I couldn't fall for your story if I wanted to.

I'm finally reading the Da Vinci Code. Told you it would take a long time. It had to basically fall into my hands.

It's very quick reading and an interesting enough story, but every now and then I am jerked into awareness that I'm READING A BOOK, a pretty sloppy one, by wooden passages like this:

Langdon's eyes were still riveted on the embossed key. Its high-tech tooling and age-old symbolism exuded an eerie fusion of ancient and modern worlds.

Dan Brown's writing has all the subtlety of a brick. He uses so many corny cliches I'm almost becoming immune to noticing them. Irritatingly, he also loves to begin a bit of exposition and then break off, leaving the rest for a few chapters on. It's fine if you can do that by having the characters plausibly finding things out gradually. But here it just feels like Brown is doling out bits of information to me, the reader, and the characters are secondary to that.

OK you may now call me a snob. And not much of a literary critic, this is a pretty easy target, I know. Yes I do take requests, do you want Grisham or Crichton next?