Just Finished Reading- The Da Vinci Code

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.

It's a decent story! Angels and Demons is better, though.

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".

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.

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?

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.

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.

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"

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