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Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown (2013)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mperham 2y agoThat’s amazing. Really nails his stilted prose.
- _carbyau_ 2y agoI love the stylised writing as humour. It would have to have been revised, crafted, tweaked, revised into being. It reminds me of: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/how-i-met-my-wife.html https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/how-i-met-my-wife...
- dlcarrier 2y agoI listen to a few hundred audio books a year while working. There seems to be no correlation between the quality of the writing and the fame of the book. As disheartening as it is that thousands of great novels are never recognized, it is also awkward that some percentage of awful novels sell well and need to be reviewed. I don't think we should make fun of Dan Brown, or assume that all of his novels will be awful, but we should take his individual novels for what they are, and for every one I've read, they're squarely in so-bad-it's-good territory. For anyone else who enjoys such novels, I highly recommend Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. There's also commentary on the novel by the creators of RiffTrax in episodes 71 through 77 of the 372 Pages podcast: https://372pages.com/ep-71-if-bizarre-foods-went-horny https://372pages.com/ep-71-if-bizarre-foods-went-horny
- citizenpaul 2y ago>I listen to a few hundred audio books a year while working. What do you do that you can immerse yourself in novel and get work done at the same time? I want that job. I've never had a job that was mentally so untaxing that I could listen to a book at the same time.
- sfjailbird 2y agoYeah that is quite the accomplishment. A few hundred? Most audio books are like six to ten hours of continuous audio!
- satvikpendem 2y agoI do the same, but at 2 to 4x speed depending on the book, that cuts down the time significantly. I don't listen while working though, as I work in software not in the other fields that were mentioned in the answer to a sibling comment which are more monotonous in nature perhaps.
- PNewling 2y ago> 2 to 4x speed Wow, how do you even process it at that speed? I normally listen at 1.2x, but feel like if I hit 1.5x, maybe 1.8x if it is a really slow narrator, I'm maxing out. I mainly am listening to it while I'm running though, so 5-20% focus on that depending on traffic or if I have to cross streets, the rest of my focus on the book. Are you just sitting and listening to it at that speed focused in on it, or are you just abled to digest it at that speed?
- satvikpendem 2y agoPractice. The more you listen the faster you can go. I can digest it at that speed, yes. Sometimes I watch shows like that especially if there's a lot of filler content, anime in particular. No one has time to go through a thousand episode.
- 93po 2y agosome peoples brains just operate faster, like have a faster clockspeed in the same way CPUs do. i feel like people who can read extremely fast also correlate strongly to people who can listen to audio very fast. my partner is an unbelievably fast reader, like the fastest i've ever seen, but she also has a phd in maths and is generally brilliant, i have no idea where im going with this. some peoples brains are just wired for high amounts of data bandwidth. but also practice, and it also depends on the original speed of the speaker/content.
- phire 2y agoWhat I've realized is that the fame of the book is closely related to how interesting and unique the "elevator pitch” of the book. Which makes sense when you think about it; It's the elevator pitch that's spreading by word of mouth, not the book. It's also become clear to me that there simply isn't a single "quality of writing" metric. Write quality is made up of dozens of factors (prose, character development, world building, plot development, grammar, uniqueness, pacing, dialog, etc). Each person balances those factors differently, and trying to squash them into a single metric is just bad communication. Personally, I love sci-fi with good world building; As long as the book has great world building, a decent plot, and a unique concept; I'm usually willing to give it the label of "average writing" despite the bad prose, clunky pacing, and cookie-cutter character development. But other people immediately turned off by the negative factors (especially bad prose).
- Terr_ 2y agoI dimly remember a time in the 90s when I thought technology was supposed to free us from the tyranny of "judging a book by its cover" and "following the crowd", when you could carry around a personalized algorithm to help you identify things you would like even if they were obscure or un-marketed. It feels like that didn't happen, and we're still stuck with the same issue of promotions and gatekeepers and tastemakers, because those who control the algorithms (centralized, proprietary, remotely hosted) find it more profitable that way.
