There was a symbologist, alas,
Who along up with a nubile French lass
Solved the single greatest mystery
In canonical history
Which is that “ssa emos miH tog ecno suseJ”
(No Latin, I’m afraid, but it does roughly summarize the plot of the book.)
Last one, I promise:
Mary Magdalen was for millennia but concupis
Yet her real price was far beyond rubies
Our Lord knew this well
And the way you can tell
Is to notice “St. John” there has boobies.
it was a fun read, sometimes clever, sometimes stupid, sometimes interesting. One of the stupidities was Langdon’s asides that such and such was “really” about the grail. Like little things in Disney movies, etc.
Also, perhaps I’m out of the loop with regards to modern grail theories, but the ones given as “fact” in the book seem pretty naive. From what I understand, the grail legend is Christianization of a Welsh legend of a horn-of-plenty. When it became merged with the Christian mythos, it became paired with the spear that supposedly pierced Christ’s side. These appear in the Parisfal story. IIRC, it also appeared as providing sustinance to it’s keepers in Le Morte d’Arthur.
That’s a pretty fair assessment. I read both The DaVinci Code and Angels & Demons and enjoyed them both as fast-moving, “just-for-fun” reads. But by golly, Dan Brown really needs to find some educated person to read his manuscripts and point out all the dumb things he needs to change. Some of the howlers that almost made me throw Angels & Demons across the room:
These two Vatican officials seem to be confusing St. Francis’s prayer withe the Serenity Prayer by (IIRC) the 20th century Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
We also learn from Robert Langdon, college professor and international expert, that Christianity borrowed Holy Communion from the Aztecs, that “seraphim” literally means “the fiery one” [“It’s a seraphim, Langdon realized.”—I thought “seraphim” was plural], and that the boy Daedalus escaped from the Minotaur’s labyrinth by keeping one hand on the wall as he moved through it.
Do you mean that he had someone explain something to someone so we could read it? Because he did that a fair amount, simply appropriately. Or that someone was artificially stupid - I think I did think that at one point, but not there - ?
I’m in the middle of A&D, and just hit those passages last night. Sheesh. Who did Christians borrow Communion from for the first 1500 years of Christianity?
The one I like is when Langdon determines that his cell phone is out of range because it fails to get a dial tone. :smack: Good Lord, hasn’t Dan Brown ever used a cell phone?
I read Angels & Demons, thinking it would be an art history mystery. I only kept going because a) I like B-movies, and this was basically a readable B-movie, and b) it was fun tormenting DangerDad by telling him about anti-matter bombs and the Illuminati. I have not read the DaVinci book–I may have to pick it up someday, but I don’t think I could take it right now. 
I liked a short one I read recently from the Penguin Lives series. It focused a lot on his anatomical studies.
Good God Almighty. What a lot of vitriol unleashed in this thread.
A) I’m just gonna sit right here and wait for all you jokers to write a better book than ‘The Da Vinci Code’. Since all you complainers are great at being literary Monday-morning quarterbacks, have at it. It’s a hell of a lot harder writing a good book than you think. Yes, I agree that some of the plot points in the book were a little hard to swallow, but it’s a story, dammit. Get over it.
B) If you think that writing was bad, maybe you ought to read the Left Behind series again.
Sorry, Dan, we didn’t know you were a Doper.
Sigmundex’s Rule of Opinions
Do not comment on movies unless you have produced one.
Do not opine on acting until you have acted in front of an audience.
No opinions on politics unless you have held an elected position.
Do not criticize a published music CD before you too have a published music CD.
etc.
It’s a POS book. Some people hate the plot holes, some the historical inacurracy, some the fact that the guy is a terrible writer. I can usually forgive the first two, but the writing in the book is so atrocious that it blew my mind. I love Shade’s phrase “artificial stupidity” - that describes perfectly how poorly Dan Brown handled characters and getting information across to the readers.
Why couldn’t Dan Brown at least walk a few blocks up Mass Ave and ask an MIT student to look over his book and find the glaringly stupid technical references?
