I finished reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown last night. I came away from it thinking that it was a very interesting read, and I suggest it to those out there looking for a book to read, but I also started to wonder how much of it is based on fact, and where fiction ended, because the whole book is so factual that I wonder if it's kind of dangerous to have such a book with that much fact if it happens to be laced with tons of speculative fiction. I don't know the answer to this question because I don't know where the author's creativity came in and where the facts ended, so the issues brought forth appear to be a bit dubious to me because they appear to be worthy of further investigation but it's hard to imagine where to begin or end because his factual information runs ramshod right over the fictional information. An example of something I found fascinating was something I double-checked. In Da Vinci's The Last Supper, there's a claim that one of the 13 characters is actually a woman. Well, I'd never heard of this before, so I downloaded a copy of The Last Supper myself, and sure enough, seated right next to Christ is someone that is obviously a woman, not a man. Every claim the author's protagonist made was backed up by this claim, so that it was very hard to wonder what was true, and what was not. There were further claims about the Merovigians (might be doctoring the spelling horribly on that one) with a linkage directly to Jesus, and I found this fascinating, mainly because the history of my name stems directly from that source as well. But how much of it is really true, or how much is just made up by the author.

It makes it really hard to read a book like this when such questions are not able to be answered without being as knowledgeable about the subject at the author himself, and my knowledge of Italian and French art is extremely limited to be up to the challenge.

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