- mandmandam 2y ago> It feels like that didn't happen Any time it happens, things get twisted, or shut down. Reddit used to be good. Twitter used to be good. But the money people come in, the bots, the astroturfers, the guerrilla marketers, the spammers... If they stay alive regardless, in come the billionaires to offer ridiculous sums. People complained that TikTok's algorithm was too good at finding niche and interesting content. The marketing was somewhat balanced, and tailored to people's actual tastes. That was before lobbyists and politicians discovered that it was severely interfering with their propaganda. Now I hear you can't so much as post 'Free Palestine', and kids are supposed to be grateful that we're allowed to have it on our phones at all. All that said, for people with the right skills there is no shortage of entertaining content to discover; far more than could ever be consumed in a lifetime. It's really the most important news and views that gets suppressed the most.
- jandrese 2y agoI went on a quest to read Hugo award winning novels a couple of years ago and have come to the conclusion that there is disappointingly little correlation between award winning and quality writing as well. Or the people who judge books have different criteria than I do as to what makes a book good.
- magicalhippo 2y agoFew works of art are great across all the metrics. A book (or a movie) can have a great overall premise and structure, but have lacking dialog, flow or other issues. Is it good? Perhaps for me, but not for you. I just watched Lost Highway in the theaters. I had never had a chance to watch it on the big screen before, and I brought my SO. I love the movie since there's no clear cut interpretation, yet it also feels accessible. My SO hadn't seen it before, and while she thought it was fine overall, she really disliked that there isn't a canonical "this is what happened and this is what the things mean" explanation. The very thing that made me love the movie.
- B1FF_PSUVM 2y agoHugo awards are by popular vote of fans attending conventions, and SF mostly prided itself on being about ideas, so you'll get what caught most people's fancy at the time.
- jccooper 2y agoHugo voters are members of the World Science Fiction Society (who are mostly Worldcon attendees). Which is to say, voters for that are chosen for enthusiasm for the genre, not taste.
- _carbyau_ 2y agoI have come to accept that most books are good at something, and maybe even a few things, but not so great at many things. I embarked on a similar "read the Hugos" adventure and much of it is great in a sci-fi premise - understandable - but the characters or pacing or unfolding story is meh. Example, The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber [0] is a great exposition of gravitational effects when a planet-sized object appears in the sky nearby earth. Characters and unfolding story are meh. I pictured it as a C-grade 60's movie with stilted acting. But the way the earth was reacting and the moon coming apart was a great fictional invention and the way it was done was novel at the time! In similar vein, Conan stories are great fantasy adventures with well described fights, battles, scenes. I've never found a better author to describe a fight - or a battle between armies - with enough detail to make it interesting and exciting and yet in relatively few words. I've also never read stories as sexist and racist... but I don't go out of my way to look for that I guess. I accepted it was written in the day it was and had to sort the wheat from the chaff. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21808426 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21808426
- kennysoona 2y ago> they're squarely in so-bad-it's-good territory. I wouldn't say they are bad at all. They are just pulp/popcorn fiction and not trying to be more than that. MCU movies considered good are not bad just because they are not trying to be more than they are.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sgustard 2y agoDon't miss another excellent takedown of the Da Vinci Code by a renowned linguist: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.h...
- buggy6257 2y agoGood lord I could practically write an equally-long response post to this linguist dissecting his "takedown" (if it could be called that) of what amounts to a single sentence of the entire book, and bases his opinion on that it seems.
- jll29 2y agoFun read. Minor typo: s/the the/the/g;
- Izkata 2y agoI'm fine with made-up technology and technobabble, but Digital Fortress had one thing that didn't make any sense: the supposed reason the new encryption scheme couldn't be cracked was "rotating cleartext" - that somehow the encrypted contents could magically change over time and the brute force cracking would have to start over.
- mvdtnz 2y ago> There's also commentary on the novel by the creators of RiffTrax in episodes 71 through 77 of the 372 Pages podcast 6 podcast episodes on a 500-page paperback thriller? That's not commentary, that's mental illness.
