[HN Gopher] Don't Make Fun of Renowned Dan Brown (2013)
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Don't Make Fun of Renowned Dan Brown (2013)
Author : codetrotter
Score : 84 points
Date : 2023-07-21 19:35 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (onehundredpages.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onehundredpages.wordpress.com)
| shultays wrote:
| Wow, a website with a progress bar. That shows a single image and
| a page of text
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Exactly how radioactive is an antimatter banana, and would it
| still be susceptible to fusarium wilt?
| jrm4 wrote:
| Ha. I teach an Intro to IT course, and I quite literally open my
| lecture on encryption making fun of Renowned Dan Brown.
|
| Namely, I acknowledge that the Tom Hanks joints are fun, but then
| I proceed to clown the terrible "Digital Fortress," which begins
| with the premise of:
|
| "The TERRORISTS have developed UNBREAKABLE ENCRYPTION and we are
| ALL DOOMED"
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical,
| repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary
| tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed
| metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in
| sentences such as "His eyes went white, like a shark about to
| attack." They even say my books are packed with banal and
| superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly
| hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his
| insect eyes flash like a rocket.
|
| I love it. "clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive"
|
| If you look at the publishing industry, there are well-defined
| genres (YA: young adult, MG: middle grade, romance,
| mystery/thriller, cozy mystery, sci-fi, etc.) A lot of agents say
| explicitly which genres they're interested in.
|
| For me, if I know the author is assiduously sticking to a genre
| and doing what he thinks the reader wants, then I'm turned off.
| It would be nice to shut my brain off and just enjoy it, but I
| can't. YMMV.
|
| If you're Dan Brown, you don't have to care what the critics
| think. So why would you?
| FredPret wrote:
| Dude sold a lot of books and got movie deals. If it works, it
| works
| serf wrote:
| yeah well that's also how you 'paperclip-maximizer' all of
| cinema into superhero movies.
|
| there is more to the arts than financial success.
| egypturnash wrote:
| If you make lots of money selling bazillions of copies of a
| mass-produced work that appeals to and entertains a large
| segment of the population, you're a hack who makes trite
| garbage.
|
| If you make lots of money selling one work to one very rich
| person or corporation, you are a Fine Artist, and anyone who
| thinks what you made is ugly (which is very often a large
| segment of the population) is an uncultured fool.
|
| There's a range somewhere between these two extremes where
| you make enough money off of your art that it pays your
| bills, but doesn't require you to cater to the whims of the
| catastrophically rich. I'm in that range and it's pretty
| nice.
| FredPret wrote:
| People like the superhero movies. Are they wrong?
| Edd314159 wrote:
| I don't think serf is calling anyone wrong. Just that there
| is more to the arts than financial success.
|
| It's ok to let people like the Marvel stuff, _and_ lament
| the fact that there is less effort going into making more
| interesting (from one perspective) movies.
| FredPret wrote:
| You can't reach financial success in the arts without
| delighting a whole lot of people with your art.
|
| If some other people then turn up their noses at this
| art, one has to wonder if they're just trying to project
| an air of superiority.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > one has to wonder if they're just trying to project an
| air of superiority.
|
| Or it could be that's just not a style of art they enjoy,
| and wish that there were more of other types around.
| robterrell wrote:
| I like paperclips. Should we maximize?
| Krasnol wrote:
| I would love to see a study on the influence of Dan Brown books
| on the likelihood of readers to believe in (popular) conspiracy
| theories.
|
| Somewhere in the 90s I got a book "The Holy Blood and the Holy
| Grail" from a friend who was into obscure conspiracy theories. It
| was a fun read, but in the end I took it more like a joke. Unlike
| my friend.
|
| Years ago, my SO came home with Browns "The Da Vinci Code" and
| forced me to read it on a holiday. It was as if someone wrapped a
| cheap crime template around "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail"
| and my SO loved it. She was never into conspiracies, and most of
| those people who in the following months and years fell for the
| Da Vinci Code hype were in the same boat. But to me, it felt like
| someone found a way to sell fringe conspiracies to a mainstream
| audience.
