I had a very same reaction - "this is Foucault's Pendulum with simpler writing and a bad case of wanting to be writing Indiana Jones" - and I think that really drills to the heart of the debate about quality/taste/literature/snobbery/whatever going on in some of the other comments here.
A big part of "taste" is exposure to a lot of stuff.
If you read 1 book a year, or predominantly only 1 genre even, your range of comparison points is going to be so much lower than someone who has read 10x or 50x or 100x more that. And that volume of data is what lets you really start to separate the wheat from the chaff. And this is why so much of what people experience as a teen or young adult sticks with them so long - all of those works have the opportunity to be the first thing of its kind that the person encountered.
If you aren't interested in reading that much more, and especially if you aren't interested in reading more complex plots/subplots/sentence and paragraph structures, then that's perfectly fine.
But if you ARE interested, and you enjoyed Da Vinci Code: definitely check out Foucault's Pendulum. It's got a perfect meta twist on the whole thing too that really makes it hold up today, too, IMO.
I read Foucault's Pendulum several times. First time, I was about 13yo and I loved the story. Then I read it again as an adult and realized just how many subtle jokes and references I had missed upon my first reading.
Just don't forget that the Templars are always in it.
A big part of "taste" is exposure to a lot of stuff.
If you read 1 book a year, or predominantly only 1 genre even, your range of comparison points is going to be so much lower than someone who has read 10x or 50x or 100x more that. And that volume of data is what lets you really start to separate the wheat from the chaff. And this is why so much of what people experience as a teen or young adult sticks with them so long - all of those works have the opportunity to be the first thing of its kind that the person encountered.
If you aren't interested in reading that much more, and especially if you aren't interested in reading more complex plots/subplots/sentence and paragraph structures, then that's perfectly fine.
But if you ARE interested, and you enjoyed Da Vinci Code: definitely check out Foucault's Pendulum. It's got a perfect meta twist on the whole thing too that really makes it hold up today, too, IMO.