- dlcarrier 2y agoThey cover over 20 chapters per episode. Any fewer episodes, and it would be difficult to keep track of what you've read, by the time you listen to the episode. They also play games based on the contents of the chapters, and answer listener questions, to fill out the episode.
- chris_wot 2y agoYou really should read Ice Station by Matthew Reilly. It's so bad its good. It has an attack killer whale the bites off one of the characters legs after launching itself meters into the air.
- xarope 2y agoI have so many of his books; there was a time in my life when I was traveling a lot, under a lot of stress from various projects, and on the plane all I wanted to do was to turn my brain off. Those books fit the bill.
- dlcarrier 2y agoThanks for the recommendation. The libraries near me only have the text version. Sometimes this happens if the audio book is an Audible exclusive. Audible can pay out as little as 25% of sales to authors, for audiobooks that aren't exclusive.
- danpalmer 2y ago> For anyone else who enjoys such novels, I highly recommend Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. I thought Digital Fortress was the better book honestly. *Spoilers ahead* – In The Davinci Code you need to suspend disbelief on many aspects of the book. However with DF, most of it is just regular old US government conspiracy stuff that makes reasonable action books. The main thing you really need to suspend disbelief on is the creation of this perfect unbreakable code, but by the end you find out that such a code has not been created and that actually it was just a virus after all, which is really quite realistic. It's still just a pulp action thriller novel, but I felt it was much more realistic. That said, I'm basing this on last reading it maybe 12 years ago.
- novemp 2y ago> For anyone else who enjoys such novels, I highly recommend Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. Isn't that the "try the kanji" book?
- seangrogg 2y agoIndeed it is.
- luqtas 2y agowhich type of fame? ephemeral best-sellers by New York Times? because if you 'read' hundreds of books each year and you can't see sui generis in works like Don Quijote, Cien años de soledad, Fernando Pessoa, Ferreira de Castro, Raduan Nassar or getting down to english solely, Ulysses play on words or even biographies like Walden by Henry David Thoreau or On The Road by Jack Kerouac or poems by Walt Whitman, Maya Angelou and even translated stuff like Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Hans Staden etc. ※ i'm curious the motif of your dismissal. specially when people dedicate their lives to study literature and in some way or another, rank up classics again and again... please also consider some books were revolutionary or set a genre on the time they were released, so it's unfair to want contemporaneity into stuff wrote 500 years ago, although some are quite impressive how actual they are by their age; as well personal preference. i never got hooked by Great Gatsby, for example (although i finished it)
- dlcarrier 2y agoIt's difficult to get older books in audiobook form from libraries, because only recently have audiobooks overtaken ebooks in popularity. For works old enough to be public domain, They are usually available from LibriVox, although the narrators are usually not as well practiced as the commercial audiobooks.
- bdeshi 2y agospent quality time in my youth making xkcdphone style doodles for the fingertip typing gadget used by a character in Digital Fortress, something like this: https://www.techeblog.com/tip-tap-finger-computer-input-device/ https://www.techeblog.com/tip-tap-finger-computer-input-devi...
- jajko 2y agoThat explains why movie sucked so much, regardless of good actors involved. Never saw appeal to even check those books, looked to me like some novels for my retired mom rather than something worth spending time on.
- vrighter 2y agoi cringed so hard when reading Digital Fortress. I could not put it down. spoiler: the answer is 3
- yellowapple 2y agoMy only memory of Digital Fortress is that my mom sold our copy of it on eBay when I was midway through reading it and that still ever-so-slightly irks me almost two decades later.
- dlcarrier 2y agoYou didn't miss much, but if you feel you need to find out what happened, get a library card and sign up with Libby, to borrow the ebook or audio book for free. The libraries near me don't even have a wait list for the audio book.
- vanderZwan 2y ago> the pulchritudinous brunette’s blonde tresses. Think this is my favorite joke in the whole thing.
- russellbeattie 2y agoHeh. I actually looked it up while reading the post and Google's definition includes that exact sentence as the example.
