Just Finished Reading- The Da Vinci Code

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.

. Pointless flashbacks, to the point where it doesn't seem like any of the characters could spend more than five minutes without their mind drifting back to that time when blah blah blah. That the main characters flashback are to Dan Brown's previous book that no-one bought didn't help.
. Apalling pacing, so that every time it looked like two exciting things might happen in a row, the info-sphinchter opens and out drops another lengthy dollop of backstory. It's not even in dialogue form, just "The Priory of Zion was blah blah"
. Just complete nonsense, where the characters act against what little characterisation they've been given (I am here mainly think of the SO DARK THE CON OF MAN section)

On the other hand, I couldn't put it down. Not for reasons of novelty either: I've read both Foucault's Pendulum and Holy Blood Holy Grail beforehand. I really don't know or understand what perfect wave he caught, though I'm not surprised he didn't manage it a second or third (or zeroth) time.

Then, of course, word of mouth took over (much helped by the fact that they sent a free copy to practically everyone in the publishing and bookselling industries). But rather than the unknown-book-gets-great-word-of-mouth-and-becomes-bestseller model, this was a case of bestseller-gets-great-word-of-mouth-and-becomes-megabestseller.

(I thought it was crap, but I enjoyed it, and devoured it in a day, nonetheless.)

Does Brown's book really present this bit of old news as OMG SUPER-SECRET HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE THAT HAS BEEN SUPPRESSED BY THE PATRIARCHY? If so, fie on it.

The only thing that annoys me more than that case of mistaken identity is people who read The Da Vinci Code and then breathlessly repeat this tidbit as if they had spotted something new in the Zapruder film.

I've realised that the stuff I was talking about earlier regarding how it's compelling but not good, and how his other books aren't even that, reminds me a lot of Dracula.

What's annoying me most is that it's brought out the inner pedant in me that I had worked so hard to repress in order to keep hold of friends while watching films with lots of mistakes in them. It's not the "Jesus had a kid" or secret society stuff, it's the tiny details in the patronising explanations of the golden ratio, Egyptian gods and so on that crop up every 3 chapters or so. Does Dan Brown really think the ancient Egyptians went around saying they felt "horny", or does he think that the first thing someone thought of when they wanted to describe the feeling of being sexually turned on was "I feel turned on, like the ancient Egyptian god of masculine sexuality. Amon. He had horns. That's it, I feel horny". It's not too hard to find out where the word horny really came from. Or when the Mona Lisa was named, for that matter (it was after Leonardo died, I doubt he intended to send many messages through the name when he didn't even give the painting one). "Left wing" politics did not get the name because they're considered radical and radical things are bad and left handed things are bad, It was named after where people sat in the French court. Koyaanisqatsi has bugger all to do with a balance of masculinity/femininity, it's a balance of giving to/taking from the earth. Suspicion of left handed people predates Christianity, so it's unlikely to have come about because christians were mysogynists and the left was considered feminine (not the most famous of Christian beliefs itself, more a pagan one, and not one of the pagan ones that Christianity nicked. Christians worshipped on the Sabbath long before Pope Constantine decided that was the best day to do it.

I'm not sure if this is part of the fiction, but it seems like it's supposed to be truthful background info put in the book to educate, along with the paragraphs about measurememnts of buildings which I could have read in an encyclopeadia if I was that interested. I'm only two thirds of the way through the book and the pedant in me has had enough. And she survived watching Volcano the other day without opening her big gob once.

A pedant writes: you mean the first National Assembly :-)

Well, some did, but surely it the Council of Nicaea where that was codified? There were a lot of early Christian sects who believed things we would find odd and behaved in ways we wouldn't expect. I can't, in 10 seconds, google up anything one way or the other, though.

I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of just what it was about Dan Browns very first sentence, indeed the very first word, that told me instantly that I was in for a very boring & wastful time period. I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting details of someone's curriculum vitae into a complex modifiers on proper names and definite descriptions is what you do in a journalistic story about a death; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative. Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better. Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International, and airline magazines are thin, and two-month-old Hollywood drivel on a small screen hanging two seats in front of my row did not appeal, that's why. And why did I keep the book instead of dropping it into a Heathrow trash bin? Because it seemed to me to be such a fund of lessons in how not to write.
Just plain and simple the "Da Vinci Code" is definitly pure fiction very poorly written.

Is Foucault's Pendulum a 'fun' read or fairly dense/serious/etc.?

i'm not sure it's any good tho.

Still, I remember it with fondness, and why should my third reaction be any more valid than my first two? Some books perhaps shouldn't be re-read too often.

good lord no

http://www.lime-light.org/xmb/images/smilies/roll.gif

You know, I loved the book but I'd never EVER recommend it. It's just throwaway. I'd prefer to recommend something more substantial to my friends. That said, I did recommend it to a friend of mine who, after reading 3/4th of the book, frothed at the mouth when I suggested it was a fun read, to be taken very lightly. (Maybe that's why I now say I'd never recommend it.)

You could say these books are necessary to regard books like... oh say... La Peste as classics. ;-)

So I tried (3 times), but it was just too terrible for me

Dude, by the time I would have wanted to quit, I would have finished it anyway. You can read this in a couple of hours easily. Coming from me, that's quite a feat as I usually take weeks to finish a book. You have to read it quickly as not to vomit all over the place. ;-)

Dan Brown gives the world...National Treasure fanfic!

It's a fact, at first I thought it was somehow the delayed novelization of the movie.

This thread's really good, I love that it took so long for people to get all cynical about the book. I also enjoyed this: "He's stuck similes in like a GCSE student who's been told to shove in as many similes as possible".

"Actually, Katherine, it's not gibberish." His eyes brightened again with the thrill of discovery. "It's ... Latin."

Dan Brown cribbed most of his material for Da Vinci Code from a non-fic book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by a committee of three authors named Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.

I have a collection of essays by Anthony Burgess, published in 1986, wherein he reviews this book soon after its publication. In his essay he wrote:

If their material had presented in a blockbuster novel like Irving Wallace's The Word...it would have been easier to take. (...) I can only see this as marvelous material for a novel. Perhaps Irving Wallace or Morris West is already writing it.

So there's an even chance Brown didn't even come up on his own with the idea of novelizing this stuff.

But you must give the devil his due; he clearly hit the sweet spot in terms of his potential audience. Kind of like Jean Auel and her caveman books. She is utter crap as a writer and I can't read more than a paragraph before I'm filled with horror and disgust. At least I could finish Da Vinci Code and even derived some wtf enjoyment from it.

Top Ten Adjectives In The Writing of Dan Brown:

dark
light
religious
grand
famous
secret
enormous
female
French
red

i should point out the above was in the paper and to the best of my knowledge isn't actually a joke

I just searched through a pdf of The Da Vinci Code, and there were 53 instances of 'enormous'. That's about once every seven pages. Not sure that 'grand' should count, since most of them are in the squillion mentions of the Grand Gallery.

Maybe since I have this pdf I should give it a read, give my high and mighty scoffing some justification.

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