I love Dan Brown's books. Maybe critics don't like him for his formulaic writing - copying the plot over and over after Angels & Demons. But IT WORKS. And it is HIGHLY engaging and moves the reader through the book at breakneck speed just like the action in the books. Plus Even when you know the formula of his books, the twists and turns and gotchas turn out to be great. Plus the stories have amazing real world location and art references and descriptions and for anyone that has been or plans to go to the places in Brown's books, he makes these places really come alive and you actually appreciate more of the acrchitecture and art of the setting if you do visit if you knew little about either previously.
And he adds just enough real history intertwined with his pseudo-history to make the books super interesting, and even give the curious reader a springboard to dive deeper into the questions his books raise for Mr. Langdon.
Oh and then there's the worldwide sales and financial success he has achieved from his books...
"All that may be true," the renowned BaseballPhysics accepted magnanimously, "but that doesn't make this blog post any less hilarious." The famous physicist who wasn't actually a physicist and certainly didn't know anything about baseball paused dramatically. "If there's one thing we've learned from Twilight," he continued, his analogy illuminating like a soaring eagle, "it's that the quality of writing doesn't necessarily correlate with commercial success."
I've had a slightly different experience of Dan Brown.
Some if it may due to my having read Foucault's Pendulum 5 years before Dan Brown, and part of the plot for Foucault's Pendulum is actually an algorithm for generating Dan Brown-style books. Written about 20 years before Dan Brown's novels. Of course, the fact that Umberto Eco writes much better (and with much greater humor) than Dan Brown didn't help me appreciate the latter.
Some of it may also be due to the fact that I actually love reading on religion, religious history and art history... and that Dan Brown's books very much felt to me like combinations of well-trodden clichés and combinations of barely half-understood history, art, religion, symbolism.
I had it slighty worse: As a teenager I bought Holy Blood, Holy Grail on a whim (it were the 90s) in a bookstore because I was reading another Grail-focussed book series. HBHG is an utterly absurd book which could not even hoodwink a 14-year-old. One of the few books I deeply regret buying. Slightly later I read Focault’s Pendulum which of course inoculates one even more against this crap.
But of course Brown copied everything in his Da Vinci Code from HBHG which is obvious, when reading it. Every twist and turn is then utterly predictable. There was a copyright case in the 90s, annoyingly decided in Brown’s favour.
The real history behind HBHG is far more funnier: turns out the authors took their story from a french con-artist who fabricated documents and genealogies and deposited them into the Bibliotheque Francaise. And of course according the the con-artist the last descendant of the Merovingian Kings was himself.
The case that Brown plagarized Holy Blood Holy Grail is hilarious because Holy Blood Holy Grail claimed to be historical research rather than fiction. So how can you plagiarize actual history? The case was basically them admitting it was made up.
Some of the utter joys that Eco’s books give you, is that they grow with you. The more you learn about the world (and yourself), the more layers and nuances you’ll find in re-reads.
As a stubborn and curious 14 year old Foucault’s Pendulum is still a somewhat readable story, which I enjoyed and got the general gist. Later Re-reads of course brought more, because I have grown and known more in the meantime. I found that even more with re-reads of The Name of the Rose.
And of course that process is never finished. I’m sure, I’ll find even more stuff, if I were a full scale medievalist or could read better Italian than reading in translation, even though translations of Eco are said to be rather good. Reading, thought in that way, is never done.
For me it was Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged, and I begrudged every single penny of the 50 pence I paid for it in the Oxfam bookshop on Byres Road.
It's the only book I've ever intentionally destroyed, too. I soaked it in waste Citroën hydraulic fluid, and took it out to the gravelly yard behind my flat, and burnt it. I couldn't bear the thought of anyone without the intellectual rigour to see it for what it is getting their hands on it.
Atlas Shrugged is a long book with unrealistic characters. The whole thing feels out of touch, like a podcast run by elitist trust-fund people complaining about the mind-numbing mediocrity of everyone else.
> There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
There are those who believe it is morally questionable or even a crime to take back any portion of what was stolen from you in an armed robbery, it now belongs to those who employ coercion to obtain things etc.
