The Really Popular Book Club is the new reading group hosted by Cambridge University Library. Everyone is invited to join their guest author to discuss a really popular book, one that we all know and perhaps or perhaps not love.

On Tuesday 15 December the discussion will be on the 2003 mystery thriller, The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. It’s a book about a coded message, with a preposterous view of academic research, a mangling of bible history, and has been called an attack on the Catholic church. And yet it was a massive hit. It’s sold over 100 million copies worldwide, was adapted into a Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks, and will be hitting the London stage in 2021.  

We’ve chosen it because it marks the antithesis of our next exhibition Ghost Words: Reading the Past, an exploration of palimpsests – documents, often biblical texts, often 1000 years old or more, that were scraped clean and then written over. Ghost Words is about the meticulous reconstruction of these faint outlines, often combining painstaking academic research with advanced photographic techniques; the exact opposite of Brown’s pacy imaginings. 

The guest author joining us to discuss the book will be Dr Sarah Dillon, Reader in Literature and the Public Humanities in the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of English. Sarah teaches and researches contemporary fiction and film, and has published and edited a number of books, including her first, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007) and her most recent, Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning (2021).

As well as hearing from Sarah about her thoughts and observations on The Da Vinci Code, we will once again be opening the floor up to you, the club members, to share your own observations and remarks.

To find out more and how to become a member, please visit the University Library's website.