- vanderZwan 2y agoIt's so absurd that I didn't even notice the "brunette's blonde tresses" part at first
- zabzonk 2y agoNever really understood why these modern best-seller writers are so popular. It's not as if the text is even easy or enjoyable to read! At least with guys like Tom Clancy you got a load of military hardware stuff to get off on.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoBelieve it or not but a vast majority of readers have no interest drowning in materiel specs while reading a book. Ridiculous, I know. I had the same reaction when someone recommended I read the abridged Moby Dick(without knowing I've read the unabridged thrice), because who wants to hear about all those random whale facts?
- graemep 2y agoRandom whale counterfactuals too - remember the insistence that whales are fish?
- zabzonk 2y agoyeah, they get called fish (something that swims, like modern military torpedo), but the whalers knew they were not
- SaberTail 2y agoI don't remember it that way. I took it more more as being about the definition of "fish", and demonstrating that whalers don't think about things the same way that non-whalers do. It's not ignorance; he acknowledges repeatedly throughout that whales breathe air, and nurse their young, and other mammalian traits.
- cowfriend 2y agonot a counterfactual. "fish" was a legal definition which allowed hunting.
- Perenti 2y agoFrom a phylogenetic perspective, whales are fish. So are we.
- louthy 2y agoGenius comedian Stewart Lee likes to poke fun at Dan Brown… https://youtu.be/-yUDh_IErT4?feature=shared https://youtu.be/-yUDh_IErT4?feature=shared
- quercusa 2y agoUnfortunately not available in the US.
- quercusa 2y agoThey even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man.
- Animats 2y agoIt's been all downhill since "The Flight of the Old Dog".
- mauvehaus 2y agoThat's Dale Brown, not Dan Brown. And yes, having read more than my share of Dale Brown novels, they didn't really improve from the first. Nonetheless, they were a great guilty pleasure read for me in middle and high school.
- navbaker 2y agoWow, I completely forgot about Dale Brown! That was a very specific time in my life when I was into Tom Clancy due to my dad having all his books on a shelf and I had run out of Clancy novels to read.
- Animats 2y agoOh, right. The Da Vinci code guy, not the techno-thriller guy. Real Tom Clancy books were OK. But he's been dead for a decade. Tom Clancy branded books are still coming out, written by somebody, but they are not very good. If you like series that went on too long, the sequel to Fourth Wing (Hunger Games with dragons) is out, there's yet another Hunger Games fill-in book soon, and something is happening in the Harry Potter space.
- kennysoona 2y agoI was backpacking through Europe when I read the Da Vinci code. It was dumb cheap fun, nothing bad about that at all. It was cool to be on a bus cross into a country that the characters were also trying to sneak into.
- dukeofdoom 2y agoI just read a few pages of the Davinci Code, but it seemed like an Indiana Jones style story. Which must have been kind of fun to write. Plus all the money from his books must be pretty nice. Reminds me of this quite from Michael Caine on 1987's 'Jaws: The Revenge': 'Someone said to me, “I saw that 'Jaws 4' - it stinks” - and I said, “I haven't seen it, but I've seen the house it bought my mother, and it's marvelous.
- DavidPiper 2y agoI was gifted Michael Caine's book for Christmas and just finished it. I was surprised and impressed just how enjoyable a read it was. Strong recommend to anyone who might be thinking about picking it up. One of the best memoir/autobiographical style books I've read.
- russellbeattie 2y agoApparently he's written several - which one are you talking about? The most recent?
- DavidPiper 2y agoOh! Sorry I meant "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off".
- russellbeattie 2y agoI just checked and he narrated the audiobook! Listening to the preview now and it sounds as good as you'd think.
- comrade1234 2y agoWhen the da Vinci code came out I was traveling every week for work as a programmer consultant. I saw so many middle-aged women reading this book in airports that I became convinced that it was a self-help book. I read the first few paragraphs of this submission (sorry, didn’t finish, I swear I already read this years ago) and to my surprise I realized that I’ve read every single book Dan brown published. I read good stuff too… :(
- humanlion87 2y agoI have genuinely been surprised by all the negative comments about Dan Brown and his novels. I read his novels when I was in middle/high school (in a developing country) and I loved them, especially The Da Vinci Code. I remember waiting to get my hands on it from the school library and then reading the entire novel in one sitting (which was a first for me). It's been ages since I have read one of his books. After seeing multiple threads like this I am reluctant to read again one of his books. I am afraid that I might "overwrite/destroy" the good memories I have of the "feeling" of reading his books.
