Wanna hear something truly shocking? I just finished reading the super-duper blockbuster mega best-seller novel The DaVinci Code - and I hated it! Yep, as far as I'm concerned, it is poorly written, formulaic, melodramatic crapola. Note that the two main characters, thrown together by events, just happen to be a man and a woman, both about the same age, and both single. Can you say "contrived?" Not that any of the characters were the least interesting or realistic, of course, with the possible exception of the albino hitman (who was interesting mainly by virtue of being freaky). It annoyed me no end that most chapters were very short, as if the author aimed the book squarely at infrequent readers with short attention spans. Also note that most of the chapters ended with "cliffhangers" designed to hook in readers whose attention spans were really short; that's a common trick in children's literature that's more than a bit condescending in books meant for adults.
Let's see, what else is there to dislike ... for one thing, the author constantly kept tossing in bits about hidden codes, numerology, secret societies and such; it gave me the impression that he'd read about such things in one of those Bathroom Reader trivia compilations that you read while sitting on the donicker, and decided to toss them together in a novel so it would seem "intellectual." Speaking of condescending things, there was the way that male characters were referred to by their last names while all females got first-name treatment. Oh, and let's not forget the big thing - the Biblical mystery at the center of the story is wholly unoriginal, having been proposed by many historians and Biblical scholars, and used in fiction many times before (and, if I'm not mistaken, accepted as a strong possibility if not outright fact by certain Protestant denominations).
Yeah, I know, everyone's taste in reading is different, and it's obvious that an awful lot of people found The DaVinci Code an excellent book. I'm just not one of them.