itself is interesting, but the telling of it is awkward and contrived, and appears oftentimes more like a lecture than a story.... Did that explain my thoughts a bit better? I have tried to not give away any of the material plot lines, so that I am not "spoiling" it for others. Ciels- Michele ~Do Angels keep the dreams we seek While our hearts lie bleeding?~ Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
SpeedRacer 1 #29 November 22, 2003 I had a great time reading the Da Vinci code, but I was not all that impressed with some of the conspiracy theories etc. When I went & looked up some of these things, his ideas just didn't hold water. Like the one about the Catholic church suppressing the Dead Sea Scrolls...Dan Brown didn't make that up, it was a conspiracy theory from a book written by two other guys (whose names I can't remember)from a few years back. And it had about as much validity as most other conspiracy theories. Now that the Dead Sea Scrolls are available on the web & elsewhere, it's hard to find anything that the Vatican would freak out about. Most of the scrolls were written around eighty years before the birth of Christ anyway. But I guess conspiracy theories are fun to believe in. Oh, and that crap about the da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks...How John the Baptist's mother is supposed to be making a "cutting gesture" over the baby John's head (supposedly symbolizing when John the Baptist got his head cut off) ...Look up the painting on the web. You can see she is pointing out the baby Jesus to the baby John. Anyway, this book shows that if you already have a pattern or a conspiracy theory fixed in your mind, you can twist anything around to provide evidence for it. One example: This is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, and the conspiracy theorists are still having a field day. Speed Racer -------------------------------------------------- Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