I’m on the other side of it… I’ve not read anyof Dan Brown’s novels, but I’m a big fan of Eco. As such, I’d disagree with your assessment of Eco.
Certainly, Eco’s books are a challenge. Name of the Rose more than the others, but all of them deal with some pretty heady, complex stuff. They do not “make you feel stupid” unless you don’t pat attention while you’re reading. I found Foucault’s Pendulum to be very straightforward, and absolutely intriguing.
Getting through Eco’s stories requires close reading and some real thinking. It requires a sharp mind, but as long as you read carefully, it’s all there. The reason some people think he’s “difficult” to read is that he doesn’t spoon-feed you information… you have to read carefully to get it.
Though (again) I’ve not read them, Dan Brown’s books sound like Jack Chalker’s Midnight at the Well of Souls. I just finished that, after having it recommended by several sources, and he uses the same sort of clumsy exposition and simplistic characterization that I’ve heard described about The Da Vinci Code. It’s not just that he takes liberties with culture and character, but he insults the reader by trying to give them much more than they need. In one particularly bad part of Midnight, Chalker writes of a very long journey down a moving walkway, while one character explains what’s really going on in the story so far. As other, far more efficient methods of transportation have already been described and used on the Well World, it was ridiculously clear that the only reason for the walkway was for the purpose of plot exposition. I felt like reaching into the book like Slappy Squirrel and yelling “Thank you, Mister Exposition!” That sort of clumsy writing just bothers me.
I finished the book, and it got no better. Chalker is an abysmal writer, and Dan Brown sounds about the same. Mind you, because I like Eco and I like the subject matter, I’ll probably still give The Da Vinci Code a shot, most likely as a checkout from the library. But if the critics’ description of Brown’s writing is in any way accurate, I can completely understand their frustration with his work.
And, for what it’s worth, Eco is nothing like that.
Avalonian, I completely agree. Eco doesn’t make you feel stupid - he just makes you work a little at grasping what he’s talking about. Everything you need is in the book itself. The biggest difference is that Brown seems to find the lowest common denominator and then goes about five pegs lower. It’s almost as if he’s a high school teacher that wants every kid in the class to understand exactly what he’s talking about. Everybody who I’ve talked to who loved DaVinci Code I’ve tried to turn on to Eco.
By the way, my girlfriend completely agrees with me and I don’t think she’d ever read Eco. I just typed that because she told me to.
I was Eco’s student.
[/shameless name-dropping ploy]
His writing is so dead-on accurate and pedagogically sound that it got me through two courses of his plus a later one in medieval lit. And, in person, he NEVER tries to make you feel stupid.
When I read the Da Vinci Code, I started snorting as soon as he said “professor of symbolism”. And there were a few other factual errors in the first few pages that really made me cringe. Like, I don’t think he ever used the term iconography. Not once. And some of the Paris details were dead-off.
I have also conversed with Jerry Jenkins (of the Left Behind series, if you don’t remember this has-been).
A real jerk, I can tell you.
Anyway, when I put down the book, all I could think was "This is Jerry Jenkins does Umberto Eco
Aside from all the feminism stuff, I wish that the real secret had been the body stolen from the tomb.
You know, disprove the entire religion by disproving the resurrection.
Sorry to bump this up. It got linked from another board and I followed the link.
So, right your own book.
But I think that one’s been written before. Just sounds kinda familiar.
Slight hijack, but…
one of my favorite writings of Eco’s is his three paragraph explanation of why Macs are Catholic and PCs are Protestant. (Full text here.)
gah! I know the difference between “right” and “write”. But apparently my fingers were on auto-pilot.
Like righting a wrong?
I am writing my own book.
But not that one.
Yeah…it is familiar. All I am saying is that it wasn’t such a profound secret. And I couldn’t really figure out what the author’s point was…such a hackneyed agenda.
Even Tom Clancy has more of a ‘true believer’ agenda.
Or writing a rong.
Especially to anyone who’d read Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I think Dan Brown did all his research by reading its dust jacket.