Reply #52: For me, the most influential critic that dislikes the book,

[Emops]

surprisingly, is film critic Roger Ebert. In his review of "National Treasure" (which he thinks ripped off TDVC), he says of the book,

"That I have read the book is not a cause for celebration. It is inelegant, pedestrian writing in service of a plot that sets up cliff-hangers like clockwork, resolves them with improbable escapes and leads us breathlessly to a disappointing anticlimax. I should read a potboiler like The Da Vinci Code every once in a while, just to remind myself that life is too short to read books like The Da Vinci Code."

Ebert is my favorite movie critic, and I trust his opinion, but I don't know how good a literary critic he is.

I'm in the middle of reading Locke right now, and there's no way The Da Vinci Code can be worse than that. So I might at least read a few pages.