We are not amongst them and have NEVER ONCE apologized about it or otherwise suggested we care to accomodate you perverse moral principle. But do go on ...
Fountainhead triggered a kind of moral indignation in me. I read it as arguing that the path to happiness and success was to ignore social mores, hold your vision firm, and take what you want. I think I described it as glamorizing sociopathy.
Also, I want to reject the imputation of faddish dislike for her. I read this 40+ years ago - I'm not some johnny-come-hately.
Oof, yes. There's a reason the TV series was just set in the same world rather than being an adaptation of the books, and it's because the writing started out weird, and got progressively more insane with each volume. (Also, way too horny for even cable TV.)
Are there any good books depicting failures of railway signals? Or just railway signal networks at all... Without all the rants and sex and rants in the middle of sex.
Idk, I’m reading a lot of sex between the lines in that one.
It’s thinly veiled, but c’mon: “Normal aspect double yellow of a distant signal in rajdhani route( where double distant signal is provided)” is a clear reference to some seriously kinky stuff “rajdhani route” to wit.
And the “symbols” and diagrams - don’t even get me started. It’s like a pictographic Kamasutra.
Without wading into the literary merits of either author, let me just drop a mention of the Ritman Library of Hermetic Philosophy in Amsterdam, aka the Embassy of the Free Mind.
Well, they usually have a great exhibition of rare books — and their reading room is inexhaustible — but my favorite thing is the cafe. It’s a place in Amsterdam where you can just sit and strike up amazing conversations with people.
Now I’m deeply involved in their community and I love it.
I read Foucault’s Pendulum on vacation, and picked up Da Vinci Code on a whim in the airport on the way back because I was in the mood to continue the theme. To say he suffered in the immediate comparison would be an understatement.
All I can say in Mr Brown’s favor is that the book was at least the perfect length to finish during the flight.
One of the things that makes Dan Brown great airport reading is that you can set the book down, forget about what happened, and pick it up again pretty seamlessly because he will repeat all the key points. And this happens over and over again.
It also makes him terribly boring for "normal" reading of if you have a memory longer than that of a goldfish. Give me Umberto Eco any day.
Opinion: Foucault's Pendulum was a faint shadow of The Name of the Rose, which I absolutely devoured in college. I think Name of the Rose was trying to be a long-form version of Jorge Luis Borges, there's even a blind librarian or someone.
You should read it again, or at least read the wikipedia entry to remind yourself of the plot. There is a blind librarian and he's very hard to miss :)
I don't think the book has anything to do with Borges. I think you're alluding to The Library of Babel. An altogehter very different kind of book (a short story, but it's not the form that makes the difference).
Comparing Umberto Eco and Dan Brown is wild to me. They write completely different books, with completely different pacing, for completely different audiences.
Eco himself joked that Brown was one of his "Diabolicals".
But I agree, they're radically different books which bear no comparison aside from the theme of secret societies. I adore Foucault's Pendulum, it's one of my favorite books. And the first two Robert Langdon books are really fun, despite their flaws, and despite the author's weird claims about factual accuracy.
Much like other comments point out - Broken Sword borrowed liberally from the same "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" book material that Dan Brown also took. Broken Sword even includes an informant character called "Plantard" - surely a reference to Pierre Plantard etc.
It's undoubtedly the common ancestor in HBHG that lead to Broken Sword and The Da Vinci Code having very similar plots and ideas - HBHG sold reasonably well, I don't buy into the idea Dan Brown needed to play Broken Sword to write the book - HBHG came out in 1982. There are many other trash-pseudo history books on the knights templar that allege conspiracy/cults etc pre-dating Broken Sword - as a kid I had an insatiable appetite for these books too.
Charles Cecil (driving force behind Broken Sword) has happily alluded to his own HBHG inspiration in interviews.
Right. For example I know the area around Temple Church in London really well - for a few years I used to walk through it twice daily on my commute. So when there was all the fuss about the Da Vinci Code I decided to read it for myself to make up my own mind, and terrible as it was the thing that probably annoyed me the most was he gets the geography of those streets wrong. It wasn't changed because the change helped the plot or anything like that - it was just wrong because he didn't care at all about getting details right. It was so _unnecessary_ an error it really drove me nuts.
