Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown (2013)
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I don't think we should make fun of Dan Brown, or assume that all of his novels will be awful, but we should take his individual novels for what they are, and for every one I've read, they're squarely in so-bad-it's-good territory.
For anyone else who enjoys such novels, I highly recommend Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. There's also commentary on the novel by the creators of RiffTrax in episodes 71 through 77 of the 372 Pages podcast: https://372pages.com/ep-71-if-bizarre-foods-went-horny
What do you do that you can immerse yourself in novel and get work done at the same time? I want that job. I've never had a job that was mentally so untaxing that I could listen to a book at the same time.
Wow, how do you even process it at that speed? I normally listen at 1.2x, but feel like if I hit 1.5x, maybe 1.8x if it is a really slow narrator, I'm maxing out. I mainly am listening to it while I'm running though, so 5-20% focus on that depending on traffic or if I have to cross streets, the rest of my focus on the book. Are you just sitting and listening to it at that speed focused in on it, or are you just abled to digest it at that speed?
Listening at double speed makes a big difference.
Versions I've had:
* Control room operator in an industrial plant (watch, make sure things are routine (listen to music | audio book), deal with "exceptions" (tradespeople locking machines out, bringing them back online, co-ordinating)).
* Maintaining throughput on data processing pipelines (eg: geophysical data processing, tape | drive | archive loading, initiating various steps, looking for "oddities" .. letting the machines run (listen to audiobook, watch console)).
* Several other variations I could list (but time is short ATM).
For one, I thought I read way too much sci-fi in my life, but it turns out he's listened to every single book I did, every one I have on my "to read" list (except maybe Greg Egan stuff), and then a couple dozen ones I never heard of.
I really should hire someone to do it, and spend my time with electrical engineering. Even then, about half of the time I'm designing a product, I can listen to audio books. Component selection is the most mentally taxing part, followed by early stages of schematic capture. Once I have everything operationally figured out, the more mundane schematic work isn't at all taxing, and I'll do it while listening to audio books. Circuit board layout I almost can't do without listening to something. It's very similar to playing puzzle games.
It's also become clear to me that there simply isn't a single "quality of writing" metric. Write quality is made up of dozens of factors (prose, character development, world building, plot development, grammar, uniqueness, pacing, dialog, etc). Each person balances those factors differently, and trying to squash them into a single metric is just bad communication.
Personally, I love sci-fi with good world building; As long as the book has great world building, a decent plot, and a unique concept; I'm usually willing to give it the label of "average writing" despite the bad prose, clunky pacing, and cookie-cutter character development. But other people immediately turned off by the negative factors (especially bad prose).
It feels like that didn't happen, and we're still stuck with the same issue of promotions and gatekeepers and tastemakers, because those who control the algorithms (centralized, proprietary, remotely hosted) find it more profitable that way.
Any time it happens, things get twisted, or shut down. Reddit used to be good. Twitter used to be good. But the money people come in, the bots, the astroturfers, the guerrilla marketers, the spammers... If they stay alive regardless, in come the billionaires to offer ridiculous sums.
People complained that TikTok's algorithm was too good at finding niche and interesting content. The marketing was somewhat balanced, and tailored to people's actual tastes. That was before lobbyists and politicians discovered that it was severely interfering with their propaganda. Now I hear you can't so much as post 'Free Palestine', and kids are supposed to be grateful that we're allowed to have it on our phones at all.
All that said, for people with the right skills there is no shortage of entertaining content to discover; far more than could ever be consumed in a lifetime. It's really the most important news and views that gets suppressed the most.
It is simple, money peoppe use money to destroy spaces that don't have their preferred bias.
(Though, to be honest, it wasn't a bias in the service itself, IMHO. Twitter was nothing but a resonance chamber. The bias was in what the outside world reacted to, and how.)
What Musk did to Twitter is unusual. The typical way "money people use money to destroy spaces" is through sterilization of the place to placate advertisers, and then through ongoing enshittification to extract as much as possible from what little users there are left. Other common ways are: buying up and merging with a shittier platform in the same or adjacent space, and a weird-ass pivot that makes business sense to everyone except the actual user base.
> What Musk did to Twitter is unusual.
Yes, it is unusual to destroy financial value of a company that fast. I assume he will do the same to the country economics too. And you will blame everyone but musk and yourself for that.