|
| I applaud his idea to do that, but it somehow doesn't feel good.
| ttepasse wrote:
| I already wrote upthread: The story behind the genesis behind
| Holy Blood, Holy Grail is far more funnier than the conspiracy
| theory in the book: The authors fell for a con-artist:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Plantard
|
| (I had the same experience like you.)
| Krasnol wrote:
| Thank you for that. It instantly made the whole story even
| more funny. I love it :D
| zem wrote:
| I remember our parish priest actually addressing it at the
| time, he was like "look, this is a popular book and I'm not
| saying not to read it, just realise that it's pure fiction,
| _especially_ the bit where he claims that Jesus was just
| considered a man until a committee got together centuries after
| the fact and decided that we would call him divine. "
|
| it wasn't particularly fulminating; he was quite good natured
| about it all, but in retrospect I have to wonder if he had even
| read the book himself, or if the church hierarchy had wanted
| priests to make sure that that particular point was spoken
| against.
| Yoric wrote:
| In Paris, there were so many tourists visiting some of the
| churches mentioned in the book and "educating" their children
| based on what they had read from Dan Brown that these
| churches had posters on the doors reminding people to please
| stop taking Dan Brown seriously.
|
| That being said, historically, there have been a number a
| debates among early Christians before it was made canonical
| that Jesus was divine. Debates continued a long time, too, to
| determine what the word "divine" meant in the context.
| zem wrote:
| oh, agreed, there was definitely a kernel of truth to that
| one. i just found it interesting that the priest not only
| said to remember the book was fiction, but to emphasise
| that that one point was fiction.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > It was as if someone wrapped a cheap crime template around
| "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" and my SO loved it.
|
| This "cheap wrapping" makes me think of Atlas Shrugged. I read
| the book completely "blind" without foreknowledge of it or its
| author--recommended to me by a relative.
|
| Partway through I felt the author was insulting my intelligence
| by trying to sneak a vapid manifesto (as an entire chapter,
| even) within a fiction novel, and I completed reading it out of
| pure spite, so that I could confidently denounce it.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Only an entire chapter? Significant swathes of the book are
| just characters monologuing about how much they hate the
| poor, and how great their enlightened selves are for actively
| shooting themselves in the foot to spite the proletariat.
|
| I say often, and only half-jokingly, that Atlas Shrugged made
| me a socialist. I grabbed a copy for free that was otherwise
| being sent to the trash, and by the end, it was clear that I
| shouldn't have interrupted its journey. It's like if someone
| took Nietzche, discarded the good bits, replaced the overt
| misogyny with the more subtle "woman should improve
| themselves by being more masculine" variety, and then tossed
| in some kinda-rapey sex scenes to try and keep peoples
| attention through a 1000-page novel/manifesto.
|
| Read Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread and Stirner's The
| Unique and It's Property a few months later, never looked
| back.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Yes, you're right. This is a perfect comparison.
|
| However, I've never finished Atlas Shrugged because it was so
| crappy, and I wasn't on holiday when I started it. It was
| actually the first book I stopped reading because up until
| that point I wanted to give the authors the chance for a turn
| at the end.
|
| I couldn't find any reason to do this with this book.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Believe it or not, the book actual got more heavy handed
| towards the end, presumably as Rand realized her publisher
| wasn't going to accept another 1000 pages.
| [deleted]
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Atlas Shrugged is one of just a handful of books I had to put
| down because I couldn't force myself to endure the pain and
| finish. It truly is crappy writing.
| Yoric wrote:
| If I recall correctly, the authors of The Holy Blood and he
| Holy Grail actually sued Dan Brown for plagiarism.