I love Foucault's Pendulum. I always thought it's a fun sideswipe at the literary Foucault also, who with Derridas is so deliberately impenetrable there are a lot of parallels with the charlatans in the novel.
Does a writer have to be intimately familiar with every location they describe in their books? I know some are, and it's great when they get stuff right, but I don't think it's really that big of a problem when they don't.
Although I'm also reminded of how movies get things hilariously wrong in ways that can't be an accident. When I was young, there was a Dutch thriller called Ansterdamned, about a scuba diving murderer moving through the canals of Amsterdam. Lots of locations I recognise. Then there's a massive speedboat chase, and suddenly they're going through a famous and unmistakable canal in Urecht. Fun movie, but the sudden teleport to Utrecht is a bit jarring.
I agree they don't have to be, but a sense of authenticity of location can really add to the atmosphere of a novel. For example, in "Mrs Dalloway", you can literally retrace the steps of Mrs Dalloway through St James' park and St James' and on to Bloomsbury. The descriptions are incredibly precise and totally accurate. Likewise people walk through Dublin visiting the exact scenes depicted in "Ulysses".
Another example (slightly obscure) from London is "The Book of Dave" by Will Self, which is partly set in a post-apocalyptic future. The geography is very thoughtfully handled, but in this future the Thames has flooded and lots of London is underwater. Part of the fun is figuring out which bits of present London they are referring to when they talk about landmarks etc which survive[1].
Now it's fair to say all those examples are shooting a lot higher-brow than Dan Brown, but another example more similar in genre aesthetic to Dan Brown would be John LeCarre's "Smiley" novels (eg "The spy who came in from the cold" etc). To the extent I know the locations in the ones I have read, they seem to me very authentically described, which greatly enhances my sense of immersion in the atmosphere.
[1] eg "centrul stack" I'm pretty sure is the wreck of the Centerpoint Building, now an empty shell filled with seabirds.
Lee Child, in his Reacher novel “Night School”, has a major part of the plot being played out in Hamburg’s “HafenCity” quarter. Reading it, you’re rather sure that the author has visited Hamburg and has traced himself the steps of his fictional character.
Only problem: the novel plays in 1997, a time, when the HafenCity quarter didn’t exist. Back then it was Hamburg’s old free port area, behind a customs border, not the “normal” city quarter as described. The current quarter is in effect a new development, which didn’t exist in 1997.
The first book I read was Angels & Demons, illustrated edition[0]. I was ~11 years old and my professor took my class to an used bookstore and we had to choose a book and summarize it. Oh God, how lucky I was to have this book recommended to me and to find the illustrated edition. The book's plot and illustrations complemented each other in such a way that I was entertained as children are entertained today with a smartphone.
I don't remember if I read the last book in the Robert Langdon series, but I have to say that after reading Inferno, I had to read Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.
Nowadays I'm always reading something. This first experience was important and the books I chose evolved as I matured in reading.
Good pick! Nothing like a little light literature to get you started off properly on the path to literacy... Sarcasm aside, I first read it when I was in my 20's for the first time (and again recently) and it definitely changed the way I look at the world. Heller is an absolute master.
I blow hot and cold on Dan Brown. I laugh at him as a writer, but there's not a book of his that I've read that I haven't enjoyed. He's like popcorn, hard to stop once you've started. And enjoying a writer's books often makes the even parodies sweeter.
Dan Brown books don’t contain ‘action’, they contain ‘motion’.
I understand how the way Brown writes makes it seem like he thinks something exciting is happening but in fact all it is, is his protagonists are moving from place to place in a series of taxis.
Motion with PERIL. The recent William Gibson books have been bad for that, just people moving between places, without much agency or clue of what is going on.
His formulaic writing is one thing (one of my favorite authors, Glynn Stewart, releases about 1 military scifi novel every three months, it's pretty formulaic), but my issue was how he made things up, and had them close enough to reality that is really hard to tell the difference. Maybe it's more of an issue I have with people, but it still made me stop reading him.
