Category: Culture

Every morn­ing, one of the first things I do is read the fun­nies. I do this online using my.yahoo. I read Boon­docks, Fox­trot, and Non Sequitur. Since yahoo pro­vides me with plen­ty of oth­er options to access, I have cho­sen to take advan­tage of a few. One of these is the Barnes and Noble Show­case.

It is most­ly crap. Rarely have I seen a book show­cased that looks even remote­ly inter­est­ing to some­one who has a smidgen of com­mon sense. This com­ing from a guy [me] who devours sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy nov­els [not to say that is all I read].

The above book takes the cake how­ev­er. What hodge­podge, what fruit­less grasp­ing at a fresh idea, what fail­ure, what atroc­i­ty. Let us exam­ine its sell­ing points piece by piece.

A mur­der mys­tery set against a reli­gious con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry

Shit! No one has ever writ­ten any­thing like that. Its pure genius, lets take two dis­tinct themes and ram them togeth­er with a lit­tle help from a spellcheck­er. But wait, it needs

Leonar­do Da Vin­ci’s paint­ings, Jesus, Mary Mag­da­lene

Yeah, famous dead peo­ple! Sort of reli­gious dead peo­ple too. And don’t for­get that it is a mur­der mys­tery, so there are at least 4 dead peo­ple in this book. Sweet! Peo­ple enjoy hearing/reading about dead peo­ple. Espe­cial­ly famous dead peo­ple. Nev­er­mind Hud­son Hawk [Bruce Willis camp hav­ing some­thing vague­ly to do with Leonar­do Da Vin­ci and the Vat­i­can]. Jesus and Mary Mag­da­lene could use a bit of pep­ping up, they are quite dead after all, per­haps we could talk about

their child and the Holy Grail

Jesus and Mary Mag­da­lene had a child! No Shit! The part where Agnus Dei goes whor­ing and knocks up one of his dis­ci­ples must have been edit­ed from the Gospels a bit ear­ly on in the his­to­ry of the Church. Oh yeah, their kid must be dead too, so that makes 5 dead ‘uns.

The movie influ­ences keep com­ing as well. The whole romance/babby thing reminds me of Scors­ese’s Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ, and hell, every­one has seen The Last Cru­sade. So this book

mix­es page-turn­ing sus­pense with art his­to­ry, archi­tec­ture, and reli­gious his­to­ry

How very post­mod­ern. Post­mod­ern garbage. So this wild plot descrip­tion is based on fact? Wow. I’ve been blind all these years. Per­haps I’m being a bit hasty, I’ve just cri­tiqued a book based on an auto­mat­ed rec­om­men­da­tion writ­ten by some hooli­gan for my fun­ny pages.

Then again, good lit­er­a­ture nev­er seems to need hooli­gans to pro­mote it. Nor does it need to suck the life out of some per­fect­ly enter­tain­ing fliks and mash it all togeth­er with a soup ladle till it looks quite coher­ent­ly, like mush. bah! I’ve gone pompous again.