dan brown, pimpin the world

I finished it! And now I must say - I don't really get it. Why the hell was this book so worthy to stay in hardcover for 3 or 4 years? Why did people buy this up in big ole massive dung heaps that it's been on the best seller list forever?? This was not the greatest book ever written. It was good, but jeez, not that good.

What I was most mad about came in the long climactic last clue to figure out in London. I swear I knew the answer to the little cryptex the first time Newton was mentioned. 50 pages later I was asking can we please be done with the mystery already?!? My second gripe: the whole balance of the book. As I described it to someone who asked me about it, I said it was 30% plot and 70% setting up background information so you'll get the plot. The book was very teachy, it had a teachy tone sometimes that I didn't like. It struck me as soon as I started reading, but then the plot kinda just takes off and you can almost forgive his teachy asides. But sometimes I felt like Brown thought he was being clever by making it seem like his characters were the ones explaining all this information. But that is so easy to see through and there is so much of it it seems like he wanted all that in there to impress his readers with his mental acumen, and if not that, at least make his long hours of research seem meaningful - if he had to suffer through it, he'd make all the world suffer with him. Yeah didn't like the know-it-all-ness of the book.

So I reached my goal of finishing before the movie, when I was reading the book I was wondering how they'd fit all that background info in there. It'd be bad if Tom Hanks had a lot of pretentious-Harvard-prof-explains-all-the-symbols-to-the-audience lines. The only other thing that worries me about this movie is Tom Hanks' hair. I saw him on some awards show I guess while he was still making it and I was like what did he do to his hair? Thats gonna be very distracting. Was that Tom's or Ron's decision I wonder. Who cares if Langdon is immediately described with a long shock of straight black hair, EVERYONE knows Tom Hanks' hair is curly!!!! They couldn't take one creative license and keep it curly??? Thats one of the things that makes Hanks so cool and cute and cuddly. Man thats gonna be distracting. I hope by the time he starts doing promos (like next week) he'll have his natural hair back, please!