Its funny, as I get the impression that this also describes the Reacher series. And really any "pulp" fiction. So many successful stories are basically the same story over and over. Curious why this particular one would be so derided?
Some of it is just normal "popular thing sucks" backlash. But it had a weird cultural moment in the early 2000s where the press went kinda nuts with some of the psuedo religious themes, and there was a brief cottage industry for talking heads talking up apocryphal biblical books, Knight Templar conspiracy theories, etc which I think rubbed a lot people the wrong way.
Personally, I think his storytelling is poor, but it's not the worst. 5th percentile for plotting, say. But he plumbs new depths with his prose.
I am not above reading trash, and you often have to accept crappy writing in genre fiction. My wife reads the trashiest pulp romance there is. But even considering the low-grade prose in our diet, Dan Brown's writing is worse by an order of magnitude.
I'd rather gargle diarrhoea than read his shit again.
I'd rather attend a school play.
I have ADHD, but I once spent a day looking at a wall rather than allow his tepid faeces into my person.
He passes the turing test: machines cannot write that badly. His word choice smells like burning tyres, his sentence structure is like a drunk driver in a car park. He's a phenomenon.
Just my opinion/reaction, but Da Vinci Code stood out to me compared to other "easy reading" as particularly blatant/lazy in its chasing and extension of cliffhangers.
I mean, it is no worse than many comics I have read. Or a lot of other, so called "young adult" novels.
Is it better than a lot? I mean, almost certainly is in the mix there. It did enjoy a lot of time in the spotlight in ways that somewhat surprise me looking back. I couldn't say how it caught the attention that it did.
I watched his course on Masterclass and found it helpful in learning to write his type of book. I was impressed that he is very conscious of what he does, how he does it, and he's quite good at explaining it to others.
Pretty much. "Beach reads" (and, yeah, a lot of genre fiction including most SF) fall into this category but criticizing popular reads because they're not somewhat arbitrarily-defined literature seems pretty pointless.
tbf, he isn't being parodied here for not being literature here, he's been parodied for the sort of poor writing editors are supposed to fix regardless of genre. Weird or mixed metaphors, the odd minor grammatical error, redundancy that isn't for dramatic effect (actually all stuff 'literary' authors are more likely to get a pass on as critics assume they were there on purpose) and an oddly journalistic approach to introducing characters.
I mean, it's also true that renowned author Dan Brown does a lot of things well in a way that literature usually fails or doesn't even try: pacing, puzzles, intrigue, ideas and references that interest the reader. The book sales aren't completely accidental. He'd never have sold the same number of books if he tried to write like Tolstoy, or Pynchon, or even a fairly mainstream-friendly Booker Prize winner. But people would have enjoyed the books just as much if they'd been better edited.
This may be subjective. I enjoyed AFfC a whole lot more than I did DwD.
I suspect the reason is that I really did like the background imagine of a war-torn Westeros being painted, while on the other hand, everything about Essos seems to be made up in such a way that it's just as "exotic" as possible without any real debt. Even the characters have stupid names that give me a kind of "I don't know what languages besides English sound like" vibe.
I find the normal European names but spelt weirdly gimmick in Westeros much more jarring than the foreign sounding names of Essos. FWIW, English was the third language I learnt to speak.
I think his stock "evil ethnic yet cosmopolitan assassin with conspicuously foreign name" characters are kinda weird. (In Inferno it's a woman named "Vayentha" working for a guy named "Zobrist".)
This might be a literary SF trope. One of the silliest was in Tad Brown's Otherworld[0], which has an evil yet cosmopolitan Aboriginal Australian assassin.
[0] it's like a literary SF version of Sword Art Online, and if this makes it sound weird it's a lot weirder than that
I find his books (well, I've only read two of them) to be tedious, personally. But then, I also find mindless action "popcorn" movies to be tedious, so perhaps that's not surprising.
I had read and enjoyed Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", and as I read Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" I found I kept contrasting Brown's work to Eco's. In the end, I didn't even finish "The Da Vinci Code", it just felt so weak to me.
