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You can't "test" a book to determine whether it's "good" or "bad", you can only express your opinion of it and that's what we're doing here. I don't know if that's a worthwhile exercise, since it's too easy to take potshots at what we don't like (it was W.H. Auden, I think, who said he didn't review books he didn't like for that very reason). I taught Russian language and literature at a university-level for 20 years: that does not make me an "authority", but simply a better-read judge (at least where Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc... are concerned). And I do disagree with many of the opinions expressed here: Da Vinci, to me, was a very good thriller, the Harry Potter books (which I listened to, in recordings by Jim Dale) were delightful, L.Ron Hubbard absolutely unreadable in the way Tom Clancy and Ayn Rand are - use maximum verbiage for minimum content, a common ailment in SF books which is why I rarely read them.
The expression is "de gustibus non EST disputandum".
And congratulations to those of you who have responded to Lobolover: I can't, since I don't understand most of what he wrote, save that he is in strong disagreement.
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