He personally will maybe come off more rich this time, because you can steal from the government but he could really not from twitter. Corruption works for him.
Was that why a chunk of left-leaning users famously left to form Bag, a "safe space" alternative to Twitter? Oh wait it was right wing and it was called Gab.
Doesn't really matter anyway. Twitter wasn't killed by bias, it was killed by a bored billionaire, but it would've been half-dead by now anyway like all social media sites, thanks to the usual cycle of enshittification.
> And you will blame everyone but musk and yourself for that.
You confuse me with someone else. I'm from the other side of the world, and my only interest in US economy is that the rest of the world kind of depends on the US keeping its shit together.
If you want to blame someone, blame people who have nothing better to do than to get endlessly polarized over non-issues, thus failing to come together to deal with the issues - and blame the industry that makes money off stoking this fire.
(And yes, we have the same thing over here, too.)
> Twitter wasn't killed by bias, it was killed by a bored billionaire [...] thanks to the usual cycle of enshittification.
He was not bored, he had political project. The enshittificationwas entrirely on Musk personal decisions, not on some impersonal rules.
> If you want to blame someone, blame people who have nothing better to do than to get endlessly polarized over non-issues, thus failing to come together to deal with the issues - and blame the industry that makes money off stoking this fire
I will blame people currently in power and those who voted for them. And nice to complain about polarization while talking about Gab as if it was not the group of people responsible for it.
this is absurd
Certainly sometimes making bad stuff does make it so people don't want to buy it, and those who do buy it will only buy it for a low price, but surprisingly that's the case less often than you'd expect. (Blame the field of psychological manipulation that is advertising?)
And so on top of that, the algorithms that recommend things are eventually going to be subverted by the people who want to sell you things, so you end up with stuff pushed at you that "sells well" even if much of it doesn't actually match what you want.
One thing that might work is to decouple the recommendation algorithm from the entity trying to sell you stuff. I'd want an independent third party to give me recommendations on what to buy on Amazon, for example, rather than Amazon themselves recommending products to me. But you have to also somehow ensure that this third party isn't motivated by profit in a way that's related to what products you eventually buy.
On top of that, the problem with every good service is that once it gets to a certain size, it attracts the sort of people who will make it a bad service, because bad services can make them more money.
Yup, thats clear for everyone.
Whats not clear to me is how you got what parent was writing into saying that people shouldnt get paid for their work?
It is obviously true that the problem of massive amounts of shitty media being sold to consumers is capitalism.
You do understand that critizising capitalism is not the same as saying ”lets all be communists”, right?
And when you try to, it’s always “um where did they say that?”
If you're going to bring up capitalism in your crusade against... recommendation systems... I think it's fair to ask you to workshop your genius idea a little more past the shower thought stage.
You can critizise something without having to provide alternatives. I dont know why people like you or gp feel the need to become so defensive about it.
Capitalism is the status quo. Like any other system ruling us it should be discussed in order to keep an intellectually honest discourse [1].
I'm unconvinced by the profit motive argument: there's plenty of money to be made in the "long tail" of selling weird things (or experiences) to weird people!
They call this "high concept"
"High concept" refers to the elevator pitch being a complete description of the movie. Nothing in the plot that might take more than a couple of seconds to describe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_concept
> High concept is a type of artistic work that can be easily pitched with a succinctly stated premise. It can be contrasted with low concept, which is more concerned with character development and other subtleties that are not as easily summarized.
> Extreme examples of high-concept films are Snakes on a Plane and Sharknado, which describe their entire premises in their titles.
Interestingly, this is exactly the opposite of what everyone assumes the phrase must mean, based on the ordinary meanings of "high" and "concept". Such is life.
Huh, yeah, that's surprising. I always assumed "high concept" meant that a work was more "cerebral" or something like that, while "low concept" is something lowbrow or simple to understand.
I had no idea that the term referred to how succinctly the work can be described or pitched.
It doesn't help that in some cases, it would actually correlate. Take the example from the Wiki:
> high-concept idea, such as "what if we could clone dinosaurs?" as in Jurassic Park.
"What if we could clone dinosaurs?" can unroll into anything between some extremely cerebral biopunk (think "Change Agent" but written by Greg Egan) and sharknando with raptors instead of sharks. In either case, the "elevator pitch" would be good, succinct summary - but, if you were to give that line to people and ask them to imagine what the book is like, the answer would depend entirely on the level of interests and sophistication of individual responders.
