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Don’t Make Fun of Renowned Dan Brown (2013)
- wkat4242 3y agoReally funny parody. Loved it :)
- NiagaraThistle 3y agoI 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...
- ghaff 3y agoPretty 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 3y agotbf, 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 3y agoIn general, after becoming best-selling, a LOT of authors would probably benefit by editorial intervention that included cutting out a lot of pages.
- Tainnor 3y ago*cries in Dance with Dragons
- unmole 3y agoDance with Dragons atleast had some plot progression. Feast for Crows on the other hand...
- Tainnor 3y agoThis may be subjective. I enjoyed AFfC a whole lot more than I did DwD. I suspect the reason is that I really did like the background imagine of a war-torn Westeros being painted, while on the other hand, everything about Essos seems to be made up in such a way that it's just as "exotic" as possible without any real debt. Even the characters have stupid names that give me a kind of "I don't know what languages besides English sound like" vibe.
- unmole 3y agoI find the normal European names but spelt weirdly gimmick in Westeros much more jarring than the foreign sounding names of Essos. FWIW, English was the third language I learnt to speak.
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago"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."
- rtavares 3y agoThe 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 3y agoThe 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...
- jacquesm 3y agoGood pick! Nothing like a little light literature to get you started off properly on the path to literacy... Sarcasm aside, I first read it when I was in my 20's for the first time (and again recently) and it definitely changed the way I look at the world. Heller is an absolute master.
- taeric 3y agoIts 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?
- majormajor 3y agoJust 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 3y agoI 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.
- themadturk 3y agoProbably because he's soooo bad, but also soooo successful.
- simplicio 3y agoSome 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 3y agoPersonally, 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.
- lifefeed 3y agoEven 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 https://twitter.com/CormacMcCrthy .
- Yoric 3y agoI'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 clichés and combinations of barely half-understood history, art, religion, symbolism. To each their own, I guess.
- anthk 3y agoAlso, Broken Sword existed since 1996 too.
- giobox 3y agoMuch like other comments point out - Broken Sword borrowed liberally from the same "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" book material that Dan Brown also took. Broken Sword even includes an informant character called "Plantard" - surely a reference to Pierre Plantard etc. It's undoubtedly the common ancestor in HBHG that lead to Broken Sword and The Da Vinci Code having very similar plots and ideas - HBHG sold reasonably well, I don't buy into the idea Dan Brown needed to play Broken Sword to write the book - HBHG came out in 1982. There are many other trash-pseudo history books on the knights templar that allege conspiracy/cults etc pre-dating Broken Sword - as a kid I had an insatiable appetite for these books too. Charles Cecil (driving force behind Broken Sword) has happily alluded to his own HBHG inspiration in interviews.
- ttepasse 3y agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Plantard
- esotericimpl 3y ago[dead]
- Semaphor 3y agoHis 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.
- themadturk 3y agoI 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.
- TigeriusKirk 3y agoI 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.
- JohnFen 3y agoI 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!
- jameshart 3y agoDan 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.
- gumby 3y agoSort of like Indiana Jones!
- jameshart 3y agoWith less punching.
- astrange 3y agoThat works for Aaron Sorkin, except you also have dramatic lectures and women telling the male lead they're right about everything.
- AlbertCory 3y agowhile they're walking down a hallway and interrupting each other a lot.
- kybernetikos 3y agoMotion with PERIL. The recent William Gibson books have been bad for that, just people moving between places, without much agency or clue of what is going on.
- codpiece 3y agoHoly cow, that's the perfect summary of what's been bothering me with Gibson's latest few series. Thank you for the insight.
- jacquesm 3y agoGibson has lost it for me with the 'stub' concept. Communicating with an alternate timeline through 'a server somewhere in China' is too thin for me.
- astrange 3y agoI 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
- billfruit 3y agoBut did you read Digital Fortress? I do think, there are far more satisfying books than his, which answer for the same purpose. Popular authour James Michener's books are a much better spring board ino the culture/history of specific nations, for example.