| dgreensp wrote:
| Related: Slender Yellow Fruit Syndrome (when a writer doesn't
| want to repeat a word like "banana" and so writes something like,
| "He peeled the slender yellow fruit.")
|
| http://www.teflspin.com/2009/10/technical-writing-and-slende...
|
| I think send-ups like this are great. Love it.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| "He peeled the antimatter enclosing fruit" for the SciFi fans.
| anthk wrote:
| Dan Brown's books on Spain are a disaster on settings, they suck
| a lot and totally not close to the actual reality of the country.
| Magi604 wrote:
| I've read and own every Dan Brown book (except for "Wild
| Symphony" which I didn't know existed until today and is
| apparently an illustrated children's book). For me his books are
| engaging and when I start reading them I can't stop, though I
| think Langdon has run his course and it's time for a new hero.
| However I can totally see how his typical formulaic structure can
| turn people off.
| gruseom wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9ByyMd_qDA
| skyechurch wrote:
| I didn't survive the first paragraph of the Da Vinci Code, so I
| can't vouch for accuracy of the satire, but it is awfully funny.
| dxf wrote:
| I had read and enjoyed Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", and
| as I read Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" I found I kept contrasting
| Brown's work to Eco's. In the end, I didn't even finish "The Da
| Vinci Code", it just felt so weak to me.
|
| But art, literature, music, and wine are all things of personal
| preference. You like what you like! And you shouldn't let anyone
| tell you not to spend your time reading Dan Brown (or whomever)
| if you enjoy it.
| majormajor wrote:
| I had a very same reaction - "this is Foucault's Pendulum with
| simpler writing and a bad case of wanting to be writing Indiana
| Jones" - and I think that really drills to the heart of the
| debate about quality/taste/literature/snobbery/whatever going
| on in some of the other comments here.
|
| A big part of "taste" is _exposure_ to a lot of stuff.
|
| If you read 1 book a year, or predominantly only 1 genre even,
| your range of comparison points is going to be so much lower
| than someone who has read 10x or 50x or 100x more that. And
| that volume of data is what lets you really start to separate
| the wheat from the chaff. And this is why so much of what
| people experience as a teen or young adult sticks with them so
| long - all of those works have the opportunity to be the _first
| thing of its kind_ that the person encountered.
|
| If you aren't interested in reading that much more, and
| especially if you aren't interested in reading more complex
| plots/subplots/sentence and paragraph structures, then that's
| perfectly fine.
|
| But if you ARE interested, and you enjoyed Da Vinci Code:
| definitely check out Foucault's Pendulum. It's got a perfect
| meta twist on the whole thing too that really makes it hold up
| today, too, IMO.
| Yoric wrote:
| I read Foucault's Pendulum several times. First time, I was
| about 13yo and I loved the story. Then I read it again as an
| adult and realized just how many subtle jokes and references
| I had missed upon my first reading.
|
| Just don't forget that the Templars are always in it.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| That's OK, I had the same feeling about Foucault's Pendulum and
| Illuminatus!. It's like there's a conspiracy among publishers
| to rehash the "what if the conspiracy theories are real" plot
| every few decades.
| majormajor wrote:
| SPOILERS (for 30+ year old book, hah)
|
| ---
|
| To me, the delightful thing about Foucault's Pendulum
| distinct from the broader "conspiracy fiction" genre is that
| there is no conspiracy _discovered_ , only _created_.
|
| And that's a fundamentally different story and investigation
| into human nature than a straight conspiracy story like Da
| Vinci Code - IMO, a much more interesting one.
| BEEdwards wrote:
| No conspiracy, the books sell. People buy and enjoy them. Not
| my thing, but it is what it is.
| m463 wrote:
| > You like what you like!
|
| I have found I have a personal star-handicapper.
|
| For science fiction, what I watch can dip down to 2-star shows.
|
| For a romantic comedy, I probably need 4 or 5 stars.
|
| Drama needs 5 stars.
|
| For documentaries, having a slew of 5-star important, well-
| done, insightful movies means little. I still rarely watch
| them.
| tines wrote:
| Absolutely amazing, it's lovely to be reminded of the
| effectiveness of satire once in a while.
| xhevahir wrote:
| > Maybe critics don't like him for his formulaic writing -
| copying the plot over and over after Angels & Demons.
|
| I think a big part of what makes this article funny and effective
| is that it shows you lots of what Brown does so poorly in his
| writing without even touching the subject of his recycled plots.