Or, in short: if you like cerebral stuff and you hear a "high-concept" pitch, you're likely to assume the work is "high concept" in terms of being full of deep ideas.
When something truly new gets invented, its value is directly apparent and obvious. Subsequent iterations yields smaller and smaller incremental improvements, and at some point, the ROI on marketing becomes greater than ROI on actual improvements, and from then on, fame stops being correlated with quality.
The Da Vinci Code hit the religious/occult conspiracy theory market, which was huge at the time, and added feminist overtones about the "divine feminine" which appealed to most female New Agers and a good few male ones.
His other books didn't have those ingredients, and they were less successful.
More recently we've had Fifty Shades and Romantasy. Working out the demographics and the reader appeal is left as an (easy) exercise for the reader.
Harry Potter and Young Adult classics like The Hunger Games are a little harder to analyse, but not much.
Someone like Stephen King is less obvious. (For most of the books "horror" is the hook, but American small town relatability is at least as important.)
Writing quality isn't quite incidental. But it only needs to be above a certain minimal level of competence, nowhere near what's usually called "good writing."
Books which have "good writing" but don't trigger a large demographic of readers with specific fears and/or fantasies - of any kind - do not do well.
I think a lot of the current market for (adult) books reflects the second stage. It would be interesting to ask the person(s) sitting next to you on the next plane ride why they are reading, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell vs Dan Brown vs Ian McEwan.
Really? I don't find that at all. It certainly helps, but books that have enduring appeal are, usually, ones that are good, within their niche at least. Especially books that are actual bestsellers, not books people are "forced to read" in school or something (they can also be great books, but they continue to be "popular" for reasons other than "people chose to read them").
I just watched Lost Highway in the theaters. I had never had a chance to watch it on the big screen before, and I brought my SO. I love the movie since there's no clear cut interpretation, yet it also feels accessible. My SO hadn't seen it before, and while she thought it was fine overall, she really disliked that there isn't a canonical "this is what happened and this is what the things mean" explanation. The very thing that made me love the movie.
Example, The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber [0] is a great exposition of gravitational effects when a planet-sized object appears in the sky nearby earth. Characters and unfolding story are meh. I pictured it as a C-grade 60's movie with stilted acting. But the way the earth was reacting and the moon coming apart was a great fictional invention and the way it was done was novel at the time!
In similar vein, Conan stories are great fantasy adventures with well described fights, battles, scenes. I've never found a better author to describe a fight - or a battle between armies - with enough detail to make it interesting and exciting and yet in relatively few words. I've also never read stories as sexist and racist... but I don't go out of my way to look for that I guess. I accepted it was written in the day it was and had to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Come to think of it not sure if that says more about the 60s or the award though. Cripes there was something in the water back then.
It is absurd to use the era where identity (gender, race) was key determinant of what will happen, before anything else.
Also, claim that hugo winners won only because of their gender is crap. They won't the vite fairly. Unlike sad puppies, they did not even needed politically motivated coordination for that.
The vote also is not fair. People publicly organize voting cliques on e.g. Reddit (to say nothing of what's happening in private), and the new system is extremely exploitable. But I think that's beside the point. The issue is the outcome. The Hugos used to not only reliably reflect the best in genre works, but also select works that would often be talked about decades later. How they achieved that is irrelevant, only that they used to be able to do so, and now do not.
I think the groups that coopt, or try to coopt, these sort of things (which obviously also includes the Puppy stuff), fail to realize that the prestige of something is not based on that thing itself - but on the value of that which it promotes. If MIT just started enrolling 'merely above average' students and printing out diplomas, then they'd quickly lose their prestige. The same thing has happened here.
Of course the Hugo obviously shouldn't just be "#1 book [in genre] on Amazon" because the entire point of awards is to focus on quality, which may not always be clearly reflected by sales. But when even the relatively small minority of people buying the winning book don't seem to like it as much as other books, something is quite wrong. Let alone the fact that Project Hail Mary came in last place, also behind books like She Who Became the Sun. [2]
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Desolation-Called-Peace-Teixcalaan-Bo...
[2] - https://www.amazon.com/She-Who-Became-Shelley-Parker-Chan-eb...
I like Project Hail Mary, too, and it's certainly more popular because the author is far more well known, but there's no question in my mind which one is "better", certainly in terms of deserving to win an award.