- baby 3y agoReminds me of Malcolm Gladwell. People love to hate on him but damn, do I find his books entertaining and insightful.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- FredPret 3y agoDude sold a lot of books and got movie deals. If it works, it works
- serf 3y agoyeah well that's also how you 'paperclip-maximizer' all of cinema into superhero movies. there is more to the arts than financial success.
- FredPret 3y agoPeople like the superhero movies. Are they wrong?
- robterrell 3y agoI like paperclips. Should we maximize?
- Edd314159 3y agoI 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 3y agoYou 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 3y ago> 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.
- Krasnol 3y agoI 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.
- zem 3y agoI 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 3y agoIn 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 3y agooh, 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.
- dgreensp 3y agoRelated: 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-slender-yellow.html http://www.teflspin.com/2009/10/technical-writing-and-slende... I think send-ups like this are great. Love it.
- readyplayernull 3y ago"He peeled the antimatter enclosing fruit" for the SciFi fans.
- astrange 3y agoThose are called "elegant variations". Or inelegant variations if you get them wrong.
- skyechurch 3y agoI 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoI 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.
- m463 3y ago> 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 3y agoAbsolutely amazing, it's lovely to be reminded of the effectiveness of satire once in a while.
- danielvaughn 3y agoIf you enjoyed this, you'd love The Da Vinci Cod. It's hilarious: https://www.amazon.com/Vinci-Cod-Fishy-Parody/dp/0060848073 https://www.amazon.com/Vinci-Cod-Fishy-Parody/dp/0060848073
- shultays 3y agoWow, a website with a progress bar. That shows a single image and a page of text
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoExactly how radioactive is an antimatter banana, and would it still be susceptible to fusarium wilt?
- mcpackieh 3y agoIt's a completely fake progress bar. If you load the page with all javascript disabled, it loads image and text instantly. This kind of nonsense is common because web designers don't get bullied enough. I browse with all javascript disabled by default because this fixes more websites than it breaks.
- xhevahir 3y ago> 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.
- anthk 3y agoDan 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.
- dyingkneepad 3y agoI 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?
- zzo38computer 3y agoFor me it would not display at all at first, although disabling CSS and JavaScripts (although I always disable JavaScripts by default anyways) allows it to display. That would also prevent it from using their fonts, and force use of the default font, so you could try that, if the browser you use has that feature, I suppose.
- AlbertCory 3y ago> 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?
- ezekiel68 3y agoA decade ago, I literally snorted out my morning coffee when I read "...repetitive and repetitive" the first time. No lasting injury, I'm pleased to report.
- AlbertCory 3y agoFrom the Department of Redundancy Department.
- jacquesm 3y agoFrom real life: NCB Bank.
- Magi604 3y agoI'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.
- jrm4 3y agoHa. 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"
- thedanbob 3y agoDigital Fortress is the one and only Dan Brown book I've read. It thoroughly killed any desire I might have had to read any of his other books. IIRC, the protagonists attempted to decrypt data that they thought was encrypted with a new and unknown algorithm by brute forcing it with a supercomputer. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief after that.
- Izkata 3y agoYou must have forgotten the "rotating cleartext". I don't remember how well defined it was in the book, but it sounded like it means the decrypted message could change out from under them, without being decrypted. Like the encryption was itself a running program they had no control over that could be magically updated remotely. IIRC though, the whole thing ended up being a ruse, a virus made to look like an encrypted message, designed to destroy that specific supercomputer. Digital Fortress was also the only Dan Brown book I've read, and later when I started college, one of the other students said it was the reason he decided to take Computer Science. I kinda winced and wasn't really sure what to say.
- jrm4 3y agoOh, as I tell my students, I literally threw the book across the room once they revealed that was the premise. I remember nothing :)
- jandrese 3y agoI’m in the same boat. I wasn’t all that interested in Biblical puzzle quests so I thought I’d read his book about a field I know a little about. It killed my interest in his works entirely. I managed to finish the book, but after the hero is chased down a hall by the fireball released when the computer virus caused the machine to explode like it was made out of nitroglycerin I was done.