But art, literature, music, and wine are all things of personal preference. You like what you like! And you shouldn't let anyone tell you not to spend your time reading Dan Brown (or whomever) if you enjoy it.
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.
I feel like certain dramas are just more forgiving. Like even if the prose is bad and the characters are flat in a sci-fi or fantasy novel, the concept of the world being explored can still be interesting. I love classic SciFi but I don’t go to it for the rich character development.
Meanwhile, drama relies much more on prose and character. If that fails, the central concept rarely backs it up.
That's OK, I had the same feeling about Foucault's Pendulum and Illuminatus!. It's like there's a conspiracy among publishers to rehash the "what if the conspiracy theories are real" plot every few decades.
To me, the delightful thing about Foucault's Pendulum distinct from the broader "conspiracy fiction" genre is that there is no conspiracy discovered, only created.
And that's a fundamentally different story and investigation into human nature than a straight conspiracy story like Da Vinci Code - IMO, a much more interesting one.
Related: Slender Yellow Fruit Syndrome (when a writer doesn’t want to repeat a word like “banana” and so writes something like, “He peeled the slender yellow fruit.”)
> The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.
I love it. "clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive"
If you look at the publishing industry, there are well-defined genres (YA: young adult, MG: middle grade, romance, mystery/thriller, cozy mystery, sci-fi, etc.) A lot of agents say explicitly which genres they're interested in.
For me, if I know the author is assiduously sticking to a genre and doing what he thinks the reader wants, then I'm turned off. It would be nice to shut my brain off and just enjoy it, but I can't. YMMV.
If you're Dan Brown, you don't have to care what the critics think. So why would you?
A decade ago, I literally snorted out my morning coffee when I read "...repetitive and repetitive" the first time. No lasting injury, I'm pleased to report.
I would love to see a study on the influence of Dan Brown books on the likelihood of readers to believe in (popular) conspiracy theories.
Somewhere in the 90s I got a book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" from a friend who was into obscure conspiracy theories. It was a fun read, but in the end I took it more like a joke. Unlike my friend.
Years ago, my SO came home with Browns "The Da Vinci Code" and forced me to read it on a holiday. It was as if someone wrapped a cheap crime template around "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" and my SO loved it. She was never into conspiracies, and most of those people who in the following months and years fell for the Da Vinci Code hype were in the same boat. But to me, it felt like someone found a way to sell fringe conspiracies to a mainstream audience.
I applaud his idea to do that, but it somehow doesn't feel good.
> It was as if someone wrapped a cheap crime template around "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" and my SO loved it.
This "cheap wrapping" makes me think of Atlas Shrugged. I read the book completely "blind" without foreknowledge of it or its author--recommended to me by a relative.
Partway through I felt the author was insulting my intelligence by trying to sneak a vapid manifesto (as an entire chapter, even) within a fiction novel, and I completed reading it out of pure spite, so that I could confidently denounce it.
Only an entire chapter? Significant swathes of the book are just characters monologuing about how much they hate the poor, and how great their enlightened selves are for actively shooting themselves in the foot to spite the proletariat.
I say often, and only half-jokingly, that Atlas Shrugged made me a socialist. I grabbed a copy for free that was otherwise being sent to the trash, and by the end, it was clear that I shouldn't have interrupted its journey. It's like if someone took Nietzche, discarded the good bits, replaced the overt misogyny with the more subtle "woman should improve themselves by being more masculine" variety, and then tossed in some kinda-rapey sex scenes to try and keep peoples attention through a 1000-page novel/manifesto.
Read Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread and Stirner's The Unique and It's Property a few months later, never looked back.
However, I've never finished Atlas Shrugged because it was so crappy, and I wasn't on holiday when I started it. It was actually the first book I stopped reading because up until that point I wanted to give the authors the chance for a turn at the end.
I couldn't find any reason to do this with this book.
Believe it or not, the book actual got more heavy handed towards the end, presumably as Rand realized her publisher wasn't going to accept another 1000 pages.