On the other hand my favorite SF author, Gene Wolfe, has also won many other awards, like the Nebula and Locus awards. So you can find good stuff by using the awards as a starting point.
This hit the Hugo awards extra hard, because their voting method is especially vulnerable to lobbying, and warring factions have been lobbying to sway the body of voters one way or another.
I wouldn't say they are bad at all. They are just pulp/popcorn fiction and not trying to be more than that. MCU movies considered good are not bad just because they are not trying to be more than they are.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.h...
s/the the/the/g;6 podcast episodes on a 500-page paperback thriller? That's not commentary, that's mental illness.
I thought Digital Fortress was the better book honestly.
*Spoilers ahead* – In The Davinci Code you need to suspend disbelief on many aspects of the book. However with DF, most of it is just regular old US government conspiracy stuff that makes reasonable action books. The main thing you really need to suspend disbelief on is the creation of this perfect unbreakable code, but by the end you find out that such a code has not been created and that actually it was just a virus after all, which is really quite realistic.
It's still just a pulp action thriller novel, but I felt it was much more realistic. That said, I'm basing this on last reading it maybe 12 years ago.
Isn't that the "try the kanji" book?
because if you 'read' hundreds of books each year and you can't see sui generis in works like Don Quijote, Cien años de soledad, Fernando Pessoa, Ferreira de Castro, Raduan Nassar or getting down to english solely, Ulysses play on words or even biographies like Walden by Henry David Thoreau or On The Road by Jack Kerouac or poems by Walt Whitman, Maya Angelou and even translated stuff like Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Hans Staden etc. ※ i'm curious the motif of your dismissal. specially when people dedicate their lives to study literature and in some way or another, rank up classics again and again... please also consider some books were revolutionary or set a genre on the time they were released, so it's unfair to want contemporaneity into stuff wrote 500 years ago, although some are quite impressive how actual they are by their age; as well personal preference. i never got hooked by Great Gatsby, for example (although i finished it)
For works old enough to be public domain, They are usually available from LibriVox, although the narrators are usually not as well practiced as the commercial audiobooks.
spoiler: the answer is 3
It's been ages since I have read one of his books. After seeing multiple threads like this I am reluctant to read again one of his books. I am afraid that I might "overwrite/destroy" the good memories I have of the "feeling" of reading his books.
And we often confuse the two, thinking that if we enjoy something, that means it was well-made. And that if something is well-made, then we should enjoy it.
But it's not. For instance, I like the film, The Ice Pirates. It's stupid, it's cheap, and the plot doesn't quite make sense. But it's fun. I can't quite put my finger on it, but whatever is happening, it's the kind of stupid I apparently like. But I will never say it was a "good" film, in that it was well-made.
To contrast, The Fountain is a mostly well-made film. The acting, cinematography, score, visual effects, etc, are all well done. I cannot deny that. However, I loathe that movie. It is just incredibly mediocre at the end of the day. The story is just banal. It has one message, delivers it real early in the movie, and then just keeps beating that dead horse. And I can see how it's easy to get distracted by the pageantry of the film. But I cannot get over that one hump.
So, yes, Dan Brown may be a horrible writer. His books may have all the problems pointed out by the author of the article. Dan Brown may not write "good" books. That does not mean people don't like them. And it does not mean they are wrong when they do.
Maybe the prose really was repetitive and the plot banal, but it took genuine skill to write something that you physically struggle to put down.
I like that his works mention random things that you can then read about from other sources, information that are tangents to search off of. It helps that all his books are easy page-turning reads.
But yeah, about his writing, I remember the latest (Origin) having some atrocious lines
I recently re-read Jurassic Park. What I recalled as a gripping scientifically plausible thriller when I read it as a teenager, read today as a screechy anti-science polemic nestled behind a monster movie plot.
That said, I still enjoyed reading it! It’s definitely a page-turner.
And I found that my new reaction to the book did not lessen my memory of enjoying it as a kid. In fact it led me to some contemplation of my life and how I’ve changed over time.
The book didn’t change at all, in fact it was the exact same hardcover copy I got as a gift when it came out. I came to think of it as a sort of intellectual mirror that just reflected me back at myself. I’ve gone back and read some other science fiction books I enjoyed as a kid now as well, to see what I think today.
I used to look down on pop music. But then I realized how hard it actually is to write a catchy hit song.
