Dan Brown: why the hate?

[Skeptic]

as long as they're not stocking dan brown that is.

Au Contraire! Mark Twain once sent a "Thank you" note to a small town which banned one of his books from their lending library, noting that such an act usually is worth 50 to 100 copies sold: now people have to buy the book to find out why it was banned in the first place.

 

[Elizabeth I]

as long as they're not stocking dan brown that is.

Hey, libraries stock all kinds of stuff I don't approve of. Jenny McCarthy's books and books on alternative "medicine," for instance.

 

[Psi Baba]

My best and toughest English professor told the class that when we are writing our papers, she's not interested in explanations of what the writer was saying. Rather, it was our job to explain how the writer manipulates and forms the mind of the reader. Much harder to do, but wow, what an education.

Are you, as a result, a fan of Jorge Luis Borges?

 

[hgc]

Are you, as a result, a fan of Jorge Luis Borges?

It was "The Library of Babel" that did it.

 

[desertgal]

What did it for me was the hero in Angels and Demons leaping out of a helicopter and grabbing onto a plastic sheet of covering material and drifting down to the sea whilst the bad ass priest detonated a massive bomb over his head and parachuted down to land on the top of the Vatican.

Yeah. Imaginative is one thing, but stupidly implausible is a waste of good reading time.

I read "Angels and Demons" and "The DaVinci Code" while traveling, and all I can say is "Meh." I also read the latest one, and couldn't tell you the title or the plot to save my life. Easy reading, I guess, but decidedly not memorable.

 

[negativ]

I didn't read the entire thread; sorry if this has already been mentioned:

The first and only Dan Brown book I read was Digital Fortress. The main things I remember about that book are the following:

* it featured a "computer genius" character who can "hack the system" and retrieve the SECRET DATA the hero needs in order to bring down The Bad Guy(s). I bet you're shocked to learn that Computer Genius has a beard, wears glasses, and expresses contempt for petty authority figures.

* the book actually features a TENSE COUNTDOWN as a suspense-building device. You know how in absolutely every action movie ever, there's always a doomsday bomb attached to a countdown timer that displays big red numbers? And you know how The Hero always has to choose whether to cut the GREEN WIRE or the RED WIRE, and will only make the correct decision when the countdown timer reads "1"? Well, he wrote pretty much that scene into the book.

The basic concept of the story wasn't terribly bad. In more capable hands, it might have been sort of good. It's just that Dan Brown is the Joel Schumacher of literature.

 

[arthwollipot]

I think Digital Fortress was about the poorest of Brown's books. You chose a bad representative sample.

 

[Ashles]

You do realise I have to read one of these books now to see how bad it is, don't you?

How could you?

Try Ice Station.

Set expectations as low as possible, expect insane (absolutely insane) action sequences, and logic tortured beyond breaking point... then read.

I thought it was quite fun.

 

[quadraginta]

Try Ice Station.

Set expectations as low as possible, expect insane (absolutely insane) action sequences, and logic tortured beyond breaking point... then read.

I thought it was quite fun.

I may have to re-read the thread to be certain, but I think that any 'fun quotient' has been mostly discarded as not pertinent (impertinent?) by Mr. Brown's detractors here.

 

[theprestige]

I may have to re-read the thread to be certain, but I think that any 'fun quotient' has been mostly discarded as not pertinent (impertinent?) by Mr. Brown's detractors here.

Good point.

On the other hand, if the roller coaster is so badly designed and built that the ride isn't fun to begin with, there's not much "fun quotient" to discard in the first place.

I think the gist of the detractions in this thread is that Mr. Brown has somehow managed to take a perfecly cromulent roller coaster ride and discard the "fun quotient" himself.

 

[hgc]

I may have to re-read the thread to be certain, but I think that any 'fun quotient' has been mostly discarded as not pertinent (impertinent?) by Mr. Brown's detractors here.

I find that reading a good, fun book is way for fun than reading a bad, fun book.

 

[quadraginta]

I find that reading a good, fun book is way for fun than reading a bad, fun book.

Okay. Very platitudinous.

Do you share the same scorn and disparagement that some others seem to indulge in when something which you don't think is deserving is found so by someone else?

Mrs. qg feels very much that way about people who have fun watching whatever their respective sport may be. I have not been able to dissuade her from this perspective. For myself I care little about watching sports, but I find in that no basis for the ridicule of those who do. It really doesn't matter to me if it is a 'good, fun sport', or a 'bad, fun sport'.

By odd coincidence, it doesn't seem to matter to her, either.

 

[dudalb]

Au Contraire! Mark Twain once sent a "Thank you" note to a small town which banned one of his books from their lending library, noting that such an act usually is worth 50 to 100 copies sold: now people have to buy the book to find out why it was banned in the first place.

The way I heard the story, when Twain heard that Huckleberry Finn had been banned in Boston, he said that was good for another 5'000 copies being sold because of the publicity.

 

[hgc]

Okay. Very platitudinous.

Do you share the same scorn and disparagement that some others seem to indulge in when something which you don't think is deserving is found so by someone else?

Mrs. qg feels very much that way about people who have fun watching whatever their respective sport may be. I have not been able to dissuade her from this perspective. For myself I care little about watching sports, but I find in that no basis for the ridicule of those who do. It really doesn't matter to me if it is a 'good, fun sport', or a 'bad, fun sport'.

By odd coincidence, it doesn't seem to matter to her, either.

The scorn, disparagement and ridicule is all in your imagination. I have every right to judge a book to be a bad book, in my opinion, without being labeled scornful of those who don't share my opinion. I don't happen to think that a bad book is fun to read, unless it turns out to be a good example of kitsch, perhaps. What, I'm supposed to keep my mouth shut?

