Treading Water Feels Just Like Swimming

Laura Miller informs Salon readers that The DaVinci Code borrows a lot from Holy Blood, Holy Grail. You don't say. I mean, it's not like anybody else might have spotted that book in Dan Brown's bibliography and commented on those "historical" elements.

So, okay, it's another lame, behind-the-times article from Salon. Big deal, right? But wait, it gets better: Miller wrote an awfully similar article for the New York Times back in February; all she really does here is add a lot of details she couldn't fit into the Times piece, add a little update about the lawsuit two Holy Blood authors filed against Brown (without mentioning the other lawsuit filed by Lewis Perdue), and say nice things about the latest Dan Brown debunker to arrive on the scene. (He's nice, apparently, because he's not a fundamentalist nut.) Other than to review a book that wasn't out when she wrote the first piece, it's not really clear (at least to me) what the point of this new article even is. After all, there can't be that many Salon readers who didn't also see Miller's original story in the Times, although I suppose many of them might have forgotten about it. But come on...griping about how people are into Dan Brown is--well, come this weekend, anyway, it will be so last year.