Surely writing a book that people find so engaging that they can’t put it down must also require talent.
Why not just read the last chapter?
Because I wanted the ending to make sense, and the series kept throwing in new characters to cover up its faults, like how Christopher Nolan throws an entire orchestra to cover up lack of drama or meaningful dialogue.
Sometimes you just know you're in for a bad time, but the starting premise is interesting enough for you to want to know how it all wraps up.
The first I raced through as fast as I could.
The second I savored like a fine wine.
If you enjoyed reading a book, why does it matter that some narrow subset of humanity doesn't like it? Critics are supposed to be good at judging on two criteria:
1. Will the average person enjoy this?
2. Is it actually good?
Why does it matter to me whether a book is "actually good" or not? One reason is that it's a status marker to like books that are "actually good" and not just popular.
Maybe all that "actually good" really means is that high status people like it.
But in my opinion, true high status comes from setting the bar, not following it. Stop trying to chase status by following the tastes of high-status people. Instead, just enjoy what you enjoy without apology and without guilt.
One argument is that people who read a lot of books know quality. But I don't buy it: maybe people who read a lot of books have different tastes. And in any case, that just reinforces my definition: quality is what a certain (elite) group of people say it is.
Another argument is that complex books are better than simple ones. But that just means elite taste-makers like complex books, maybe because they've read so many books that straightforward ones are boring to them. But there's value in books that are easily understood--that's the whole point of writing: to communicate. One shouldn't value opaque books just because they're opaque.
Yet another argument is that smart people like good books and dumb people like popular books. Smart people are able to appreciate good books that are beyond most people. The convenient thing about this is that you can show how smart you are by liking certain books, which is way easier than winning a Fields Medal or Nobel Prize. Snark aside, this is just defining "good books" as "books smart people like", which is (in my view) morally equivalent to "books high-status people like".
As for "discouraging people from talking about things," I'm not yet arrogant enough to think that my post on Hacker News(!) is going to influence anyone. But if I did, I would tell people to stop worrying what other people think. Stop worrying about whether others think you're a snob or a mid. Like what you like and talk about it as much as you want.
If you generally seek media that challenges your comprehension, or grants you new insights into yourself or the world around you, then a Dan Brown book may feel a bit like eating a cookie. It’s not bad for you or anything, you might enjoy it a lot, but the calories may feel a bit empty after.
Yes, people have multiple goals for reading a book and pleasure is only one of them. And there are finite hours in your life, so you have to choose.
But I'm mostly arguing against having an absolute, objective scale for "good book" other than popularity. If a book grants new insight, but it's so boring that few read it, then maybe it's not a very good book.
I think largely though the problem here is that “good” is too vague to mean anything to anybody without expansion. Good why? There’s a difference between saying a book is good and a book is well written. Likewise if someone tells me Dan Brown is bad they’ll have to tell me why. Maybe I’ll agree and no longer like the book, or maybe I’ll agree it falls short in plot or characterization but I’ll still like it, and then it will be a guilty pleasure.
I prefer to ask whether a piece of art is "effective" or not. An EDM club banger, a classical piano sonata, and a rap battle are all trying to achieve very different things with valued qualities coming from their various subcultures, so ask what the artist is trying to achieve (intricate composition, or shifting units etc) and judge it only in that context
Then you have good books, where you can feel that the author took care of doing a good job. They are not redundant, and they don't use dirty cheap tricks to keep you engaged. They might be even repulsive or unnerving (I'm thinking of Kafka's The Metamorphosis or The Trial), and some people can find them boring.
The point is that you can read both of them. It's like watching a quality TV show (maybe The Wire), but also watch some Kardashians. You can easily tell which one is good, and which one is bad but made in some way that you want to keep watching even when you know you are wasting your time and getting nothing in return other than a goog feeling that disipates as soon as you end watching. It's like reading a danluu blog entry or wasting one hour in TikTok or Instagram: one of them is good, the others are tricking your mind to keep you engaged. There's nothing bad in wasting some time, but IMO it's important to be aware of what is happening, that not all content is the same, and that popularity doesn't necessarily means good.
I sometimes get put in a position where i state my favourite book. Snow Crash. What's it about they ask?