Atlas Shrugged is one of just a handful of books I had to put down because I couldn't force myself to endure the pain and finish. It truly is crappy writing.
I remember our parish priest actually addressing it at the time, he was like "look, this is a popular book and I'm not saying not to read it, just realise that it's pure fiction, especially the bit where he claims that Jesus was just considered a man until a committee got together centuries after the fact and decided that we would call him divine."
it wasn't particularly fulminating; he was quite good natured about it all, but in retrospect I have to wonder if he had even read the book himself, or if the church hierarchy had wanted priests to make sure that that particular point was spoken against.
In Paris, there were so many tourists visiting some of the churches mentioned in the book and "educating" their children based on what they had read from Dan Brown that these churches had posters on the doors reminding people to please stop taking Dan Brown seriously.
That being said, historically, there have been a number a debates among early Christians before it was made canonical that Jesus was divine. Debates continued a long time, too, to determine what the word "divine" meant in the context.
oh, agreed, there was definitely a kernel of truth to that one. i just found it interesting that the priest not only said to remember the book was fiction, but to emphasise that that one point was fiction.
I don't think priests should get the final word on what constitutes pure fiction and what isn't. But it's absolutely hilarious to read this and I'll be sure to pass it on to my Catholic priest friend :)
I read it was more the opposite, Jesus was more of a god who spoke to people through visions, and the early Christians edited the early writings to make him an actual person, because too many other Jesus's were popping up
I already wrote upthread: The story behind the genesis behind Holy Blood, Holy Grail is far more funnier than the conspiracy theory in the book: The authors fell for a con-artist:
I can still remember the exact moment someone passed me this link a decade ago and how doubled-over with laughter I was while reading it. Perhaps there's a term or a well known genre (besides "irony") for critiquing a writer by mimicking his style. But it was new to me and it still reads freshly to me today.
I don't worry too much about renowned author Dan Brown's feelings. He can cry all the way to the bank.
> Perhaps there's a term or a well known genre (besides "irony") for critiquing a writer by mimicking his style
Parody.
In fact, this is the strict definition of parody - the kind that's actually protected in copyright law.
Other things that get called Parody, like Weird Al Yankovic songs, aren't strictly parodic because they are using a creator's work to critique something else. Just changing the words to a thing or reusing the characters or plotlines to make it about something else isn't 'parodic' unless the something else you're making it about has some critical purpose in relation to the original work.
Using someone's own style to critique them is, precisely, legally, parody.
I just read it for the first time, without any spoilers. It took me a second, then I had to laugh loud out at the legendary piss-take at display. Wonderful.
> Maybe critics don't like him for his formulaic writing - copying the plot over and over after Angels & Demons.
I think a big part of what makes this article funny and effective is that it shows you lots of what Brown does so poorly in his writing without even touching the subject of his recycled plots.
There's a lot of mickey taking of Dan Brown's work but I found them (up until The Last Symbol) easy-osy reads in between more serious novels. They were something to relax with in the form of boy's own adventure stories from my youth.
Now even if his books aren't anywhere near high culture in a literary sense I do think that if they get non-readers to start reading books then that's a good thing. They can be gateway novels to much better writing. See also JK Rowling, Joseph Finder and Lee Child. Apropos Lee Child, my dad hadn't read much in the way of fiction for many years and then in his 70's somehow bumped into the Jack Reacher novels and he ploughed through them all on his iPad in his spare moments. That's no bad thing.
I've read and own every Dan Brown book (except for "Wild Symphony" which I didn't know existed until today and is apparently an illustrated children's book). For me his books are engaging and when I start reading them I can't stop, though I think Langdon has run his course and it's time for a new hero. However I can totally see how his typical formulaic structure can turn people off.
Ha. I teach an Intro to IT course, and I quite literally open my lecture on encryption making fun of Renowned Dan Brown.
Namely, I acknowledge that the Tom Hanks joints are fun, but then I proceed to clown the terrible "Digital Fortress," which begins with the premise of:
"The TERRORISTS have developed UNBREAKABLE ENCRYPTION and we are ALL DOOMED"
When Da Vinci Code came out, I knew essentially zilch about Renaissance Italy, or early church history or art or many of the other topics it touches on, and I thought it was fascinating!
