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Comment by dlcarrier | Hacker News Reader

I listen to a few hundred audio books a year while working. There seems to be no correlation between the quality of the writing and the fame of the book. As disheartening as it is that thousands of great novels are never recognized, it is also awkward that some percentage of awful novels sell well and need to be reviewed.

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

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What I've realized is that the fame of the book is closely related to how interesting and unique the "elevator pitch” of the book. Which makes sense when you think about it; It's the elevator pitch that's spreading by word of mouth, not the book.

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).

I dimly remember a time in the 90s when I thought technology was supposed to free us from the tyranny of "judging a book by its cover" and "following the crowd", when you could carry around a personalized algorithm to help you identify things you would like even if they were obscure or un-marketed.

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.

Did they ever make last.fm for books? Or other things? One of my ideas back in the day was "last.fm for meeting people", i.e. you could connect based on overlapping interests or aesthetic preferences in any dimension of life. That seems to have still not been invented yet?

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!

Last.fm for books sounds like Goodreads, but not sure how Amazon buying it bodes for its future. It does attempt to make recommendations.

Amazon has owned goodreads since 2013.I have been using thr platform for many years, and the service has been good. Having said that, I haven't seen much innovation being built but that might be a good thing with this product.

> It feels like that didn't happen

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.

Reddit was good, various forums were good for that too. The best way to get recommendation is through curated lists and you need people that are genuinely involved for that. You can still find some, but they can be very off the beaten path.

I don't think it is just money. Twitter had slight right wing bias and that was not enough. Musk wanted it to have hard right bias so he destroyed it.

It is simple, money peoppe use money to destroy spaces that don't have their preferred bias.

That's nonsense. If anything, for the prior decade, Twitter was well-known as the extreme left's judge, jury and executioner. All the cancellations people argue about? Overblown or not, Twitter was always at the center of it, and it was what made them possible.

(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.

Bullshit, frankly. That was what your self imposed bubble was telling to themselves. Whenever measured, twitter bias was right wing - it took much more for them to stop right accounts then left ones.

> 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.

> Whenever measured, twitter bias was right wing - it took much more for them to stop right accounts then left ones.

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.)

Yeah, Gab is super nice example of the asymmetry - the sort of behavior right wing Gab members displayed was much much less prominent on the left. So yeah, this is nice example of right wing extreme behaving in the worst way and then complaining it is fair people who behave better are not treated the same. When right wing harasses more, it is ok to kick them out more. The reality was that right wing harasses more, they get kicked, so services would kick off comparatively better behaved left wing people just to make right wing happy. That is right wing bias.

> 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.

>Twitter had slight right wing bias

this is absurd

The problem is, as usual, capitalism. The goal of people making stuff isn't to make good stuff, it's to sell lots of their stuff, at the highest price they can.

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.

Seems pretty clear that if you want someone to do work for you (e.g. recommend you books you will like) they might need paying somehow.

> Seems pretty clear that if you want someone to do work for you

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?

Well, like everyone who "criticizes capitalism" online, they leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine the concrete entailments of what they vaguely propose.

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.

Thats a quite ignorant conclusion.

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].

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_honesty

Maybe not for books, but my taste in music benefitted tremendously from streaming and discovery algorithms.

This is kind of how The Locked Tomb series got around - "lesbian necromancers in space" has a sort of hook to it. :)

It’s a weird tagline because the books are basically sexless. But the first one was definitely fun and original so who cares. Unfortunately, the next two simply weren’t good. I wonder if the series will see a conclusion.

I disagree. The follow-ups definitely wasn't more of the same thing if that's what you were expecting, but I feel they were interesting, challenging and original, and I enjoyed them. YMMV.

Similar for Signalis fans with games ;)

The fame of the book is strong correlated to the marketing spend behind it and little else.

Much like anything in an established market.

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 success of major bestsellers depends entirely on how they trigger the fantasies and wish fulfilments specific demographics.

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 don't remember who originally stated it, but there is an old axiom that "There are three stages of Reading: 1. Infantile - to learn about the world, 2. Adolescent - to learn about oneself, and 3. Adult - to read simply for enjoyment".

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.

> What I've realized is that the fame of the book is closely related to how interesting and unique the "elevator pitch” of the book. Which makes sense when you think about it; It's the elevator pitch that's spreading by word of mouth, not the book.

They call this "high concept"

"High concept" doesn't refer to the elevator pitch being interesting or unique. The less interesting or unique the movie is, the more high-concept it is.

"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.

> this is exactly the opposite of what everyone assumes the phrase must mean

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.

I was surprised by this as well.

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.

For 44 years my misunderstanding of 'character actors' was that they are good at acting like other characters.