Well there's a guy who delivers pizza, 'a deliverator' they call him but his name is Hiro Protagonist (yes seriously that's the main characters name folks). It's set in the dystopian future where you have to deliver pizza in under 30minutes or face public execution for the entertainment of the people who didn't get their pizza in time. He uses a skateboard and grappling hooks to get around and has samurai swords because he studies the way of the blade. He logs into the metaverse where he's a hardcore hacker by night. He ends up meeting a biker who has a nuclear bomb in a sidecar with a tattoo on his forehead that reads POOR IMPULSE CONTROL... (i could ramble on for a while like this trying to explain what it's about but you probably get a sense for it).
I actually think Neil Stephenson was intentionally trying to write the most ridiculous book possible but the truth is the book is FUN. I don't care about clever plots or prose. I want FUN. Da Vinci code is similar. It's an Indiana Jones movie in book form.
"How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine". I wasn't sure how to answer that at first, but I think your comment solidifies it. I can accept ridiculous and unrealistic scenarios as long as they are fun, and held together within an equally ridiculous world.
Theres a fine line between something that is clearly a dramatisation being frustrating or just fun.
Marvel and Star Wars aren't fine--the writing is execrable whenever they aren't outright plagiarizing something else.
Star Wars was schlock meant to sell toys that just happened to become huge. Marvel is pretty much just straight up garbage across the board (some characters are interesting--the stories and world though are pretty uniformly trope-ridden crap).
Modern movies also have the problem that a lot of their revenue comes from overseas--China in particular. They can't risk having writing that is either too subtle for a foreign audience or cover themes that might get them banned by the government.
Thus we get Michael Bay syndrome--spectacle after spectacle and the minimum writing necessary to connect them.
(To be honest--this is nothing new to Hollywood--Michael Bay can trace his roots the whole way back through "Towering Inferno" to "Noah's Ark", etc.)
I'm sure alot of this can be traced back to Manga roots.
When you get down to comic books and animations, the market forces aren't quite so vicious and your "10% okay vs 90% of everything is crap" doesn't get so filtered out. Consequently, you get more of the standard curve--some stuff is bad, most stuff is average, some stuff is good, and a few gems poke up every now and then.
It's an interesting book, and it does engage, but it is also quite the trip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Blood_and_the_Holy_Gr...
I remember reading it in the 90s and being very put off by the insanity and lack of logic. As it later turned out: The conspiracy theory of HBHG and DVC was in the end invented by a French document forger who in his own forgery seemed to be the last merovingian king/descendent of Christ:
This is sometimes called conspiracy fiction, and one cool thing about it is that the form as such doesn’t strictly imply or require a specific genre, so it works just as well with any or all of sci-fi / noir / historical fiction. Apparently renowned author Dan brown can easily understand that mixing with actual treasure hunt instead of some kind of forbidden knowledge is part of the formula for giving it the most popular appeal.
It's been a minute, but I think Hiro Protagonist gets around on a motorcycle with wheels that deform to adapt to the terrain.
The story does have couriers that use skateboards and grappling hooks, though.
I like Stephenson, he's written some great stuff, but even ignoring that scene, Snow Crash is IMO just a bad book to read once you're out of high school.
For me it is less problematic than it could have been, because: YT is shown to be naive, reckless and impulsive, and Raven (is that his name? I think so) is an awful person just in general. The author is in no way implying that sex for those two is a good idea, in any way. It's just a thing that happened in the book.
It's also not a sexy scene, so it's not written to be titilating (IMO), and it's short and it does ~something for the plot.
Hiro doesn't use a skateboard you're thinking of "YT" the courier.
Hiro uses a high-performance pizza-delivery-specific car early on and then later a motorcycle that has wheels that aren't even continuous discs, but made up of many individually coordinated linear actuators with grip-pads on the end.
I don't recall Hiro's motorcycle being much a part of the story, it might also have had the smartwheels but isn't discussed until later...
Excellent book that still delivers 3 decades after it came out.
Hiro: "But you'll never forget it."
(I also think it's great, btw.)
i'm not really sure i grokked the whole 'sumerian is machine code for mankind' thing. might have to re-read it, my last go-through was in high school.
Michael Caine on 1987's 'Jaws: The Revenge': 'Someone said to me, “I saw that 'Jaws 4' - it stinks” - and I said, “I haven't seen it, but I've seen the house it bought my mother, and it's marvelous.
I was surprised and impressed just how enjoyable a read it was. Strong recommend to anyone who might be thinking about picking it up. One of the best memoir/autobiographical style books I've read.
