Don’t Make Fun of Renowned Dan Brown (2013)
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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...
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.
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 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.
0: https://www.ebay.com/itm/184865824842Is 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 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.
Choose:
a) Dan Brown
b) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLOPygVcaVE (you must watch it all)
I enjoy Cormac McCarthy. I also enjoy the fake Cormac McCarthy twitter account https://twitter.com/CormacMcCrthy .
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.
To each their own, I guess.
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.
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.
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.
The only book I intentionally destroyed though was Kaplan’s Advanced Calculus, but that was just the frustration talking.
I remember really liking Fountainhead.
I never read Fountainhead, maybe it's better.
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 ...
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.
Handbook of signalling symbols and terminology
https://rdso.indianrailways.gov.in/works/uploads/File/Handbo...
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.
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.
All I can say in Mr Brown’s favor is that the book was at least the perfect length to finish during the flight.
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.
Brown also gets facts wrong in his books. Which is irritating.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/
Dan Brown helped pay for their digitization efforts and I’m grateful for that. The library is a real gem.
Now I’m deeply involved in their community and I love it.
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.
That led me to read Foucault's Pendulum.
So reading Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and watching Ron Howard's film version of Brown's book gave me a sense of deja vu.
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).
Different strokes!
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.
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
Popular authour James Michener's books are a much better spring board ino the culture/history of specific nations, for example.
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.
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.
Just don't forget that the Templars are always in it.
I have found I have a personal star-handicapper.
For science fiction, what I watch can dip down to 2-star shows.
For a romantic comedy, I probably need 4 or 5 stars.
Drama needs 5 stars.
For documentaries, having a slew of 5-star important, well-done, insightful movies means little. I still rarely watch them.
Meanwhile, drama relies much more on prose and character. If that fails, the central concept rarely backs it up.
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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.
The conclusion of Illuminatus! is a level of indirection above that.
http://www.teflspin.com/2009/10/technical-writing-and-slende...
I think send-ups like this are great. Love it.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Plantard
(I had the same experience like you.)
I don't worry too much about renowned author Dan Brown's feelings. He can cry all the way to the bank.
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 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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 had to look up pulchritudinous, and in Google, the example usage is the sentence in this piece :)
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=pulchri...
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.
I have read DVC. I must say, I don't remember it!
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.
If some other people then turn up their noses at this art, one has to wonder if they're just trying to project an air of superiority.
Or it could be that's just not a style of art they enjoy, and wish that there were more of other types around.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.