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Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Da Vinci Code Panned

Oh this is delicious. Here Murph demonstrates his excellent facility with that highest of literary forms, the negative book review. I think this is my favorite passage.
But the worst piece of writing in the whole book has to be what I'm about to unveil on you. I have to warn you that it will shock you. If you have a heart condition, you may want to scroll ahead. Now that you're ready, allow me to blow your mind. From page 379 (pagination in the illustrated edition may vary), where our heroes sit down with a librarian to conduct a search, and the librarian says

"I'm asking the system to show us any documents whose complete text contains all
three of these keywords [London, Knight, Pope]. We'll get more hits than
we want, but it's a good place to start."

Oh ... my ... God. Did he just tell us what a search engine does and how to conduct one? Next thing you know he'll tell us what this thing called the Internet is. This isn't writing to the lowest common denominator, it's worse. I don't know what you call it, but it's far, far worse.
What makes this particularly sad to me is that our adult patrons regularly require this level of explanation or greater.

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