Then I read Digital Fortress and realized that it was quite possible that Dan Brown was very comfortable writing entire books on topics which he also knew essentially zilch about, and perhaps I should be a bit more skeptical of the historical and factual basis of his novels.
As a Spaniard I've seen horrors from Dan Brown and Tom Clancy, basically placing us as 3rd world country (if they knew about the actual, hugely culture and climate diverse Spain, from cold minus ten-twenty winters to scorching summers), as if we set the USA as some hell-like country with a mix betwen Detroit and some Americana ruralia with a Far West lore
with some corrupt NYC cops on top.
Or Tom Clamcy mixing Spain with Latin America and USA tropes on race fights to depict the political struggles in Spain, which we have nothing to do with Latin America tropes as it's a damn ocean between them and US and things diverged as much as the USA with the UK, if not further because of France, Italy and UK's influence from centuries ago, either by land or by sea (For instance, Bay of Biscay's coal -> UK's factories for the Industrial Revolution).
Yes digital fortress was terrible if you know anything about encryption.
It reads like a JJ Abrams blockbuster, the tech just serves as a McGuffin to advance the empty plot.
Good point, I've never thought of it that way. I thought the Da Vinci code wasn't bad as a mindless thriller, though going further into the series I got really annoyed with the plot repetition.
Digital Fortress is the one and only Dan Brown book I've read. It thoroughly killed any desire I might have had to read any of his other books.
IIRC, the protagonists attempted to decrypt data that they thought was encrypted with a new and unknown algorithm by brute forcing it with a supercomputer. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief after that.
I don't remember how well defined it was in the book, but it sounded like it means the decrypted message could change out from under them, without being decrypted. Like the encryption was itself a running program they had no control over that could be magically updated remotely.
IIRC though, the whole thing ended up being a ruse, a virus made to look like an encrypted message, designed to destroy that specific supercomputer.
Digital Fortress was also the only Dan Brown book I've read, and later when I started college, one of the other students said it was the reason he decided to take Computer Science. I kinda winced and wasn't really sure what to say.
I’m in the same boat. I wasn’t all that interested in Biblical puzzle quests so I thought I’d read his book about a field I know a little about. It killed my interest in his works entirely. I managed to finish the book, but after the hero is chased down a hall by the fireball released when the computer virus caused the machine to explode like it was made out of nitroglycerin I was done.
I have to admit that as I read this, I had recently awoken from a nap and in my stupor following that nap, I was somehow replacing Dan Brown's name with Tom Clancy's.
Nevertheless I completely enjoyed the blog post and got a good laugh. It was only after reading through a number of the comments that I realized my mistake, and had to laugh even harder because some of the same things could have been said about Tom Clancy's writing.
And in fact, I really do think that most of these things could be sent about any successful writers works. It can also be said about musicians, artists, and probably the guy who washes your windows too.
That is say, their works are all derivative, are formulaic in nature, and probably involved Windows at some point.
Tom Clancy was indeed such a terrible writer. While his books were very interesting when it comes to the tech and the strategic realism (this guy freaking knew his stuff there is no denying that), his style was awful, character development was childish, and the pacing was always a bit odd.
I would say the main difference with Brown is, as u said, Clancy knew his stuff. He would probably spend more time doing the research for his books than writing them. I can find respect for a writer that puts in the work like this.
It's a completely fake progress bar. If you load the page with all javascript disabled, it loads image and text instantly.
This kind of nonsense is common because web designers don't get bullied enough. I browse with all javascript disabled by default because this fixes more websites than it breaks.
I liked Digital Fortress, but then again I was in high school. People here say that there are better novels around the same topic but I haven't encountered it for the last 10 years. Is there are good novels that I'm missing?
This was fun to read, but I'm missing some context I think. What did Dan Brown do, to deserve such a vituperative put down? I mean besides the writing, which I understand is not great. Did he refer to himself as "renowned" something?