- gruseom 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9ByyMd_qDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9ByyMd_qDA
- ezekiel68 3y agoI can still remember the exact moment someone passed me this link a decade ago and how doubled-over with laughter I was while reading it. Perhaps there's a term or a well known genre (besides "irony") for critiquing a writer by mimicking his style. But it was new to me and it still reads freshly to me today. I don't worry too much about renowned author Dan Brown's feelings. He can cry all the way to the bank.
- sundvor 3y agoI just read it for the first time, without any spoilers. It took me a second, then I had to laugh loud out at the legendary piss-take at display. Wonderful.
- jameshart 3y ago> Perhaps there's a term or a well known genre (besides "irony") for critiquing a writer by mimicking his style Parody. In fact, this is the strict definition of parody - the kind that's actually protected in copyright law. Other things that get called Parody, like Weird Al Yankovic songs, aren't strictly parodic because they are using a creator's work to critique something else. Just changing the words to a thing or reusing the characters or plotlines to make it about something else isn't 'parodic' unless the something else you're making it about has some critical purpose in relation to the original work. Using someone's own style to critique them is, precisely, legally, parody.
- pests 3y agoI don't agree with you on your definitions of parody.
- meling 3y agoThe blog didn’t give me much. But the HN commentary on books is always such a great inspiration for getting new reading ideas. Thanks!
- geocrasher 3y agoI have to admit that as I read this, I had recently awoken from a nap and in my stupor following that nap, I was somehow replacing Dan Brown's name with Tom Clancy's. Nevertheless I completely enjoyed the blog post and got a good laugh. It was only after reading through a number of the comments that I realized my mistake, and had to laugh even harder because some of the same things could have been said about Tom Clancy's writing. And in fact, I really do think that most of these things could be sent about any successful writers works. It can also be said about musicians, artists, and probably the guy who washes your windows too. That is say, their works are all derivative, are formulaic in nature, and probably involved Windows at some point.
- dudul 3y agoTom Clancy was indeed such a terrible writer. While his books were very interesting when it comes to the tech and the strategic realism (this guy freaking knew his stuff there is no denying that), his style was awful, character development was childish, and the pacing was always a bit odd. I would say the main difference with Brown is, as u said, Clancy knew his stuff. He would probably spend more time doing the research for his books than writing them. I can find respect for a writer that puts in the work like this.
- acjohnson55 3y agoThis is the funniest thing I've read in a while. I had to look up pulchritudinous, and in Google, the example usage is the sentence in this piece :) https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=pulchritudinous+ https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=pulchri...
- teh_klev 3y agoThere's a lot of mickey taking of Dan Brown's work but I found them (up until The Last Symbol) easy-osy reads in between more serious novels. They were something to relax with in the form of boy's own adventure stories from my youth. Now even if his books aren't anywhere near high culture in a literary sense I do think that if they get non-readers to start reading books then that's a good thing. They can be gateway novels to much better writing. See also JK Rowling, Joseph Finder and Lee Child. Apropos Lee Child, my dad hadn't read much in the way of fiction for many years and then in his 70's somehow bumped into the Jack Reacher novels and he ploughed through them all on his iPad in his spare moments. That's no bad thing.
- mcmoor 3y agoI liked Digital Fortress, but then again I was in high school. People here say that there are better novels around the same topic but I haven't encountered it for the last 10 years. Is there are good novels that I'm missing?
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoThis was fun to read, but I'm missing some context I think. What did Dan Brown do, to deserve such a vituperative put down? I mean besides the writing, which I understand is not great. Did he refer to himself as "renowned" something?
- joenot443 3y agoHe received some vitriol in the 2000s from some Christian groups about Da Vinci Code being blasphemous. I think these days he’s mostly just seen as a bit of a literary punching bag who makes popular, digestible books for Gen-X Americans. I read DVC in high school and thought it was a fun read, definitely not a book I’d expect someone to be later criticized for. Perhaps it’s a bit like Michael Bay or Roblox or The Bachelor, smart people being overly critical of popular things mostly just because they’re popular.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoThanks. To be honest, I felt the review above was a bit on the nose. But I guess it's considered OK if one is punching up, even if there's a bit of snobbishness in the put-down. I have read DVC. I must say, I don't remember it!