In my opinion, Dan Brown writes weak books that are gripping in the same way that celebrity magazines (e.g. Hello, OK, etc) are - nothing to them, but fascinating for a while in a ghoulish kind of way. The problem with his books (and I include the Da Vinci Code in this) is that, unlike a magazine, you feel that you can't put it down once you have invested so much time reading it. Note to self: Stop reading his books.
I am not actually going to offer any analysis of the plot, as it was totally unbelievable - culminating in the worlds best cryptographer (code-breaker) being unable to see a message encoded using a Caesar Cipher (as used by Caesar) which she, coincidentally enough, mentioned and explained earlier in the book. When she covered it very early in the book, you knew that it was going to appear in the climax somewhere. If that encoding method has been around for 2000 years, how could she not see it (even though her love interest could)? Note to self: Stop reading his books.
As an aside, does anybody else know an author that loves 2-page chapters? 95% of the chapters must be less than 8 pages long. Each chapter features a context switch to another stream of the story so you end up swapping mini-stories every 5 pages. Very, very, very annoying. I could live with it a few times, but it is like that for the whole 500 pages. Note to self: Stop reading his books.
And the end was totally obvious, and (I may have mentioned this already) pathetically weak.
Stop reading his books.