Monday, December 27, 2004

Buffy novels vs The Da Vinci Code

I finally got around to reading Immortal (by Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder), the Buffy novel which my manager picked up from the library book sale, and gave me.

Up until now I've been avoiding the novels, instead reading only the scholarly non-fiction books about the TV series, thinking that surely the novels would be poor substitutes for the TV episodes. But I'm going to have to amend my opinion. I really enjoyed Immortal; the dialogue was believably Buffy-like, the story was exciting and the main villain was interesting. This doesn't mean I'm going to go out and buy them all - there must be a hundred Buffy and Angel novels, and not all written by these two authors - but it does give me more choice next time I go to the library (as a customer) for some leisure reading. And in 2005, I have promised myself more time for leisure reading.

I certainly can't be as positive about Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. It's just a boring thriller. An un-thriller. For a start, the first (and only? I'm only a quarter of the way through the book) murder victim is shot in, or close to his stomach. He must be in agony. He's dying. Yet he manages to crawl up and down the gallery in the Louvre, hide keys behind paintings, scrawl anagrams on the floor with his own blood and arrange his body to resemble the man in Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man - before he dies. Yeah, right.

No comments: