So Dan Brown’s latest sold over a million copies on its first day of release.  Good luck to him.

I read The da Vinci Code some years ago and enjoyed it immensely, apart from the fatuous caricature of an English academic, which suggests that Brown has never actually met an Englishman.  He seems to think that we speak as if we’ve stepped out of the pages of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, whereas of course in fact only some of us do.  But that minor quibble aside, it was everything that escapist fiction should be – fun, fast-paced, deliciously implausible, and completely thrilling.  Suspend your disbelief and dive in.  There’s a reason it did so well, despite what the book-snobs think: it’s wonderfully well-done.

I don’t think I’ll read the new one, though, since I’ll be struggling with Thomas Pynchon until I’m about 70.