I tried reading "The Da Vinci Code" and it felt like a was a bad version of Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum". But that's me. Most of my friends would choose "The Da Vinci Code". And I imagine Eco and Brown had very different goals for their books.
I did love Harry Potter and Hunger Games though! Not great works of literature, but they're super fun!
I probably wasn't as open minded back then either. Well, at least I hope I'm more open minded know.
Also learned the meaning of the conspicuous word pulchritudinous, which in the default Oxford languages dictionary Google uses [1] comes up with "Dan gazed admiringly at the pulchritudinous brunette" as usage example.
Here's a sample:
"Space Fleet Commander Brad Brad sat in silence, surrounded by a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, maintaining the same forlorn frown that had been fixed upon his face since he’d accidentally destroyed the phenomenon known as time, thirteen inches ago."
Don't give random people on the internet the power to take away joys of your past.
This is something I see come up a lot on the Internet. It begins with a critique of something (sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek) and almost immediately develops into OTHER people being criticized for enjoying something that someone else thinks is bad, often through the mechanism of the "this is terrible" people drowning out the "but I like this" people by a factor of 10-to-1, because it's the Internet.
Art is subjective. People consume it for different reasons, at different times, with different expectations and different perspectives. People also LOOK for different things in art (some people like themes, some people like history, some people like aesthetics, some people like fun, etc.) - and they look for different things in every piece of art they consume.
I've never read a Dan Brown novel. Maybe I'll like them, maybe I won't. But lucky for me it's going to be easy to go in with a clean slate and form my own -- oh wait.
Yeah, this post was kind of a "can't unsee" for me and totally ruined those books. Although, maybe it was just a decade of reading better books that did it.
> [...] As the dust fell from his cart he thought that he saw some object glittering in the evening sunlight. He got down from his cart to the ground and walked down the slope of the shoot to the spot where he thought, possibly, the object might have fallen. He groped about in the refuse with the toe of his boot, which was tipped with iron nails, and soon disclosed the bright object which he had really seen. He picked it up between his fingers and examined it with his eyes. [...]
Don’t Make Fun of Renowned Dan Brown (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36818501 - July 2023 (165 comments)
- the original James Bond novels
- the Dick Francis novels
If it works - for the author, make megabucks, or for the reader - be entertained, then so be it. It's not like the hit movies are the deeply cerebral ones either. The books can still suck from an artistic standpoint, and the critics can still rip into them.
How many of these armchair critics of Dan Brown have actually written even one book!
>...“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
My friend passed away a couple of years ago, or I'd have him fill in the details.
Think this is my favorite joke in the whole thing.
will always be my favorite part of this. It makes me laugh like a babbling brook.
Summarizing, when the audience laughs, they vote about the quality of the bit. When the tickets sell out, they vote about the quality of his work. So, who cares what the critics say?
This might not make sense, but sometimes this perspective helps me (not a comedian, or anyone critics have ever heard of).
There is a lot of history and art embedded in the books (as I believe his wife is a historian and is greatly involved in the making of the books, if I’m not mistaken) which I believe is the highlight, a lot more than the plot or anything else. I distinctively remember reading The Da Vinci Code in my grandfather’s house - there is a piece in the book about secrets in The Last Supper and my grandfather had a big clock in the house with it as the background. I remember going to the clock to check out what the book was saying about the painting and being mindblown. I don’t even remember if everything made sense but that stuck with me.
I'm certain that translation could only improve the books; the English writing is quite poor.
It's conversational. It reads as if it were dictated and published sans editing.
This is what most readers want, it seems.
Honestly, this doesn't bother me. I can't imagine the oral tradition our species has enjoyed since time immemorial to be any more eloquent.
It usually is, though probably more for making it memorizable without major error than any other reason. Rhyme styles of oral traditions don't look too much like our penchant for rhyming the last vowel of sentences.
I chuckled.
Real Tom Clancy books were OK. But he's been dead for a decade. Tom Clancy branded books are still coming out, written by somebody, but they are not very good.
If you like series that went on too long, the sequel to Fourth Wing (Hunger Games with dragons) is out, there's yet another Hunger Games fill-in book soon, and something is happening in the Harry Potter space.
I read the first few paragraphs of this submission (sorry, didn’t finish, I swear I already read this years ago) and to my surprise I realized that I’ve read every single book Dan brown published.
