Day: July 29, 2005

Skip Codex by Lev Grossman. It was another silly vacation read maybe a fortnight ago.

Young investment banker looks for ancient book, assisted by slightly frantic graduate student, both of them caught up in some odd royal family power struggle. Even for a “beach read,” pretty dismal. I read it, so you don’t have to. It was sitting on a shelf, and the jacket promised another historical manuscript mystery, of a sort, and I’m clearly a sucker for those right about now.

By the way, I almost always finish the books I start, even if they are not worth the hours. Probably not the only place I waste valuable time, but one habit ingrained in my soul. I know others who find it hard to finish books they start, and I alternately envy and pity their different style.

A couple of weeks ago, while on vacation, I whipped through Angels & Demons, an earlier novel by Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code. This historical/religious/pulp thriller even pulls in the Illuminati. A quick summer read, but you can skip this one. Way back in high school, I think, I read The Illuminatus Trilogy, though I remember little.

I found one web oddity with the official book site. If you do some walking of the paths, you get to www.danbrown.com/novels/angels_demons, which shows you all the files in the directory rather than loading the index page. Oops. That lets you look at different versions of pages that are left over on the web server, like this versus this, where the content is the same but the headers are different. Here is the final version of the “interview” page. The difference appears to be the real one states loud and clear that this is “the official website of bestselling author Dan Brown,” which tells me only that various people have tried to earn a few pennies via mock sites which lead to book sites with their own affiliate codes instead of those of the publisher. Ah, the money to be made in the margins while preying on the unaware, though that kind of scam is one of the least offensive kinds. Sad.