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| I gave up reading the article: I can barely understand the font
| they used in the website! What an uncomfortable mess. Am I the
| only one?
| NiagaraThistle wrote:
| I love Dan Brown's books. Maybe critics don't like him for his
| formulaic writing - copying the plot over and over after Angels &
| Demons. But IT WORKS. And it is HIGHLY engaging and moves the
| reader through the book at breakneck speed just like the action
| in the books. Plus Even when you know the formula of his books,
| the twists and turns and gotchas turn out to be great. Plus the
| stories have amazing real world location and art references and
| descriptions and for anyone that has been or plans to go to the
| places in Brown's books, he makes these places really come alive
| and you actually appreciate more of the acrchitecture and art of
| the setting if you do visit if you knew little about either
| previously.
|
| And he adds just enough real history intertwined with his pseudo-
| history to make the books super interesting, and even give the
| curious reader a springboard to dive deeper into the questions
| his books raise for Mr. Langdon.
|
| Oh and then there's the worldwide sales and financial success he
| has achieved from his books...
| jameshart wrote:
| Dan Brown books don't contain 'action', they contain 'motion'.
|
| I understand how the way Brown writes makes it seem like he
| thinks something exciting is happening but in fact all it is,
| is his protagonists are moving from place to place in a series
| of taxis.
| astrange wrote:
| That works for Aaron Sorkin, except you also have dramatic
| lectures and women telling the male lead they're right about
| everything.
| gumby wrote:
| Sort of like Indiana Jones!
| jameshart wrote:
| With less punching.
| themadturk wrote:
| I blow hot and cold on Dan Brown. I laugh at him as a writer,
| but there's not a book of his that I've read that I haven't
| enjoyed. He's like popcorn, hard to stop once you've started.
| And enjoying a writer's books often makes the even parodies
| sweeter.
| ghaff wrote:
| Pretty much. "Beach reads" (and, yeah, a lot of genre fiction
| including most SF) fall into this category but criticizing
| popular reads because they're not somewhat arbitrarily-defined
| _literature_ seems pretty pointless.
| notahacker wrote:
| tbf, he isn't being parodied here for not being _literature_
| here, he 's been parodied for the sort of poor writing
| editors are supposed to fix regardless of genre. Weird or
| mixed metaphors, the odd minor grammatical error, redundancy
| that isn't for dramatic effect (actually all stuff 'literary'
| authors are more likely to get a pass on as critics assume
| they were there on purpose) and an oddly journalistic
| approach to introducing characters.
|
| I mean, it's also true that renowned author Dan Brown does a
| lot of things well in a way that _literature_ usually fails
| or doesn 't even try: pacing, puzzles, intrigue, ideas and
| references that interest the reader. The book sales aren't
| completely accidental. He'd never have sold the same number
| of books if he tried to write like Tolstoy, or Pynchon, or
| even a fairly mainstream-friendly Booker Prize winner. But
| people would have enjoyed the books just as much if they'd
| been better edited.
| ghaff wrote:
| In general, after becoming best-selling, a LOT of authors
| would probably benefit by editorial intervention that
| included cutting out a lot of pages.
| rtavares wrote:
| The first book I read was Angels & Demons, illustrated
| edition[0]. I was ~11 years old and my professor took my class
| to an used bookstore and we had to choose a book and summarize
| it. Oh God, how lucky I was to have this book recommended to me
| and to find the illustrated edition. The book's plot and
| illustrations complemented each other in such a way that I was
| entertained as children are entertained today with a
| smartphone.
