I don’t understand Dan Brown pile-ons: why is it so hard for detractors to accept that some of us might find his books to be both mindless and quite entertaining?
I started with The Da Vinci Code, and, while I never took anything in it as gospel (heh), I thought some of the speculation was interesting. And it was a good read! Not every book has to be profound or brilliant to be worthwhile (or popular). Angels and Demons? Yep, the exact same story as Da Vinci, just set in a different country and the characters have different names. But still, pretty enjoyable. The only other one I’ve read is Deception Point, which I liked the least but still found to be entertaining.
I won’t read any of his other books – from what I understand I’ve already seen the best of his work – but I won’t pretend that I didn’t enjoy the ones I have read, despite their sometimes far-fetched, oftentimes mind-candy aspects.
When I bought my mp3 player, it came with a promotion for audible.com which included the first chapter of The Da Vinci Code. So on the long flight home from Italy, I had a lot of time on my hands, and I decided to listen to it.
I made it all the way through the first chapter, but it was easily the most painful 15 minutes of my life. I re-wrote every other line in my head because the man is enamoured with passive voice. Sorry, that’s a habit you need to break long before you are actually publishing. I don’t read books so I can do the author’s job for them.
I’m with **Misnomer **on this one. I read The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons and enjoyed both very much. Didn’t take either of them the least bit seriously, and have had to talk several friends out of believing every word. But I don’t feel the need to dismiss them as crap.
I guessed the actual owner of the “trusted friend’s” account in Digital Fortress about six seconds after I read the username; it was an anagram of another character’s name. The characters who were stumped by this amazingly convoluted encryption scheme are supposed to work for the NSA. Let me tell you, the folks I know who work there love wordplay, obfuscated clues, and counter-intuitive tricks. And also: they aren’t stupid one-dimensional drama queens.
I read Da Vinci and while I thought it was entertaining, I was a little disappointed by the writing, even for entertainment, and how easy the clues were. I mean, I was thinking…there’s no way it can be that obvious, because I’m pretty stupid about these things. But by the end of the book, I realized that I was at least smart enough to figure these out.
I’m conducting an experiment. I currently have The Da Vinci Code sitting on the shelf immediately next to Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. Next to Pendulum are Island of the Day Before and Baudolino. So far, the books have remained peacefully juxtaposed; no damage, no fire, no radiation.
I’m thinking I need to raise the stakes. Should I add Angels & Demons on the other side of Baudolino, or should I put Wilson & Shea’s Illuminatus on the other side of Da Vinci?
Would it be cruel for me to sandwich The Da Vinci Code between A Theory of Semiotics and How to Travel with a Salmon? Would Dan Brown run out of the room crying?
I read the first two chapters of the Da Vinci Code.
Conclusion: It’s not for grown-ups. The prose is utterly artless.
My coworker, however, is fanatical about the book. I have no doubt that this is due to her hatred of the Catholic church. She has passed it all over the office with admonitions of you have to read this! Look what the church has done!
I read them both back to back in about the same time frame (it was for a book club). I thought A&D seemed like a rough draft. He turned it in, the teacher marked it up with red and then ink, then he turned it back in and it was slightly better.
It seemed like (for both) there was a relatively decent (not great, but decent) mystery story in the middle of a bunch of crap. After he tells the story 4 or 5 more times, he might actually have an ok book.
The Da Vinci Code made the rounds of my GF’s office a few months ago. I’d already read it (OK beginning, blah middle, terrible ending), so when one of her coworkers finished it, I gave her a copy of Foucault’s Pendulum, explaining that it had a similar theme (age-old conspiracies, which she really gets into), but that it was much better-written, and had better characters and a more engaging plot.
She didn’t read it. She returned it to me unread (and I already have a copy).
I don’t get why everyone likes them. Even though I’m not that smart, I’m smart enough that I saw through the plot and the puzzles well before most other people did. I tell everyone that thinks it’s an interesting book that too. I totally figured it out and knew all the facts that were misrepresented in the book. I read lots of history and stuff, just as a hobby, I’m not erudite, but I totally got why it sucked. I usually get why stuff really sucks when everyone else likes it.
I can understand not liking Umberto Eco, but I have to say, I cannot wrap my mind around the idea that he is a poor writer. I know this is a Dan Brown thread, but perhaps you wouldn’t mind elaborating a little?
Read both **DaVinci Code ** and **Angels & Demons ** with my husband. (He received them as gifts.) I read them aloud in a breathless, dramatic fashion, and ended each chapter with the “dum-dum-dum!” that you know Dan Brown would have put in himself, if his editors hadn’t convinced him otherwise.
About four chapters into the DVCode, I stopped reading and put the book down. “I can’t stand reading this,” I said. “This is so *obviously * written to be a best-seller.” (Meaning that it was pop-culture pap written to appeal to the greatest common denominator, like a tabloid.) My hub now enjoys ribbing me about all those authors who work so hard not to write best-sellers.