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- saagarjha 2y agoI read them around the same time and they were fine. I think they are reasonable to read at around that age and when you get older you realize there’s not that much depth there.
- ranger207 2y agoEh, if you like it, you like it. Unless it's hurting someone, why care about what gets people's dopamine receptors going? After all, that's why the concept of the guilty pleasure exists
- plorkyeran 2y agoI thought they were a fun read, but there was a widespread idea at the time that they were somehow something more than that with actual depth. The hatred is mostly a backlash against that.
- bena 2y ago"Good" is an overloaded word. We use it to mean both "enjoyable" and "well-made". And we often confuse the two, thinking that if we enjoy something, that means it was well-made. And that if something is well-made, then we should enjoy it. But it's not. For instance, I like the film, The Ice Pirates. It's stupid, it's cheap, and the plot doesn't quite make sense. But it's fun. I can't quite put my finger on it, but whatever is happening, it's the kind of stupid I apparently like. But I will never say it was a "good" film, in that it was well-made. To contrast, The Fountain is a mostly well-made film. The acting, cinematography, score, visual effects, etc, are all well done. I cannot deny that. However, I loathe that movie. It is just incredibly mediocre at the end of the day. The story is just banal. It has one message, delivers it real early in the movie, and then just keeps beating that dead horse. And I can see how it's easy to get distracted by the pageantry of the film. But I cannot get over that one hump. So, yes, Dan Brown may be a horrible writer. His books may have all the problems pointed out by the author of the article. Dan Brown may not write "good" books. That does not mean people don't like them. And it does not mean they are wrong when they do.
- Nevermark 2y agoAnything can signal something great to people. An oddly ugly actor, with a strange voice who happens to also be a great character actor can become perceived as good looking and an audible charm without changing a thing. Similarly, the repetitive and technically flawed but also predictably distinct tempo of an author who writes books that are consistently easy and enjoyable to read without too much mental hardship can become beloved. Never underestimate the power of anything, no matter how seemingly worthless on the face of it, to signal something good to people. When we ask “how can people like that?”, we may be seeing the reliable flaws quite accurately. What we are missing is it is exactly those particular flaws that have now become a signal of something those people like. The flaws are just the consistently awful din outside a loved restaurant. Unacceptable anywhere else, but welcome when dining there. What sounds like cacophony to many, is now hypnotic tempo to others. — TLDR; Branding lesson: any distinctive disadvantage can be counter intuitively leveraging for good effect, by incorporating it as a signal of something good. Soup nazi. TLDR2; Health lesson: You can learn to like the taste of almost anything, if it makes you feel good after you eat it. TLDR3; Social lesson: This is how beloved assholes become loved for being despicable assholes. People like something about them in spite of their being an awful person. Then they start associating their irredeemable asshole-ishness with what they like about them. Then they love that they are a destructive asshole. It’s one of their best features!! This dynamic underlines the worship of the asshole qualities of many real and fictional assholes. Slovenly lazy rude unbathed detectives are a classic. Certain repugnant politicians.
- drawkward 2y agoOn the branding lesson: OK Cupid, the dating website, used to have a blog that wrote on topics relevant to data analysis from their site (much of which was repurposed in the book "Dataclysm" by Christian Rudder, one of OKC's principals). One of the topics refers just to this phenomenon. OKC data scientists found that among people who had similar attractiveness ratings (i.e., the hidden average rating you got on your looks by other users who rated you), people whose attractiveness was higher variance got many many more private messages. In other words: imagine two people who were rated, on average, a 3/5. One way to achieve this is by always being rated 3, for 0 variance. Another way to achieve this is to be rated 50% 1, and 50% 5; high variance. The person who was half 1s and half 5s would get many more messages than the "straight 3". OKC's blog theorized that this is because while half of the people rating the high variance person were not at all likely to reach out to them, the other half see the high variance peraon as very desirable. On the other hand, everyone sees the straight 3 as a straight 3, and are less motivated to message them. The advice given by OKC was just like your branding advice: play up your divisive or unique characteristics, rather than downplay them. The people who like big noses (or lots of tattoos or whatever) are looking for you!