|
| I don't remember if I read the last book in the Robert Langdon
| series, but I have to say that after reading Inferno, I had to
| read Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.
|
| Nowadays I'm always reading something. This first experience
| was important and the books I chose evolved as I matured in
| reading. 0:
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/184865824842
| arethuza wrote:
| The first "grown up" novel I can remember reading at the age
| of 12 or so was "Catch-22" - I'm pretty sure this has had a
| long term effect on me...
| taeric wrote:
| Its funny, as I get the impression that this also describes the
| Reacher series. And really any "pulp" fiction. So many
| successful stories are basically the same story over and over.
| Curious why this particular one would be so derided?
| themadturk wrote:
| Probably because he's soooo bad, but also soooo successful.
| majormajor wrote:
| Just my opinion/reaction, but Da Vinci Code stood out to me
| compared to other "easy reading" as particularly blatant/lazy
| in its chasing and extension of cliffhangers.
| taeric wrote:
| I mean, it is no worse than many comics I have read. Or a
| lot of other, so called "young adult" novels.
|
| Is it better than a lot? I mean, almost certainly is in the
| mix there. It did enjoy a lot of time in the spotlight in
| ways that somewhat surprise me looking back. I couldn't say
| how it caught the attention that it did.
| simplicio wrote:
| Some of it is just normal "popular thing sucks" backlash. But
| it had a weird cultural moment in the early 2000s where the
| press went kinda nuts with some of the psuedo religious
| themes, and there was a brief cottage industry for talking
| heads talking up apocryphal biblical books, Knight Templar
| conspiracy theories, etc which I think rubbed a lot people
| the wrong way.
| psd1 wrote:
| Personally, I think his storytelling is poor, but it's not
| the worst. 5th percentile for plotting, say. But he plumbs
| new depths with his prose.
|
| I am not above reading trash, and you often have to accept
| crappy writing in genre fiction. My wife reads the trashiest
| pulp romance there is. But even considering the low-grade
| prose in our diet, Dan Brown's writing is worse by an order
| of magnitude.
|
| I'd rather gargle diarrhoea than read his shit again.
|
| I'd rather attend a school play.
|
| I have ADHD, but I once spent a day looking at a wall rather
| than allow his tepid faeces into my person.
|
| He passes the turing test: machines cannot write that badly.
| His word choice smells like burning tyres, his sentence
| structure is like a drunk driver in a car park. He's a
| phenomenon.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| "All that may be true," the renowned BaseballPhysics accepted
| magnanimously, "but that doesn't make this blog post any less
| hilarious." The famous physicist who wasn't actually a
| physicist and certainly didn't know anything about baseball
| paused dramatically. "If there's one thing we've learned from
| Twilight," he continued, his analogy illuminating like a
| soaring eagle, "it's that the quality of writing doesn't
| necessarily correlate with commercial success."
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I watched his course on Masterclass and found it helpful in
| learning to write his type of book. I was impressed that he is
| very conscious of what he does, how he does it, and he's quite
| good at explaining it to others.
| astrange wrote:
| I think his stock "evil ethnic yet cosmopolitan assassin with
| conspicuously foreign name" characters are kinda weird. (In
| Inferno it's a woman named "Vayentha" working for a guy named
| "Zobrist".)
|
| This might be a literary SF trope. One of the silliest was in
| Tad Brown's Otherworld[0], which has an evil yet cosmopolitan
| Aboriginal Australian assassin.
|
| [0] it's like a literary SF version of Sword Art Online, and if
| this makes it sound weird it's a lot weirder than that
| lifefeed wrote:
| Even if you love his books you are still free to appreciate a
| good parody.
|
| I enjoy Cormac McCarthy. I also enjoy the fake Cormac McCarthy
| twitter account https://twitter.com/CormacMcCrthy .
| Yoric wrote:
| I've had a slightly different experience of Dan Brown.
