Just Finished Reading- The Da Vinci Code

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

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