The Da Vinci Saturation

The The Da Vinci Code movie, starring Tom Hanks, is set to become one of Hollywood’s all-time blockbusters. With only a few weeks remaining before its release, however, it’s STILL getting less press than the bestselling book that began it all.

And the constant attention to Dan Brown’s book is starting to get on my nerves.

Earlier this month, London judge Peter Smith ruled against two authors who claimed Brown stole much of his book from their nonfiction work The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. But Smith left a little surprise embedded within his ruling: a secret code of italicized letters, decrypted only a few days ago by a London lawyer and The Times newspaper.

These sleuths used a substitution pattern based on the Fibonacci sequence—a series of numbers in which each figure is the sum of the two previous ones—to reveal the message “Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought.” It’s an obscure reference to an equally obscure historical figure that Smith admires, British Admiral “Jackie” Fisher, who apparently helped developed the Dreadnought warship in the 1800s.

I have a hunch Judge Smith doesn’t get out much.

Dan Brown is probably chuckling about this, but the laughter has not inspired him to complete the long-anticipated follow-up to The Da Vinci Code. Brown’s publisher originally aimed to have the novel—which supposedly does for the society of Masons what The Da Vinci Code did for the Catholic church—in stores this year, but it is now not slated for release until at least 2007.

Brown reportedly has dropped the new book’s working title, The Solomon Key; a better name, given the delay in writing it, might be The Time Machine. Or, if Brown desperately inserts a boy wizard in his hurry to finish the manuscript, perhaps we’ll end up getting Harry Potter and the Resting-on-His-Laurels Author.

And there’s yet more related news, an additional excuse for Brown’s writer’s block: a new lawsuit, this one out of Russia.

St. Petersburg art historian Mikhail Anikin claims that back in 1998 he shared his theory about a coded theological message in Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with colleagues in Texas. Anikin admits he granted one of them permission to share the idea with a “detective book author” as long as the writer gave attribution if he employed Anikin’s concept.

Any guesses who Anikin suspects that author was?

I have to be honest with you: After the deluge of Dan Brown book news this past week, I’ve had enough.

These trials and tribulations are enough to make me do something rash. Like run—not walk—to the closest theater on the day The Da Vinci Code hits the screen and lock myself inside to watch it over and over and over again.

At least in there, I won’t hear any more news about this damn book.