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Comment by NiagaraThistle | Hacker News Reader

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...

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"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.

To each their own, I guess.

Also, Broken Sword existed since 1996 too.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Plantard

> One of the few books I deeply regret buying.

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.

Hah! I had a similarly visceral reaction to Fountainhead - I finished reading while pacing angrily, and afterward threw it as far as I could.

The only book I intentionally destroyed though was Kaplan’s Advanced Calculus, but that was just the frustration talking.

Why? I never get the hate for Ayn Rand - aside that it's weirdly cool to hate her books so people jump onto that bandwagon.

I remember really liking Fountainhead.

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.

I never read Fountainhead, maybe it's better.

It's also super frustrating to know the author lived on a public pension. Couldn't even live the fantasy.

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 ...

> 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.

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html

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.

Avoid Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series then. But I still wish we'd gotten a third season of Legend of the Seeker.

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.)

I liked sword of truth but will admit it got a little darker than I'd have liked.

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.

That's awfully precise, but how about this one?

Handbook of signalling symbols and terminology

https://rdso.indianrailways.gov.in/works/uploads/File/Handbo...

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.

Well, if it's on the internet, it's probably porn already :P

yay, burn the books!

You've gone grey my friend. Wrongthink is being thunk by you.

Yeah, Atlas Shrugged was really bad.

unfortunately, it is rare that a 14 old kid who can read Focault’s Pendulum.

I did and I'll certainly try it on my kid :)

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.

Which I guess makes him a descendant of Jesus, in Diabolical logics? Such humility :)

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.

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.

Foucault's Pendulum is so much better than any schlock Brown dumps out. ++ for mentionin it. Eco is one of my favorites.

Brown also gets facts wrong in his books. Which is irritating.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/

Dan Brown helped pay for their digitization efforts and I’m grateful for that. The library is a real gem.

I've always been interested in visiting but I live in the US. Anything cool in particular about the place you'd like to share?

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.

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.

I saw the film adaptation of Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose_(film)

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.

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.

Both of them are among my favorite books. I don't think I can pick one above the other.

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).

I did the same and Focault’s Pendulum is one of my favourite books. So when the Dan Brown books came along, I enjoyed the, but the depth was lacking.

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.

  0: https://www.ebay.com/itm/184865824842

The first "grown up" novel I can remember reading at the age of 12 or so was "Catch-22" - I'm pretty sure this has had a long term effect on me...

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.

Sort of like Indiana Jones!

With less punching.

That works for Aaron Sorkin, except you also have dramatic lectures and women telling the male lead they're right about everything.

while they're walking down a hallway and interrupting each other a lot.

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.

Holy cow, that's the perfect summary of what's been bothering me with Gibson's latest few series. Thank you for the insight.

Gibson has lost it for me with the 'stub' concept. Communicating with an alternate timeline through 'a server somewhere in China' is too thin for me.

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?

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.

Probably because he's soooo bad, but also soooo successful.

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.

so wait -- you're saying there's a chance you might read it?

Choose:

a) Dan Brown

b) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLOPygVcaVE (you must watch it all)

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.

Even if you love his books you are still free to appreciate a good parody.

I enjoy Cormac McCarthy. I also enjoy the fake Cormac McCarthy twitter account https://twitter.com/CormacMcCrthy .

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.

In general, after becoming best-selling, a LOT of authors would probably benefit by editorial intervention that included cutting out a lot of pages.

*cries in Dance with Dragons

Dance with Dragons atleast had some plot progression. Feast for Crows on the other hand...

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

Haha, Tad Brown indeed. He did inspire A Game of Thrones and, uh, Eragon. However, this kind of makes me want to pick up Otherland (?)

edit: Tad Williams

But did you read Digital Fortress? I do think, there are far more satisfying books than his, which answer for the same purpose.

Popular authour James Michener's books are a much better spring board ino the culture/history of specific nations, for example.

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.

Different strokes!

Reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell. People love to hate on him but damn, do I find his books entertaining and insightful.

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