"High concept" is a bit of a different case in that nobody ever knows the actual meaning. It's too obvious that, in the absence of the existing meaning, it would mean "conceptually complex". It's not at all obvious why you would use a phrase meaning "conceptually complex" when what you want to say is "conceptually trivial".

"I don't really know any high level programming languages, I really only know python."

Agree. For example, Dragon's Egg by Forward is not a well written book by most of those metrics, and yet I very much enjoyed the novel due to the creative story.

> What I've realized is that the fame of the book is closely related to how interesting and unique the "elevator pitch” of the book.

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 went on a quest to read Hugo award winning novels a couple of years ago and have come to the conclusion that there is disappointingly little correlation between award winning and quality writing as well. Or the people who judge books have different criteria than I do as to what makes a book good.

Few works of art are great across all the metrics. A book (or a movie) can have a great overall premise and structure, but have lacking dialog, flow or other issues. Is it good? Perhaps for me, but not for you.

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.

Hugo voters are members of the World Science Fiction Society (who are mostly Worldcon attendees). Which is to say, voters for that are chosen for enthusiasm for the genre, not taste.

Not to be the one to point out the pink elephant, but the Hugo Awards became somewhat politicized a decade or so ago and identity politics started to feature heavily into selections. If your criteria doesn't include that then the awards are now probably meaningless. But go back to the past, and there's a reason they used to have such prestige associated with them. For instance in the 60s some winners were Starship Troopers, Man in the High Castle, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress!

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.

Yes, 60s famous as period when the gender of the author or characters did not mattered in the slightest. It was totally only later when they started to matter, sure.

Of course it mattered, but it didn't define the results. Le Guin won it multiple times. And as far back as 1956, the third Hugo ever, a female author made it to the short list. But they weren't winning or being nominated because of their sex. They were just exceptional authors who happened to be female, which is as it should be.

Meanwhile male authors had to be less exceptional to win or succeed. Simple as that. Men had lower bar, every step of the way.

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.

What authors of the past were neglected in your opinion, or perhaps unfairly promoted? In modern times I think this is fairly easy to demonstrate. Books like Project Hail Mary are insufficient to win, while the most winning works are not especially exceptional. Those that are, perhaps The Three Body Problem, tend be the exception rather than the rule.

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.

I mean Project Hail Mary is also far from being exceptional. I didn't dislike the book and it was enjoyable but I would never think it deserves an award. In particular, the scenes with the alien fell really flat. Now I haven't read the winner for best novel of 2022 and to be honest I haven't read any amazing novel published in 2021.

Of course there are personal tastes, so I'd simply look at large scale data. The winner for 2022 is A Desolation Called Peace. [1] As per Amazon it ended up with far fewer purchases, lower reviews amongst those who purchased it (in spite of a rather conspicuous amount of reviews that are generally critical of the book then giving it 5 stars anyhow), and it won the Hugo.

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...

FWIW, A Desolation Called Peace is one of my favorite SF books I've read in the last 10 years. I really enjoy that series.

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.

identity politics sneakily becoming a required element in media (whether that be for genuine representation reasons, appeals to that market, whatever) isn't a necessary result of equitability in writing.

Compared to era when female characters and writers were excluded openly ... I mean common.

It is absurd to use the era where identity (gender, race) was key determinant of what will happen, before anything else.

Do you have any evidence that such alleged exclusion of good writing was common and disproportional compared to male writers?

Hugo awards are by popular vote of fans attending conventions, and SF mostly prided itself on being about ideas, so you'll get what caught most people's fancy at the time.

I have come to accept that most books are good at something, and maybe even a few things, but not so great at many things. I embarked on a similar "read the Hugos" adventure and much of it is great in a sci-fi premise - understandable - but the characters or pacing or unfolding story is meh.

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.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21808426

I've noticed the same thing, especially with Hugo awards.

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.

Huh, that's interesting. I read a lot of Hugo winning stuff and always found them well written even if not massively engaging.

When awarding bodies grow in popularity, their roles switch from populist to elitist, as their membership becomes more elite.

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 did the same a couple of decades ago and enjoyed it. It was especially interesting to see a slice of early sci-fi. It's been a while, but I remember enjoying "The Big Time" and Connie Willis' books.

>I listen to a few hundred audio books a year while working.

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.

There are many 'overwatch' type jobs, a number that carry heavy responsibility, that mostly only require "light regular attention" and the skill level to be on the ball and top of your game in bursts.

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).

Physical labor. A friend of mine has a job like this, in their parents' egg wholesaler business. It's a hard job, but has two major benefits: keeps him in good physical shape, and lets him listen to audiobooks pretty much the whole time. I sometimes find myself envying him that.

