Just Finished Reading- The Da Vinci Code

What makes you say that?

And can I just comment on what a phenom this book is? I was at a surprise birthday party this weekend and it turns out that half the people there had read it... It kind of scared me a little.

Catholic exalted high-ranking murderous priest(s) willing to kill rather than let "dangerous" truth from ancient time/mithology ("nature of holy grail" and "Aristotele's pledge for laughter",respectively, and excuse my didascalic snobbish attitude WINK) come out.
Truth uncovered by cultivated detectives...

isn'tdad smart??

Regarding analogy with Foucault's pendulum, I could not get over page 100 (was I the only one to feel very annoyed by the book pretentious gimmicks ex. untraslated greek quotations??? geez...)

David Baddiel (I think it was him) was likening it to Dickens in one of the newspapers at the weekend and deploring the snobbish attitude of the literati to this book. Not that I give a toss what DB thinks, but it did have me ruminating on the (admittedly remote-seeming) possibility that this might be regarded as a good book at some point in the future, even though every cell in my brain was telling me it was rubbish when I was trying to read it.

(And in any case I'm regularly in bookshops/read the book pages etc and I only became aware of this book once it had already topped the bestseller lists for months - I couldn't have gone long without hearing about new book by, say, Salman Rushdie who won't be selling in TDVC numbers).

I think the key phrase is "well written". Josh is right: to most people with a taste for literature this is a badly written book. That leaves the mystery of its popularity. If Baddiel is right and it survives to be regarded as literature (that's a very big if, of course, but Baddiel is a reasonably bright guy and his suggestion doesn't have to be right to be interesting, it just has to be not obviously wrong) then what people like me think of as "well-written" is either wrong, or just irrelevant to whether a book is any good. Of course it's difficult for me to see that from where I'm standing. But there are plenty of examples in critical history of work that was regarded as vulgar rubbish by the cognoscenti being accepted as good or even great by later generations.

I just think this has touched on a suspicion that I increasingly have that being conventionally "well-written" is less important than we think, that there are many "well-written" books that are published and deservedly sink without trace every year as well as apparently ill-written books that turn out to be culturally important. I've been reading Don Quixote in translation, one of the great masterpieces of prose fiction, but I'm not convinced it could be described as "well written" as we understand the phrase nowadays. Some of the writing is extraordinarily clumsy but it doesn't detract from the greatness of the book.

(just not abt what you THINK they're credible abt!)

also i think way more ppl. are sympathetic to conspiracy theories at the moment than in the recent past -- esp. global and ancient ones.

i dunno what you mean by 'recent past', but i'd be interested to hear why you think that, sterling.

this happens with political screeds and slambooks alla time.

this happens with political screeds and slambooks alla time.

(kinda)

I'm in the UK and have only noticed one TV documentary about TDVC, which was predictably showing what an absurd piece of nonsense it is. TV execs would have made this programme because they knew audiences would take pleasure in having their suspicions confirmed and in laughing at and feeling superior to the credulous minority. I don't think the existence of documentaries like this is evidence that many readers take TDVC seriously any more seriously than James Bond.

YR FRIENDS ARE TOO SMART AND ITS SKEWING YR PERCEPTION OF SOCIETY AT LARGE.

I think it's the opposite - researchers for tv documentaries and the like are able to locate a credulous minority and make them seem more representative than they are. Which plays into the desire of people who are not taken in like to believe that they are in a relatively clever minority rather than just typical readers.

If the sub-Parsons/Hornby nonsense that was Time For Bed is anything to go by, David Baddiel knows less than most people about what makes a good book. He is, however, something of an authority on porn.

but if you do manage to whip up a time viewer that shows the college students of the future [studying blank] my reaction will be to weep for humanity, not rush out and buy crap.

