Thursday, July 22, 2004
I finally got my hands on The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. Daisy liked this one a lot better than The Da Vinci Code and I totally agree with her. I raced through it pretty quickly and didn't even yell at it once. When I was on Amazon earlier to make sure of the authors' names, I checked out some of the customer reviews. Most of the negative ones were from people who felt it wasn't as much like The Da Vinci Code as they'd been promised. Honestly, I don't really see why these two have been paired together. The subject matter isn't all that similar and lord knows the writing is a hell of a lot better in this one, although occasionally I felt they were trying a little too hard for artistry. But even then I still preferred it to Brown's ham-handed style. I thought the book had a lot more in common with The Secret History and The Dante Club, both of which I loved. I suppose hitching this book to the inexplicable phenomenon that is Dan Brown ensured bigger sales than a more accurate comparison would have done. As for the story - while the identity of the killer (or the ending) was not a surprise to me, I didn't mind all that much because of the larger mystery of the decryption and the friendship between the boys and the Princeton setting.
(Oh, and to the Amazon reviewer who thought that snowfall in April was too far-fetched to be more than a plot contrivance, I went to a college with the same latitude as Princeton and a couple of my years there it snowed not too long before I left to go home for the summer. In April. So there.)
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(Oh, and to the Amazon reviewer who thought that snowfall in April was too far-fetched to be more than a plot contrivance, I went to a college with the same latitude as Princeton and a couple of my years there it snowed not too long before I left to go home for the summer. In April. So there.)
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