Da Vinci Codes

I was just thinking about the Da Vinci Codes and the other Dan Brown books that have been so popular lately. We are told in Brown's introduction that not all of his claimed "facts" are indeed facts, but that some of his historical references are real. However, we can judge by the popularity of the so-called decoding books that followed Brown's book that people tend to believe most of what Brown has written. His stories just seem so believable because he writes about things that remain unexplained. People feel lost when they do not have an explanation for things, so they tend to grasp onto any explanation, no matter how accurate it appears. Even having read Brown's introductions and remaining skeptical of his "facts", I still find myself wishing that his stories were true. It's almost as though if something is in print, then we believe it to be true. This reminds me of the Jayson Blair scandal (the guy who was caught embellishing and lying in his NY Times column). I won't go into the scandal, but when is the last time you really questioned the news?