8 ms·
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
by Yoric 3y ago
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 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
- Gordonjcp 3y ago> One of the few books I deeply regret buying. For me it was Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged, and I begrudged every single penny of the 50 pence I paid for it in the Oxfam bookshop on Byres Road. It's the only book I've ever intentionally destroyed, too. I soaked it in waste Citroën hydraulic fluid, and took it out to the gravelly yard behind my flat, and burnt it. I couldn't bear the thought of anyone without the intellectual rigour to see it for what it is getting their hands on it.
- randrus 3y agoHah! I had a similarly visceral reaction to Fountainhead - I finished reading while pacing angrily, and afterward threw it as far as I could. The only book I intentionally destroyed though was Kaplan’s Advanced Calculus, but that was just the frustration talking.
- johndhi 3y agoWhy? I never get the hate for Ayn Rand - aside that it's weirdly cool to hate her books so people jump onto that bandwagon. I remember really liking Fountainhead.
- randrus 3y agoFountainhead triggered a kind of moral indignation in me. I read it as arguing that the path to happiness and success was to ignore social mores, hold your vision firm, and take what you want. I think I described it as glamorizing sociopathy. Also, I want to reject the imputation of faddish dislike for her. I read this 40+ years ago - I'm not some johnny-come-hately.
- notRobot 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't do this here.
- jameshart 3y agoI 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 3y agoOne 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.
- helf 3y agoFoucault's Pendulum is so much better than any schlock Brown dumps out. ++ for mentionin it. Eco is one of my favorites. Brown also gets facts wrong in his books. Which is irritating.
- seanhunter 3y agoRight. For example I know the area around Temple Church in London really well - for a few years I used to walk through it twice daily on my commute. So when there was all the fuss about the Da Vinci Code I decided to read it for myself to make up my own mind, and terrible as it was the thing that probably annoyed me the most was he gets the geography of those streets wrong. It wasn't changed because the change helped the plot or anything like that - it was just wrong because he didn't care at all about getting details right. It was so _unnecessary_ an error it really drove me nuts. I love Foucault's Pendulum. I always thought it's a fun sideswipe at the literary Foucault also, who with Derridas is so deliberately impenetrable there are a lot of parallels with the charlatans in the novel.
- mcv 3y agoDoes a writer have to be intimately familiar with every location they describe in their books? I know some are, and it's great when they get stuff right, but I don't think it's really that big of a problem when they don't. Although I'm also reminded of how movies get things hilariously wrong in ways that can't be an accident. When I was young, there was a Dutch thriller called Ansterdamned, about a scuba diving murderer moving through the canals of Amsterdam. Lots of locations I recognise. Then there's a massive speedboat chase, and suddenly they're going through a famous and unmistakable canal in Urecht. Fun movie, but the sudden teleport to Utrecht is a bit jarring.
- ttepasse 3y agoLee Child, in his Reacher novel “Night School”, has a major part of the plot being played out in Hamburg’s “HafenCity” quarter. Reading it, you’re rather sure that the author has visited Hamburg and has traced himself the steps of his fictional character. Only problem: the novel plays in 1997, a time, when the HafenCity quarter didn’t exist. Back then it was Hamburg’s old free port area, behind a customs border, not the “normal” city quarter as described. The current quarter is in effect a new development, which didn’t exist in 1997.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoWithout 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/ https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/ Dan Brown helped pay for their digitization efforts and I’m grateful for that. The library is a real gem.
- glimshe 3y agoI've always been interested in visiting but I live in the US. Anything cool in particular about the place you'd like to share?
- dr_dshiv 3y agoWell, they usually have a great exhibition of rare books — and their reading room is inexhaustible — but my favorite thing is the cafe. It’s a place in Amsterdam where you can just sit and strike up amazing conversations with people. Now I’m deeply involved in their community and I love it.
- librish 3y agoComparing Umberto Eco and Dan Brown is wild to me. They write completely different books, with completely different pacing, for completely different audiences.
- TillE 3y agoEco 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.
- canucker2016 3y agoI saw the film adaptation of Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose_(film) That led me to read Foucault's Pendulum. So reading Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and watching Ron Howard's film version of Brown's book gave me a sense of deja vu.
- cjohnson318 3y agoOpinion: Foucault's Pendulum was a faint shadow of The Name of the Rose, which I absolutely devoured in college. I think Name of the Rose was trying to be a long-form version of Jorge Luis Borges, there's even a blind librarian or someone.
- Yoric 3y agoBoth of them are among my favorite books. I don't think I can pick one above the other.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoYou should read it again, or at least read the wikipedia entry to remind yourself of the plot. There is a blind librarian and he's very hard to miss :) I don't think the book has anything to do with Borges. I think you're alluding to The Library of Babel. An altogehter very different kind of book (a short story, but it's not the form that makes the difference).
- southwesterly 3y agoI did the same and Focault’s Pendulum is one of my favourite books. So when the Dan Brown books came along, I enjoyed the, but the depth was lacking.