He received some vitriol in the 2000s from some Christian groups about Da Vinci Code being blasphemous. I think these days he’s mostly just seen as a bit of a literary punching bag who makes popular, digestible books for Gen-X Americans. I read DVC in high school and thought it was a fun read, definitely not a book I’d expect someone to be later criticized for.
Perhaps it’s a bit like Michael Bay or Roblox or The Bachelor, smart people being overly critical of popular things mostly just because they’re popular.
Thanks. To be honest, I felt the review above was a bit on the nose. But I guess it's considered OK if one is punching up, even if there's a bit of snobbishness in the put-down.
If you make lots of money selling bazillions of copies of a mass-produced work that appeals to and entertains a large segment of the population, you're a hack who makes trite garbage.
If you make lots of money selling one work to one very rich person or corporation, you are a Fine Artist, and anyone who thinks what you made is ugly (which is very often a large segment of the population) is an uncultured fool.
There's a range somewhere between these two extremes where you make enough money off of your art that it pays your bills, but doesn't require you to cater to the whims of the catastrophically rich. I'm in that range and it's pretty nice.
I don't think serf is calling anyone wrong. Just that there is more to the arts than financial success.
It's ok to let people like the Marvel stuff, _and_ lament the fact that there is less effort going into making more interesting (from one perspective) movies.
That's like concluding McDonalds is the world's best restaurant based on having sold 1 billion burgers, or whatever the number is.
I do enjoy superhero movies to some extent, and many of them are very well crafted. The fantastical elements give actors an opportunity to go to extremes by dramatically upping the stakes. But even the well-made ones can tip into tedium or self-parody, full of stock characters collecting plot coupons and trudging through obligatory scenes. Once something turns into a franchise, it's hard to evade decline, virtually impossible to reverse it.
An interesting difference here is that part of the reason McDonalds is so popular is because it's cheap.
Writing pop fiction or making Marvel movies isn't cheaper than the "artful" variants (in fact for superhero movies it's much more expensive), and consuming isn't cheaper either, so there's more at play here.
It's not that cheap over here, they have a budget menu but you can get a cheaper 'big' burger at a local Independent restaurant that is likely to be much better.
For me what makes it popular is the consistency. It's something you eat when you don't want to explore some amazing local cuisine that you may either like or dislike. You just want to get something known.
McDonald's is never amazing but once you've had it you know what every next time is going to be like. And mediocre is better than bad. Also, they really have the fast in fast food licked.
Mentally it costs far less energy to watch a superhero movie than the deeper movies.
I like to watch movies that are for entertainment too, don’t get me wrong. Just want to point out that there is a different in cost to watch different movies, even when the amount of money I pay to watch them is unchanged.
Yeah, so? It is the best restaurant in the world, from the point of view of millions of people who go there.
I personally hate superhero movies and McDonalds, but to say that these are incorrect or bad in some way is to cast a (probably class-based) value judgement on something that is adding value to people's lives.
They're bad if they make it harder to access more complex experiences.
This doesn't apply to McDonalds, because a McD won't automatically kill off more sophisticated restaurants within the same area.
It does apply to terrible movies and books, because more creative and original projects don't get made "for commercial reasons" - which is really just a form of corporate enshittification.
The issue isn't just that they're bad culturally - although they are. It's that they normalise conformity and creative obedience through the principle that the mass market is the ultimate cultural authority.
When a majority of creators self-censor because "This will never sell/get made/be published/be listened to, what's the point?" - that is a very dangerous place to be.
You don't need to burn or ban books to destroy the values they represent. You can censor them implicitly by making sure certain values, ideas, and creative orientations have no cultural presence.
For me it would not display at all at first, although disabling CSS and JavaScripts (although I always disable JavaScripts by default anyways) allows it to display. That would also prevent it from using their fonts, and force use of the default font, so you could try that, if the browser you use has that feature, I suppose.
And he adds just enough real history intertwined with his pseudo-history to make the books super interesting, and even give the curious reader a springboard to dive deeper into the questions his books raise for Mr. Langdon.
Oh and then there's the worldwide sales and financial success he has achieved from his books...