there’s a lot of bonkers stuff in those books, so i don’t blame you all for not knowing this. but this is up there in terms of wtf even if it’s not nearly as gross as the slavery or whatever.
also listen to the shriekcast. they’re doing the da vinci code right now
Wow I have seen almost NO talk on this podcast for years, really good to see it get love here
I hiked the John Muir trail a few summers ago and downloaded the catalog to listen to while I walked
It was nice, and an accidental benefit is every time I listen to them or trueanon I get nostalgic feelings and memories of crossing beautiful mountain passes and rivers and shit
The whole podcast is pretty good if you want a long form deep dive into HP. They’ve also done Twilight and did an episode on The DaVinci code. They’re pretty good politically from what I can tell.
I really enjoyed listening to them on commutes or walking back when I was finishing up college.
The DaVinci code
The movie they made out of that with Tom Hanks and its sequel Angels & Demons (haven’t seen the third movie) have long been guilty pleasures of mine. Ian McKellen doing a heel turn, being a criminal mastermind while deluding himself about being a grail knight and rambling about Jesus’ secret bloodline (even if he happened to be right about all that), what’s not to love? Plus I do like Tom Hanks. And then in the second one, they make you think Stellan Skarsgard is a bad guy by having him be a grumpy dick but it turns out he’s the only true man in the Vatican and good-boy Ewan McGregor turns out to be a power-hungry mastermind and even though its the most predictable shit ever put on screen I’m going :soypoint-1: :soypoint-2:
All this to say, I’ve never been able to read the novels. I tried, and I’m not even a prose first kind of reader- I read all sorts of books with shitty prose and don’t care -but I find Dan Brown to be such a terrible writer on the sentence level that I just cannot force myself to read more than a few dozen pages of one of his books. Only other author I’ve encountered like that is Robert Ludlum. Ironically, I do like the first Bourne movie quite a bit.