You could replace that blank with lot of names of artists viewed as populist crap in their day but now taken pretty seriously, though. And perfectly encapsulate the confidence with which the arbiters of conventional good taste dismissed vulgarians like Verdi, Puccini, Mahler, Dickens, any and every novel (not real literature like drama and poetry, dear boy), all cinema, all pop music, all jazz, yadda yadda.

even if the college students of the future were reading the da vinci code, that would just show that somehow 'we' had decided to start forcing that small group of people to try to take it to be culturally important. but how else are many things preserved for a hundred years, anyway? very few things with mass appeal - books, especially! - a hundred years ago retain that mass appeal now. there are new things for masses to find appealing now.

I wouldn't be surprised if college students of the future *do* end up studying it; but that doesn't mean it's crap, though.

At my university library, we had class sets of Jurassic Park and various Anne Rice novels, plus a fairly wide range of 1960s sci-fi, because that was what the English department had asked for. Just because those books were being taught at university doesn't mean that they are high quality.

"Appeals to an imagined critical judgement of an imagined future are always bad thinking"

appeals to an imagined literary web board elite can distort discussions of entertaining, non-experimental fiction

Actually I was talking about the kind of poor quality music criticism you hear which compares [name dull alt-rock act] to [name shiny pop act] and goes "I know which people will be listening to in 20 years time", which is just an absence of engagement really: don't say why you like it, just rely on a legion of imaginary people to back you up. And extrapolating my discomfort with that to literature. I think it still works but maybe I'm wrong.

Anyhow "TDVC" is already regarded as a good book, just not by everybody. It has this in common with every book ever written. (Is this true? I'm not quite sure. I don't suppose there's a book which everyone agrees is good. Whether there is a book which no-one thinks is good is more difficult. Perhaps I should have added a virtually.)

I haven't read it. I will, though. Maybe when it's less fashionable.

Sorry my mistake.

even if we could predict what people in the future would like, why would we care?

For the same reasons that we might care what *anyone* else thinks? Or don't you think we should?

I cited porn as a reason Baddiel might be in a position to comment on DVC. He's an expert on badly written cheap thrills with terrible dialogue, weak characters and stupidly contrived situations.

Since these future people remain imaginary, I find it hard to care what they like or don't (and I certainly don't think made-up opinions ascribed to them, by Baddiel or whoever, count for anything or tell us anything about what we think).

I can see how predicting future tastes would be a result for people who plan publishing schedules, though, and for people who like to speculate on modern first editions. Are there people who speculate on modern first editions? How much would a first edition TDVC cost me just now, I wonder?

Clearly you are not a mathematician. Those guys care a lot about things that are imaginary.

Having read TDVC I went on to read Angels and Demons, which was atrocious and not interesting in the least, despite having much more at stake. It did contain some interesting descriptions of particle accelerators and some nice chat about antimatter, but it didn't have the creepy overtones or the familiar locations of TDVC. I really do believe that people love a creepy Catholic conspiracy and Brown tapped into that really well. The Celestine Prophecies also sold by the bucketload, as did Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Not as much maybe, because they're not airport thrillers.
I would be curious to know when the buzz around this book really got going, as I too missed out on it until it was established. Anyone know?

(Mathematicians really do care about imaginary numbers, don't they? And that seems fair enough. I'm not sure that mathematicians, on the whole, care about imaginary people. I'm not sure they care about actual people either, but perhaps I need to gather more data on that subject.)

people, though, who needs those.

No, but some of what's good to talk about regarding books (particularly smash blockbusters like this) is why people like the books, and how this relates to other things. Are people more receptive to conspiracies? Less tolerant of Catholic perversions (by the way, m coleman, it wasn't the catholic church after all)? How does it compare with Left Behind Mania?

Most appeals to the future, though, assume that this web of culture will melt away with time, letting smart people see The Truth. This is of course more prevalent in music. I still consider this to be the classic example. This is also of course complete horseshit.

she also said "have you read 'Angels and Demons' yet?"

Wordle of The Lost Symbol:

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/4265/lostsymbol.png

Only 35 instances of 'enormous' in this one.

Is the 'Bellamy' Craig Bellamy?

David.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6194031/The-Lost-Symbol-and-The-Da-Vinci-Code-author-Dan-Browns-20-worst-sentences.html

Ugh. I had been pretty comfortable with the verdict that Brown is great with plots and awful with style, but that commentary has turned me into an all-round sympathiser.

