#3 The Da Vinci Code

by Dan Brown

This book is a page turner. I stayed up until 1:00am one night, and 12:30am the next night reading it. All the history and mystery were very intriguing. I especially liked the fact that it felt like the reader could participate in figuring out the clues. I watched a similar movie, National Treasure, where they were looking for a treasure hidden by The Masons. In the movie I felt like I was just watching the characters figuring everything out. In this book the clues weren't so difficult that you couldn't at least figure some of them out before the characters did. Even the more difficult ones were usually figured out in steps, so at some point you felt like you knew the answer before they had fully figured it out. I also didn't figure out who the nemesis was before being revealed in the book. Multiple times I thought I knew who it was, but I was never correct. Throughout the book I was concerned about how they would end this book. I didn't know if they would be able to end it either logically, or with final conclusion. Brown found the perfect way to finish that didn't disappoint. I would highly recommend this book to any and everyone. It was fantastic.

I don't have any favorite quotes that I remember, but there were a few ideas that intrigued me.
The biggest was the number of divine proportion, PHI. PHI is the number 1.618... It is called the divine proportion because it is present in nature, art, and many other things in different proportions. I will give an example to help explain. If you take the distance from your shoulder to your wrist, and divide it by the distance from your shoulder to your elbow you get the number 1.618. It is present in the proportions of the pyramids and the Parthenon; in art like The Last Supper, in music by Mozart and others, and many other things. One of the examples the book gave was, if you take the male population of ANY beehive anywhere in the world and divide it by the female popluation in that beehive, you get 1.618. Very interesting.