I read good stuff too… :(
It invites you to step beyond the 4th wall, go meta and ask yourself "but IS IT" and usually, the answer is ..
Brown, and Rowling both got to an income level where the file notes in the publisher said: "their literary agent knows we think it's too long, but the contract says we can't tell them that, and in any case it's profitable. don't worry"
If you want a contrast, read Len Deighton's self-reflections in re-issues of his book. He really loved critique. It hurt, but it helped. He also liked being plugged into the tech scene enough to get offered early sight of some of the first word processing systems, and talks about the impact they had on his writing. I happen to like both what he writes, and how he writes. Sometimes, I find myself reading authors where I'm reading in spite of how the words resonate off the page.
It would have to have been revised, crafted, tweaked, revised into being. It reminds me of:
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/how-i-met-my-wife...
The fact is that Dan Brown is laughing all the way to the bank while this mere pamphleter rails against perceived slights against literary asceticism.
> The fact is that Dan Brown is laughing all the way to the bank
The author seems fully aware that Dan is laughing all the way to the bank, and alludes to it multiple times.
An oddly ugly actor, with a strange voice who happens to also be a great character actor can become perceived as good looking and an audible charm without changing a thing.
Similarly, the repetitive and technically flawed but also predictably distinct tempo of an author who writes books that are consistently easy and enjoyable to read without too much mental hardship can become beloved.
Never underestimate the power of anything, no matter how seemingly worthless on the face of it, to signal something good to people.
When we ask “how can people like that?”, we may be seeing the reliable flaws quite accurately. What we are missing is it is exactly those particular flaws that have now become a signal of something those people like.
The flaws are just the consistently awful din outside a loved restaurant. Unacceptable anywhere else, but welcome when dining there.
What sounds like cacophony to many, is now hypnotic tempo to others.
—
TLDR; Branding lesson: any distinctive disadvantage can be counter intuitively leveraging for good effect, by incorporating it as a signal of something good. Soup nazi.
TLDR2; Health lesson: You can learn to like the taste of almost anything, if it makes you feel good after you eat it.
TLDR3; Social lesson: This is how beloved assholes become loved for being despicable assholes. People like something about them in spite of their being an awful person. Then they start associating their irredeemable asshole-ishness with what they like about them. Then they love that they are a destructive asshole. It’s one of their best features!! This dynamic underlines the worship of the asshole qualities of many real and fictional assholes. Slovenly lazy rude unbathed detectives are a classic. Certain repugnant politicians.
OK Cupid, the dating website, used to have a blog that wrote on topics relevant to data analysis from their site (much of which was repurposed in the book "Dataclysm" by Christian Rudder, one of OKC's principals).
One of the topics refers just to this phenomenon. OKC data scientists found that among people who had similar attractiveness ratings (i.e., the hidden average rating you got on your looks by other users who rated you), people whose attractiveness was higher variance got many many more private messages.
In other words: imagine two people who were rated, on average, a 3/5. One way to achieve this is by always being rated 3, for 0 variance. Another way to achieve this is to be rated 50% 1, and 50% 5; high variance. The person who was half 1s and half 5s would get many more messages than the "straight 3".
OKC's blog theorized that this is because while half of the people rating the high variance person were not at all likely to reach out to them, the other half see the high variance peraon as very desirable. On the other hand, everyone sees the straight 3 as a straight 3, and are less motivated to message them.
The advice given by OKC was just like your branding advice: play up your divisive or unique characteristics, rather than downplay them. The people who like big noses (or lots of tattoos or whatever) are looking for you!
I think we also underestimate how much we value uniqueness, and therefore appreciate and admire people who can be confident despite conventionally undesirable differences. The confidence passes both a fitness test, and a test of unique value, by demonstrating that a handicap for most people, doesn’t impede them in anyway way. Those people also make us more comfortable about our own differences or insecurities.
Why do people read Murakami? That guy writes disgusting drivel.
Ridiculous, I know. I had the same reaction when someone recommended I read the abridged Moby Dick(without knowing I've read the unabridged thrice), because who wants to hear about all those random whale facts?
So are we.
But surely Tom Clancy fans DO like reading this stuff? There isn't much else!
> because who wants to hear about all those random whale facts?
well, me at least - some of the best bits of the book (one of my favourites)
(more seriously: I think both authors understand their markets and are savvy about delivering what they want, critics be damned)