I am halfway through The Lost Symbol and it is hard to shake the feeling that Dan Brown is a dick.

yeah that article has a lot of "who cares" and the occasional bit of "now you're just being a dick" to it. See esp. 'learning the ropes' bit. It's called a figure of speech, gaiz.

"whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes" - I kinda like this image! Although I'm imagining the eyes somehow punching through the paper. And it just being a sheet of paper instead of a face. So not that much.

This book was some grade-A bullshit, like beyond even what my low expectations were. Way to brutally murder some interesting ideas, you no-talent tool.

kinda funny what happens after the BIG POP HIT. dude is plugging along writing books then OH NO I IZ HUUUUUGE BETTER NOT FUCK UP and it takes him longer to follow up da vinci than it took him to crank out the three before it. how long did it take that cold mountain dude? ten years? it must be scary. (stephen king being the exception to the rule)

* Digital Fortress, 1998
* Angels & Demons, 2000
* Deception Point, 2001
* The Da Vinci Code, 2003
* The Lost Symbol, 2009

Part of me feels like he just took Digital Fortress and replaced every reference to cryptography with references to Masons.

"whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes" -- this is really not defensible; it's not the image, it's the confusion about what the second half is meant to modify

haven't read the article so don't know if it makes that point ah well

What they choose to complain about is 'precarious', which I guess Brown means to mean "precariously positioned":

"Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes."

But that's at best the third-worst howler there.

dark
light
religious
grand
famous
secret
enormous
female
French
red

repeating these words over and over again can only be effective in keeping people's attention

that reads like a Fiona Apple album title

The dark-skinned light fitter was religious, but his not-so-famous secret was that he liked enormous females and the odd glass of French red.

Someone give me a million dollar book contract.

Slightly overweight medical student Buck Mulligan walked up the historical stairs of the Martello tower

ha my very-forgiving-of-bad-prose wife is just as fed up with this book as I was

http://nymag.com/arts/books/bookclub/lost-symbol/

this was entertaining

"influential family dynasty"

i like how a leading symbologist and france's leading code cracker can't recognize what language a paragraph is in when it's just english printed backwards

out of all the shitty things in this (going ahead and mentioning how you can see the word "sex" in the lion king...omg), the shitty "codes" were the worst. all of them were way too obvious and suspension of disbelief was impossible. you can't help but think "these 'academics' are dumb, and the person who wrote this is dumb." the answers to all of them were immediately clear. if this were real, everyone and their fuckin mom would be showing up to get the grail.

i read this because i was stuck volunteering in a place and there was nothing to do, but a copy of this book was there.

i've only seen the moovie, but i think when yr big shock ending (okay i already knew what it was gonna be cos i'd read the source material but) is kinda "sfw? you were killing dudes over this??" then u have a problem too

"oh? jesus is my grandad? thanks for the info, i will get back to work now cheers"

otm. all the shit thats supposed to be shocking regarding religion is classic type 2 challops

it made me think about this a lot: what does it say about people that we WANT to believe in stupid conspiracy theories? is it about wanting to feel superior?

simplistic explanations for frightening randomness of life? sense that even tho yr life is mundane there is an exciting world hiding within reach? liking to be in on big secrets? not being real bright?

also maybe it's hard in a "secular age" for people to understand the complexities of how major religions became major and religious conspiracy theories provide a recognisable modern world reason, however ridiculous

that last point is pretty tangy, imo - i think that's a good explanation.

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

^ always a good read. this might be the most ridiculous set of sentences in any popular work of fiction:

A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move."

On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

I was surprised to open this thread and see it beginning with someone talking about how great the DVC is.

lol comparing it with eco

"The Templar Revelation, a MUST read"

also

I wouldn't call it 'a dumbed-down' version of Eco's work (in general). Maybe you could say it's 'not as scholastic' or 'more plot-centric' (as opposed to a novel basically being 500 pages of regurgitated research). Dan Brown put a lot of research into The Da Vinci Code but equally blends it with suspense and murder.

O_OOOOOOOO