I gave in...

As of last night, I have given up my claim to be the last person left on earth who has not yet read The Da Vinci Code.

I expected more, somehow.

While the story was certainly engaging, it was also full of plot holes, and I found the writing to be simplistic and unsophisticated. I also felt like I was reading a school textbook. ("It's an anagram!" "What's an anagram?" "An anagram is when you scramble the letters of a word to form another word, like when you turn 'top' into 'pot'. That's an anagram. You try it." "Yeah, I know what an anagram is, dumbass, I meant where the hell do you see an anagram in the freakin' Louvre in the middle of the night?")

Of course, part of the problem was that I was reading the illustrated version, which included images of many of the places and works of art mentioned in the book. It was nice to have the visual aids, but the illustrations, the wide margins, and the dimensions of the thing all were reminiscent of a schoolbook.

The "secret" revealed at the end was predictable and unsatisfying. The book's saving grace was the number of twists and turns that occurred in the middle of the story.

I can see why true believers in Catholic dogma would take offense at the premise of the story, but nowhere in the book is there any real indictment of the current Vatican administration. Opus Dei does come out of it looking pretty bad, though.