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.

Not the same premise (I don't listen to audiobooks), but what helps me get through my reading list was buying an ereader and put my whole library on it. It goes with me everywhere, and every time I have an urge to take my phone, I open it instead. Can go through a normal book in a couple of days.

Mostly remodeling my house, by myself.

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.

Yeah that is quite the accomplishment. A few hundred? Most audio books are like six to ten hours of continuous audio!

I do the same, but at 2 to 4x speed depending on the book, that cuts down the time significantly. I don't listen while working though, as I work in software not in the other fields that were mentioned in the answer to a sibling comment which are more monotonous in nature perhaps.

> 2 to 4x speed

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?

Practice. The more you listen the faster you can go. I can digest it at that speed, yes. Sometimes I watch shows like that especially if there's a lot of filler content, anime in particular. No one has time to go through a thousand episode.

some peoples brains just operate faster, like have a faster clockspeed in the same way CPUs do. i feel like people who can read extremely fast also correlate strongly to people who can listen to audio very fast. my partner is an unbelievably fast reader, like the fastest i've ever seen, but she also has a phd in maths and is generally brilliant, i have no idea where im going with this. some peoples brains are just wired for high amounts of data bandwidth. but also practice, and it also depends on the original speed of the speaker/content.

That's even a bit short. The median I listen to is probably around 12 hours, and the more popular series tend to be in the 20 to 30 hour range. Brandon Sanderson titles can hit in around 60 hours.

Listening at double speed makes a big difference.

I usually read/listen to a lot of books, compared to most people, but not several hundred. And if you're reading Brandon Sanderson as part of that - wow! I'm envious :)

A working year is ~250 days. I suppose it is possible with a minor playback speedup to hit 1.2 books/working day, 300 per year. Which sounds unbelievable, but good for them for having a job which just requires a butt in a chair.

Don't miss another excellent takedown of the Da Vinci Code by a renowned linguist:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.h...

Fun read. Minor typo:

  s/the the/the/g;

Good lord I could practically write an equally-long response post to this linguist dissecting his "takedown" (if it could be called that) of what amounts to a single sentence of the entire book, and bases his opinion on that it seems.

I'm fine with made-up technology and technobabble, but Digital Fortress had one thing that didn't make any sense: the supposed reason the new encryption scheme couldn't be cracked was "rotating cleartext" - that somehow the encrypted contents could magically change over time and the brute force cracking would have to start over.

You really should read Ice Station by Matthew Reilly. It's so bad its good. It has an attack killer whale the bites off one of the characters legs after launching itself meters into the air.

I have so many of his books; there was a time in my life when I was traveling a lot, under a lot of stress from various projects, and on the plane all I wanted to do was to turn my brain off. Those books fit the bill.

Thanks for the recommendation. The libraries near me only have the text version. Sometimes this happens if the audio book is an Audible exclusive. Audible can pay out as little as 25% of sales to authors, for audiobooks that aren't exclusive.

> For anyone else who enjoys such novels, I highly recommend Dan Brown's Digital Fortress.

Isn't that the "try the kanji" book?

Indeed it is.

> For anyone else who enjoys such novels, I highly recommend Dan Brown's Digital Fortress.

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.

That explains why movie sucked so much, regardless of good actors involved. Never saw appeal to even check those books, looked to me like some novels for my retired mom rather than something worth spending time on.

My only memory of Digital Fortress is that my mom sold our copy of it on eBay when I was midway through reading it and that still ever-so-slightly irks me almost two decades later.

You didn't miss much, but if you feel you need to find out what happened, get a library card and sign up with Libby, to borrow the ebook or audio book for free. The libraries near me don't even have a wait list for the audio book.

i cringed so hard when reading Digital Fortress. I could not put it down.

spoiler: the answer is 3

which type of fame? ephemeral best-sellers by New York Times?

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)

It's difficult to get older books in audiobook form from libraries, because only recently have audiobooks overtaken ebooks in popularity.

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.

> they're squarely in so-bad-it's-good territory.

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.

spent quality time in my youth making xkcdphone style doodles for the fingertip typing gadget used by a character in Digital Fortress, something like this: https://www.techeblog.com/tip-tap-finger-computer-input-devi...

> There's also commentary on the novel by the creators of RiffTrax in episodes 71 through 77 of the 372 Pages podcast

6 podcast episodes on a 500-page paperback thriller? That's not commentary, that's mental illness.

They cover over 20 chapters per episode. Any fewer episodes, and it would be difficult to keep track of what you've read, by the time you listen to the episode. They also play games based on the contents of the chapters, and answer listener questions, to fill out the episode.

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