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.
― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Friday, 12 August 2005 09:33 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Cressida Breem (neruokruokruokne?), Saturday, 3 September 2005 03:07 (eighteen years ago) link
A pedant writes: you mean the first National Assembly :-)
― Forest Pines (ForestPines), Saturday, 3 September 2005 06:56 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 3 September 2005 09:52 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Rob Aralight, Thursday, 22 September 2005 16:38 (eighteen years ago) link
― Da Vinci Crap, Wednesday, 17 May 2006 23:31 (seventeen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Thursday, 18 May 2006 00:00 (seventeen years ago) link
― Action Tim Vision (noodle vague), Thursday, 18 May 2006 00:03 (seventeen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Thursday, 18 May 2006 03:20 (seventeen years ago) link
― Action Tim Vision (noodle vague), Thursday, 18 May 2006 07:35 (seventeen years ago) link
― steve ketchup (steve ketchup), Thursday, 18 May 2006 15:58 (seventeen years ago) link
Is Foucault's Pendulum a 'fun' read or fairly dense/serious/etc.?
― milo z (mlp), Thursday, 18 May 2006 21:33 (seventeen years ago) link
i'm not sure it's any good tho.
― tom west (thomp), Thursday, 18 May 2006 23:29 (seventeen years ago) link
― adam (adam), Wednesday, 24 May 2006 22:02 (seventeen years ago) link
― I Hate You Little Girls (noodle vague), Thursday, 25 May 2006 06:27 (seventeen years ago) link
― Ray (Ray), Thursday, 25 May 2006 06:51 (seventeen years ago) link
― adam (adam), Thursday, 25 May 2006 10:35 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― ledge (ledge), Friday, 26 May 2006 12:03 (seventeen years ago) link
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. ;-)
― Nathalie (stevie nixed), Saturday, 27 May 2006 18:13 (seventeen years ago) link
Dan Brown gives the world...National Treasure fanfic!
― Ned Raggett, Monday, 14 September 2009 00:20 (fourteen years ago) link
It's a fact, at first I thought it was somehow the delayed novelization of the movie.
― alimosina, Monday, 14 September 2009 01:44 (fourteen years ago) link
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".
― Ismael Klata, Monday, 14 September 2009 07:09 (fourteen years ago) link
"Actually, Katherine, it's not gibberish." His eyes brightened again with the thrill of discovery. "It's ... Latin."
― James Mitchell, Monday, 14 September 2009 14:08 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― Aimless, Monday, 14 September 2009 17:41 (fourteen years ago) link
Top Ten Adjectives In The Writing of Dan Brown:
darklightreligiousgrandfamoussecretenormousfemaleFrenchred
― thomp, Monday, 14 September 2009 20:10 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― Akon/Family (Merdeyeux), Monday, 14 September 2009 20:29 (fourteen years ago) link
It's a decent story! Angels and Demons is better, though.
― so says i tranny ben franklin (HI DERE), Monday, 14 September 2009 20:34 (fourteen years ago) link
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.Still probably less frequent than the phrase "Every so often" appeared in "2666".
― Øystein, Monday, 14 September 2009 20:46 (fourteen years ago) link
It's a brilliant story, whatever its flaws. Teachers should use it as the clearest demonstration that good plotting, good style and good writing are not the same thing, but I bet they don't.
― Ismael Klata, Monday, 14 September 2009 20:53 (fourteen years ago) link
it's really not a "good story" in any way
merdeyeux can you check if any of the uses of 'female' are as a noun?
― thomp, Monday, 14 September 2009 21:17 (fourteen years ago) link
quite a few, yeah, although there are a couple more 'female's than there are 'enormous'es, so maybe that's been taken into account.
― Akon/Family (Merdeyeux), Monday, 14 September 2009 21:47 (fourteen years ago) link
78 instances of 'dark' or 'darkness, btw, more than once every five pages. Flicking through all of that male and female harmony hokum makes me kinda want to read it now, for some reason.
― Akon/Family (Merdeyeux), Monday, 14 September 2009 21:55 (fourteen years ago) link
i haven't read these and I'm not gonna act like I'm better than them or something but some girl I worked with once was shocked that I hadn't when I told her I had written my thesis for art-school on "kinda religiously themed stuff"
― ❊❁❄❆❇❃✴❈colinda❈✴❃❇❆❄❁❊ (I know, right?), Monday, 14 September 2009 23:41 (fourteen years ago) link
she also said "have you read 'Angels and Demons' yet?"
― ❊❁❄❆❇❃✴❈colinda❈✴❃❇❆❄❁❊ (I know, right?), Monday, 14 September 2009 23:42 (fourteen years ago) link
Wordle of The Lost Symbol:
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/4265/lostsymbol.png
― James Mitchell, Monday, 21 September 2009 18:42 (fourteen years ago) link
Only 35 instances of 'enormous' in this one.
― James Mitchell, Monday, 21 September 2009 18:44 (fourteen years ago) link
Is the 'Bellamy' Craig Bellamy?
― Ismael Klata, Monday, 21 September 2009 18:51 (fourteen years ago) link
David.
― James Mitchell, Monday, 21 September 2009 22:03 (fourteen years ago) link
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6194031/The-Lost-Symbol-and-The-Da-Vinci-Code-author-Dan-Browns-20-worst-sentences.html
― Number None, Tuesday, 22 September 2009 16:15 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, 22 September 2009 17:03 (fourteen years ago) link
I am halfway through The Lost Symbol and it is hard to shake the feeling that Dan Brown is a dick.
― sturdy, ultra-light, under-the-pants moneybelt (HI DERE), Wednesday, 23 September 2009 13:55 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― Akon/Family (Merdeyeux), Wednesday, 23 September 2009 14:42 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― a misunderstanding of Hip-Hop and contracts (HI DERE), Thursday, 1 October 2009 17:39 (fourteen years ago) link
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
― scott seward, Thursday, 1 October 2009 18:22 (fourteen years ago) link
Part of me feels like he just took Digital Fortress and replaced every reference to cryptography with references to Masons.
― a misunderstanding of Hip-Hop and contracts (HI DERE), Thursday, 1 October 2009 19:04 (fourteen years ago) link
"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
― thomp, Thursday, 1 October 2009 19:55 (fourteen years ago) link
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.
― thomp, Thursday, 1 October 2009 20:00 (fourteen years ago) link
repeating these words over and over again can only be effective in keeping people's attention
― to cloves fork comfurt (Curt1s Stephens), Thursday, 1 October 2009 20:01 (fourteen years ago) link
that reads like a Fiona Apple album title
― a misunderstanding of Hip-Hop and contracts (HI DERE), Thursday, 1 October 2009 20:06 (fourteen years ago) link