DaVinci Code: Take 2

Life and death intervened to keep me from blogging about finishing The DaVinci Code before now. But here's a bit:

In the end, I really enjoyed the novel. It was escapist when I needed some escape; it challenged Christian religio-cultural supremacy when I needed to bask in such challenge. I stand by my critiques of the novel’s limitations, but once I accepted that this was an action-adventure thriller with some juicy if superficial political critique of the Church (many aspects lifted whole from other texts) rather than Good Literature (a.k.a. beautifully written prose with richly crafted characters, etc.), then I just dove in and enjoyed it for what it was. The reading dovetailed nicely with my readings of Richard Dawkins, which was another factor in its timely favor for me. Dawkins deserves and will get his own blog entry here one of these days. I share many of his perspectives but not all. He is sexist and throws babies out with bathwater too often, but he is also such a reassuring voice admist the excess of religious rhetoric dominating our culture and much of the world today. But I think I may have to blog about Talledega Nights and Nacho Libre next.