Bulls hit?
I don’t get it. I mean, I’m no symbologist or anything…
May I recommend some reading that I think will keep you riveted?
Yeah I noticed that. I read the books in reverse order, so I enjoyed DaVinci and Angels & Demons, but I hated the first two. I’m chalking it up to use the same idea until he hit success. Of course, if the next book follows the same formula, I’ll be done with him.
The problem isn’t that he dumbs things down (which he does). The problem is that he takes wild premises that have no historical or scientific basis, and then attempts to present them as FACT.
I think he’d have more respect if he hadn’t attempt to pass his work off as being strictly based on firm historical and scientific claims.
My problems with Dan Brown are twofold:
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Bad writing. It goes among Eragon and Twilight as novels I have tried and found wanting.
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People think that shit is TRUE, and apparently he says it’s true. The “historic” facts about Jesus and Mary Magdalene and Leonardo da Vinci? Yeah, I’ve met people who believe it wholeheartedly. It pisses me off.
I haven’t read any of Dan Brown’s books, but when I first saw The Da Vinci Code in the store, I picked it up, read the blurb on the back and flipped through it a bit, and thought, “So somebody has based a bullshit novel on that bullshit book Holy Blood, Holy Grail.” Not my cup of tea.
That doesn’t bother me. I love Robert Anton Wilson and he believed every conspiracy theory in the world.
The problem is he gets a lot of the science plain wrong. IIRC his container for the antimatter was made of plastic and yet was able to generate a magnetic field to contain the particles so that they could be smuggled through customs. Don’t know what happened after that as I stopped reading.
Not to get off on a tangent, but no … I don’t think he did. But he had a lot of fun mocking those who DID.
And the history, geography, religion, art, architecture, politics, mythology and language, plus a few other piddling little details here and there.
Rome is in Italy, though, so he seems to have done some research.
And chicks with long, wavy red hair are often smokin’ hot. So, yes, even I don’t think he gets everything wrong.
So you’re saying I’d probably think the Bourne novels were crap too, if I were to read them?
I don’t even remember how far I managed to slog through The DaVinci Code. It was a definite struggle, and believe me, if I want a light little thriller, my standards aren’t huge.
I managed to not laugh when Brown breathlessly and repeatedly wrote (in chapter 3, checking the book) about how “the Citroën” navigated through traffic, as if this was an impressive vehicle class and he was speaking of it in reverent tones. He certainly wasn’t using the car’s make to distinguish it from another in a chase, as he was describing the exciting event of the protagonist being driven, uneventfully, to the scene of the crime. This is as if he repeatedly wrote phrases worded similar to, “As the Ford accelerated southward across the city,” for no apparently good reason. He identifies it once near the start of the chapter as a Citroën ZX, which is this magnificent vehicle. He also only referred to the driver taking action once (accelerating) or twice (turning off the siren), but the rest of the chapter wrote as if the car was doing the driving itself.
That’s just one example, barely scratching the surface of how awkward his writing is. He drags the reader through with frequent chapter changes, often only a few pages each and frequently ending on some kind of urgent note.
Finally, he states just before the Prologue that the Priory of Sion is real and had many famous members, and that “[A]ll descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate” while repeating myths/urban legends like - for starters - the Louvre Pyramid has exactly 666 panes and was built with such at Mitterand’s demand. So either he’s quite deluded about conspiracy theories, or he’s intentionally misleading his readers by putting that after the title page (i.e., not in a foreword) and yet labeling the page with a big “FACT:” header. Unlike the Bourne books, he’s using religion and (often) deeply-held religious beliefs to manipulate his readers. And that irritates me.
To clarify, I don’t think people shouldn’t read Brown. If you can get past the awkward language (I can’t), I can see how it would be an interesting read. Conspiracy theories are fun! But people shouldn’t think that he’s a highly skilled writer, or very groundbreaking, or that he knows what he’s talking about on the topic. He gobbled up a big pastiche of conspiracy theories, slapped an “it’s true!” label on a lot of it, and churned it out into a formulaic thriller, then (I haven’t read them but my husband has) rinsed and repeated for his other works.
(My husband recommends the adventure novels of James Rollins, who’s better with the science than Brown is - he typically follows real scientific fact and theory to a more-or-less logical extrapolation of where that could lead to. I’ve read a couple of them and found them quite entertaining. Rollins is a better writer than Brown, too. My husband adds that he thinks the last few books haven’t been quite as good as the others but he still enjoyed them.)
It’s a pity this site isn’t working properly any more, but scrolling through the code gives you some idea…
I read Angels and Demons when it came out and sort of enjoyed it stealth hypersonic aircraft operated by CERN as a black project? I don’t think so; that’s very silly! but when The DaVinci Code came out, I started reading it until I thought ‘this is the same book!’
And James Rollins has one of my favourite OTT scenes in any of these ‘ancient artifact’ adventures… the hero and the villain battle it out hand to hand, inside a battle tank which has fallen out the rear door of a Hercules (iirc) aircraft and is plummeting towards the ground!
Jack DuBrul’s Philip Mercer series is pretty good, too…
If you just hit Reload repeatedly on that first page, you get more examples. 
By “both” do you mean Angels & Demons and DaVinci Code? I read both of them ,and found them to be light, mindless entertainment. Then I read Deception Point, and had this odd feeling of deja vu. Then I read Digital Fortress, and it dawned on me three chapters in that he was using the exact same plot in all his books.
It was like reading a Mad Lib. Within three chapters, I had guessed which character was the Unlikely Hero, the Love Interest (who is highly intelligent, yet needs basic concepts spelled out for her), The Red Herring (what? You thought he was the bad guy, but he’s killed by the Real Bad Guy two thirds of the way into the story), and who was the Real Bad Guy (Oh no! It was Out Unlikely Hero’s mentor the whole time!)
Oh yeah - the last chapter will be a tacked on love scene.
So it does; I never thought to try!
Yes, I should have been more specific, but I meant A&D and The DaVinci Code. I can see the annoyance at Brown putting forth some of his story devices as fact, but it didn’t really bother me. I expect fiction authors to make stuff up. Blame the gullible audience, not the author.
I’ll probably wait and see what kind of reviews the new Dan Brown novel gets, but if they’re good enough, I’ll probably get around to reading it. At least it’ll give me something else to snark about here on the SDMB.
I read and enjoyed his previous books as entertainment. I absolutely would not rely on them as a source of knowledge of histiory, science, philosophy, or anything else. I think they work if, and only if, you read them fast; if you read slowly and carefully enough to pay attention to things like writing style, you may not be able to stand them. Even so, there were plenty of glaringly obvious errors that I couldn’t help but notice.
You can recommend me some! I like that genre.
Please define “OTT.”