If you didn't care so much about what other people think of your aesthetic choices, perhaps you wouldn't find insult under every rock. Just sayin'.

 

[quadraginta]

The scorn, disparagement and ridicule is all in your imagination. I have every right to judge a book to be a bad book, in my opinion, without being labeled scornful of those who don't share my opinion. I don't happen to think that a bad book is fun to read, unless it turns out to be a good example of kitsch, perhaps. What, I'm supposed to keep my mouth shut?

If you didn't care so much about what other people think of your aesthetic choices, perhaps you wouldn't find insult under every rock. Just sayin'.

You don't read very carefully,do you? Perhaps this contributes to your issues?

The scorn, disparagement and ridicule is not imaginary. It is quite apparent for any who wish to see, some of it in this very thread.

I did not "label" you as anything. Quite the contrary, in fact. I asked you if you "shared" those sentiments. Please re-read the post you quoted with a goal of greater comprehension.

The speed and vehemence of your poorly considered response to a non-existent slight, and accompanying groundless assertions that I found some "insult" to myself, or my "aesthetic choices" (of which you cannot even be aware, much less judge) is far more revealing of your own biases than any of mine. I had found no insult to myself at all, and not even the most creative interpretation of my post can accurately claim that I did.

In fact, if you try just a little bit, you will see that all I said was that I don't judge other peoples' tastes by my tastes and encourage the same attitude in others. You yourself may want to take such advice more personally, if only to avoid any more imagined slights of your own.

Just sayin'.

 

[paiute]

The same goes for cliches. Let nobody tell you that writers should avoid cliches like the plague - they are useful. Dwarves work in mines, the hero gets the girl and the bad guy is your father. Yet they are useful for good reasons. They are templates the reader brings with them, giving the writer lapels to grab and pull the reader around by. So when a story is cliche in such a way that it presumes to be novel and clever, I again know the writer is without much skill.

Athon

I listen to a lot of audio books these days driving to work. Hearing a book is for me a whole different experience, because I read so fast that I will just speed up to compensate for crappy writing. But listening to the prose of someone who always reaches for the obvious is just painful.

Several times I have listened to the first ten minutes of a book, reached over, popped it out of the player, and tossed it out the car window. (Unless it was a library loan, of course. Then I just curse and turn on a radio station.)

When I am working on something myself, I will often text-to-speech it to see how it reads. I am now of the opinion that good writing reads well and bad, cliched writing is like fingernails on the side of an empty cement truck.

 

[quadraginta]

I listen to a lot of audio books these days driving to work. Hearing a book is for me a whole different experience, because I read so fast that I will just speed up to compensate for crappy writing. But listening to the prose of someone who always reaches for the obvious is just painful.

Several times I have listened to the first ten minutes of a book, reached over, popped it out of the player, and tossed it out the car window. (Unless it was a library loan, of course. Then I just curse and turn on a radio station.)

When I am working on something myself, I will often text-to-speech it to see how it reads. I am now of the opinion that good writing reads well and bad, cliched writing is like fingernails on the side of an empty cement truck.

I don't think I agree with this. I will agree that it can sometimes be true, but I don't see it as a general truth, and would hesitate to judge a work on that basis alone.

Writing well for the spoken word can be substantially different than for narrative intended only to be read. Many good novelists who have done screenplays of their own work have struggled greatly with the difference. Many playwrights haven't even bothered, which, for example, is one reason many people find Shakespeare more enjoyable to watch than to read. Many efforts have not succeeded, and may be a main cause of complaints about the translation of novels to the screen and vice versa.

Certainly it is at least possible for a dialogue or narrative to be written in a fashion to accomodate both, but I think that it is far from easy, and it could be argued that the content and emotive value for either form of presentation can be diminished by trying to do so.

 

[Shrike]

After reading The Lost Symbol, I've just started on The Da Vinci Code.
Oh my...

 

[Schrodinger's Cat]

Thay're so badly written. He doesn't use much complexity. You could drive a bus through the plotholes. This is about his writing style. It gets old fast. Very fast. Plus his stories are insane.

Agreed. I read DaVinci code, and it's simply poorly written. Now, if that's all there was to it, no biggie. There's no lack of poorly written action books that, while not having any real literary merit, are simply fun reads. No harm in that.

My problem is how much CREDIT this guy gets. People act like he came up with all these ideas in his book himself, and he didn't. It's completely derivative. Pretty much every idea he presents - both the conspiracies and the aspects of real anthropology/theology/history, I have read before, in books like "The Alphabet vs the Goddess." He takes incredibly complex anthropological theories that have been around for decades and then waters them down to a 3rd grade level, and people think he's some genius who came up with this all on his own. And then they think they're reading something new and insightful, when all they're reading is existing theories boiled down to the level of the lowest common denominator. It's basically the opposite of Christopher Nolan's writing style. He doesn't give his audience any credit at all and presents things as if he's writing for simpletons.

I worked at Barnes and Noble when DaVinci code came out, and I wouldn't have thought twice about the book if not for the fact that so many customers lauded as one of the best, most insightful, creative, masterful books they've ever read. If people just took it for what it was, a mindless beach read, I'd have no problem. But people act like is this revelation of literature, that's what is ridiculous. And as foolme stated, people actually take it SERIOUSLY when it comes to the conspiracy theory aspects of it.

 

[Retrograde]

I was listening to The Lost Symbol today (yeah, I know better, but it was the least uninteresting thing I found at the library yesterday and I needed some background noise while cleaning the garage) when I made a discovery: the previous borrower had put the CDs back in the wrong order, and it makes no noticeable difference to the plot or the flow of the narrative!