Okay, I haven’t read “DaVinci Code” and I don’t really have any interest in it based on things I’ve heard. But a friend of mine gave me “Deception Point” with his recommendations, so I felt I should at least give it a try.
Holy shit, does it suck. The writing is just awful, hackneyed, cliched and clumsy. To say nothing of the factual stuff he got wrong, though that’s not necessarily a deal breaker if the story is good. I got as far as page 44 before throwing it down in disgust. But my friend liked it…
So, has anybody read it? Does it get any better?
Also, if this is typical of Brown’s writing skill (is it?) then how is he so popular?
For God’s sake, stop NOW! You lose 1/100th of an IQ point for every page of a Dan Brown novel you read. Why, I had to write a review of the Davinci code, and when I was done I had forgotten how to do quadratic equations.
Haven’t read it but based on experience (“Angels and Demons” all the way through, “DaVinci” just enough to realize it had peaked somewhere between the cover and the first page) I’d say no, it doesn’t get better. “Awful, hackneyed, cliched and clumsy,” are par for the course. Then there’s all “the factual stuff he (gets) wrong,” which seems like nit-picking to the Boobeoisie but can be “a deal breaker if the story is (not) good.”
Why is Dan Brown so popular? I dunno, except that he is one of the many current proofs Mencken was right when he said, " Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." And before I get dumped on for being elitist please search for my other posts in Cafe Society; you will find that my tastes run to crap so if a writer, like Brown, stands out to me as unreadable that’s saying something.
[QUOTE=dropzone]
Haven’t read it but based on experience (“Angels and Demons” all the way through, “DaVinci” just enough to realize it had peaked somewhere between the cover and the first page)
[quote]
That’s such a lie. “The DaVinci Code” peaked between the “T” and the “H” on the cover.
Okay, I think I’m convinced, if I wasn’t already. I can read crap too. I’ve read most of Michael Crichton’s books and he’s a hack too, but at least he’s a fairly entertaining hack. Brown is just painful to read.
Why is he so popular? A combination of things. Never underestimate the power of the lightning strike of luck in gaining popularity. Also, at this point, enough people have read The DaVinci Code that the snowball effect has taken over. (Everyone else has read it, maybe I should too). The DaVinci Code also has a fast moving story with enough secrets and conspiracy and suspence that once you’ve read a certain amount one wants to know what happens next, so one must keep reading. Plus, he mixed conspiracy and religion with some famous figures, and so it’s intriguing to find out what else he had to say. Even if you don’t believe most of it.
I listened to an abridged version of the DaVinci Code about 6 weeks ago, while driving with my mother, and we agreed that 5 or so hours (not the 11 of the unabridged version) was plenty.
Of course, we might have noticed the following pattern less if we hadn’t listened to all of it in about 48 hours.
Pattern
Character A “This is hopeless. We’ll never figure it out”
Character B smacks self in forehead as he (or she) is suddenly struck by a flash of insight.
Insight is revealed.
Steps are taken based on insight which in hindsight is blindingly obvious.
Characters become paralyzed with indecision and hopelessness.
Repeat.
Coupled with the bad guys always being exactly one step behind . . .
I wouldn’t call it a horrible book, but if I’d been reading it on my own, instead of listening to it on CD with my mother, I might have stopped despite the lure of finding out “what happens next.”
I read the Da Vinci Code because it was popular at school and I like to keep up with pupil tastes.
I read Harry Potter too.
Now Harry Potter books have a plot, are well written and worth rereading.
Dan Brown is truly appalling.
In the Da Vinci Code:
Our heroes go through incredible complications, facing death at every step, to find out a succession of silly clues. It turns out the last one in the series is … wrong. :rolleyes:
In Angels and Demons:
The Head of Vatican Security has no idea what anti-matter is, nor why it would be dangerous to bring it into contact with matter. :rolleyes:
Our heroes decide it’s necessary to warn the Vatican of a terrorist plot. They decide the best people to do this are a girl in a mini-skirt and a man whose speciality is interpreting mystical signs. :rolleyes:
I read it, and I found it, and Dan Brown’s other books, to be entertaining, but I read them fast and didn’t pay much attention to the writing style. I suspect that if I tried listening to them read aloud, I might very well end up ramming Phillips screwdrivers into my ears. If you don’t like it so far, it’s probably not worth it to you to keep reading.
Dan Brown’s popularity is due partly to the fact that he’s great at keeping readers turning the pages to find out what happens next or what the answer to some riddle is going to be, partly due to the controversy around the supposed secrets and conspiracies he “revealed” in The Da Vinci Code, and partly because popularity breeds popularity: when you’re hot, lots of people hear about you and your audience grows ever wider.
Dopers: Any recommendations of writers who do the same kind of thing Brown does but are a lot better at it?
Or turning the pages to see how long it will take the characters to figure out what you already figured out. I was at least a chapter ahead of the DVC heroes at one point. “Golly, what do you suppose the combination for the lock could be?” Um gee,
maybe the numbers the dead guy wrote next to his body? Ya think?
And this is odd behavior for me; I’m usually happy to leave all the detecting to the fictional detectives. But in most books I read the detectives are smarter than me. Not in The Da Vinci Code. The whole damn book revolves around da Vinci; if you know anything about da Vinci other than “Italian Renaissance, painter, bearded, dead” you know he kept journals in mirror writing; and yet when a piece of mirror writing falls in their laps they dither about exotic alphabets!
James Rollins. Absolute crap from the first page, but I can read them like popcorn. Absurdities piled onto cliches and lots of fun.
Matthew Reilly. More of the same, with added scientific and military nonsense.
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are also to be enjoyed.
(Damn. I cannot be proud of my leisure reading. In my defense, I would like to state that I do not want anything challenging while on the beach, nor anything that I would care about if it fell into the water before I finished it.)
[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
Dan Brown’s popularity is due partly to the fact that he’s great at keeping readers turning the pages to find out what happens next or what the answer to some riddle is going to be…<snippage>
[QUOTE]
Actually, for me that was possibly the most annoying part of his style. It’s like he writes in little snippets, like a movie trailer. Little two or three page chapters that all have a “hook” at the end. Then he’ll switch to a different character for a few pages and do the same thing. Rinse, and repeat. Way too annoying for me. If he’d just stick with it for a while and lay out a scene, maybe I could ignore the awkward dialog and cheesy phrasing.
The name of the painter of the Mona Lisa was Leonardo. He is properly referred to as Leonardo. He was FROM da Vinci. But THAT WAS NOT HIS NAME, and, Zororaster help me, the next time I hear someone call him da Vinci I shall abandon all my super-villainy principles, track Dan Brown down, and personally beat him to within 3/17 of a millimeter of his life – and then beat him another two klicks!
I believe that many people like the feeling of being smart. The dumber-than-average contestants on many popular quiz shows, not to mention reality TV in general, can be attributed to the same phenomenon. With respect to Dan Brown, my only question is whether or not he is cunningly patronizing the public by deliberately writing idiotic stories over which they can feel intellectually superior, as opposed to being a genuinely bad writer who has simply gotten lucky.
(For the record, I finished neither Angels & Demons nor Da Vinci Code; I managed three chapters of the first but not even the entire first chapter of the second before giving up.)
Not trying to defend anyone here, least of all Dan Brown, but this doesn’t bother me too much, since it is one way in which surnames originated anyway; might as well complain that some medieval character or other wasn’t really called ‘John Smith’, he was just called John, and was a metalworker.
…‘da Vinci’ was part of his name, because that’s what people called him; that’s what names are.