|
| Some if it may due to my having read Foucault's Pendulum 5
| years before Dan Brown, and part of the plot for Foucault's
| Pendulum is actually an algorithm for generating Dan Brown-
| style books. Written about 20 years before Dan Brown's novels.
| Of course, the fact that Umberto Eco writes much better (and
| with much greater humor) than Dan Brown didn't help me
| appreciate the latter.
|
| Some of it may also be due to the fact that I actually love
| reading on religion, religious history and art history... and
| that Dan Brown's books very much felt to me like combinations
| of well-trodden cliches and combinations of barely half-
| understood history, art, religion, symbolism.
|
| To each their own, I guess.
| ttepasse wrote:
| I had it slighty worse: As a teenager I bought Holy Blood,
| Holy Grail on a whim (it were the 90s) in a bookstore because
| I was reading another Grail-focussed book series. HBHG is an
| utterly absurd book which could not even hoodwink a 14-year-
| old. One of the few books I deeply regret buying. Slightly
| later I read Focault's Pendulum which of course inoculates
| one even more against this crap.
|
| But of course Brown copied everything in his Da Vinci Code
| from HBHG which is obvious, when reading it. Every twist and
| turn is then utterly predictable. There was a copyright case
| in the 90s, annoyingly decided in Brown's favour.
|
| The real history behind HBHG is far more funnier: turns out
| the authors took their story from a french con-artist who
| fabricated documents and genealogies and deposited them into
| the Bibliotheque Francaise. And of course according the the
| con-artist the last descendant of the Merovingian Kings was
| himself.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Plantard
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| [dead]
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Without wading into the literary merits of either author, let
| me just drop a mention of the Ritman Library of Hermetic
| Philosophy in Amsterdam, aka the Embassy of the Free Mind.
|
| https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/
|
| Dan Brown helped pay for their digitization efforts and I'm
| grateful for that. The library is a real gem.
| jameshart wrote:
| I read _Foucault's Pendulum_ on vacation, and picked up _Da
| Vinci Code_ on a whim in the airport on the way back because
| I was in the mood to continue the theme. To say he suffered
| in the immediate comparison would be an understatement.
|
| All I can say in Mr Brown's favor is that the book was at
| least the perfect length to finish during the flight.
| fallinghawks wrote:
| One of the things that makes Dan Brown great airport
| reading is that you can set the book down, forget about
| what happened, and pick it up again pretty seamlessly
| because he will repeat all the key points. And this happens
| over and over again.
|
| It also makes him terribly boring for "normal" reading of
| if you have a memory longer than that of a goldfish. Give
| me Umberto Eco any day.
| librish wrote:
| Comparing Umberto Eco and Dan Brown is wild to me. They write
| completely different books, with completely different pacing,
| for completely different audiences.
| TillE wrote:
| Eco himself joked that Brown was one of his "Diabolicals".
|
| But I agree, they're radically different books which bear
| no comparison aside from the theme of secret societies. I
| adore Foucault's Pendulum, it's one of my favorite books.
| And the first two Robert Langdon books are really fun,
| despite their flaws, and despite the author's weird claims
| about factual accuracy.
| anthk wrote:
| Also, Broken Sword existed since 1996 too.
| helf wrote:
| [dead]
| esotericimpl wrote:
| [dead]
| JohnFen wrote:
| I find his books (well, I've only read two of them) to be
| tedious, personally. But then, I also find mindless action
| "popcorn" movies to be tedious, so perhaps that's not
| surprising.
|
| Different strokes!
| Semaphor wrote:
| His formulaic writing is one thing (one of my favorite authors,
| Glynn Stewart, releases about 1 military scifi novel every
| three months, it's pretty formulaic), but my issue was how he
| made things up, and had them close enough to reality that is
| really hard to tell the difference. Maybe it's more of an issue
| I have with people, but it still made me stop reading him.
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(page generated 2023-07-21 23:00 UTC)