- DavidPiper 2y agoFor those in this thread that enjoyed reading Dan Brown novels: Don't give random people on the internet the power to take away joys of your past. This is something I see come up a lot on the Internet. It begins with a critique of something (sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek) and almost immediately develops into OTHER people being criticized for enjoying something that someone else thinks is bad, often through the mechanism of the "this is terrible" people drowning out the "but I like this" people by a factor of 10-to-1, because it's the Internet. Art is subjective. People consume it for different reasons, at different times, with different expectations and different perspectives. People also LOOK for different things in art (some people like themes, some people like history, some people like aesthetics, some people like fun, etc.) - and they look for different things in every piece of art they consume. I've never read a Dan Brown novel. Maybe I'll like them, maybe I won't. But lucky for me it's going to be easy to go in with a clean slate and form my own -- oh wait.
- titanomachy 2y ago> going to be easy to go in with a clean slate and form my own -- oh wait Yeah, this post was kind of a "can't unsee" for me and totally ruined those books. Although, maybe it was just a decade of reading better books that did it.
- MarkusWandel 2y agoToo old and cynical now to suspend disbelief for Dan Brown stuff (even the movies), but have in the past enthusiastically read series of certified potboilers such as - the original James Bond novels - the Dick Francis novels If it works - for the author, make megabucks, or for the reader - be entertained, then so be it. It's not like the hit movies are the deeply cerebral ones either. The books can still suck from an artistic standpoint, and the critics can still rip into them.
- ggm 2y agoThe word "like" in this context, is an invitation to Betteridge's law of headlines, except its like (sorry) "Betteridge's law of simile" It invites you to step beyond the 4th wall, go meta and ask yourself "but IS IT" and usually, the answer is .. Brown, and Rowling both got to an income level where the file notes in the publisher said: "their literary agent knows we think it's too long, but the contract says we can't tell them that, and in any case it's profitable. don't worry" If you want a contrast, read Len Deighton's self-reflections in re-issues of his book. He really loved critique. It hurt, but it helped. He also liked being plugged into the tech scene enough to get offered early sight of some of the first word processing systems, and talks about the impact they had on his writing. I happen to like both what he writes, and how he writes. Sometimes, I find myself reading authors where I'm reading in spite of how the words resonate off the page.
- willangelo 2y agoHonestly, Dan Brown was my first introduction to any sort of literature that was not manga/comics and I liked every book. Granted, I read the Portuguese translations so there might be differences in the “writing style”. There is a lot of history and art embedded in the books (as I believe his wife is a historian and is greatly involved in the making of the books, if I’m not mistaken) which I believe is the highlight, a lot more than the plot or anything else. I distinctively remember reading The Da Vinci Code in my grandfather’s house - there is a piece in the book about secrets in The Last Supper and my grandfather had a big clock in the house with it as the background. I remember going to the clock to check out what the book was saying about the painting and being mindblown. I don’t even remember if everything made sense but that stuck with me.
- crooked-v 2y agoTo some degree it reminds me various pieces of "thinky" scifi (a lot of Stephen Baxter or Larry Niven work, for example), where the plot and characters are constructed around exploring some interesting ideas or concepts for the reader. Often in that territory the writing is stilted by necessity, because the writer doesn't want to overload things with complex character relationships or elaborate internal lives on top of the Big Ideas.
- jgwil2 2y ago> Granted, I read the Portuguese translations so there might be differences in the “writing style”. I'm certain that translation could only improve the books; the English writing is quite poor.
- willangelo 2y agoIf the English writing is as bad as people say, I definitely agree
- acuozzo 2y ago> the English writing is quite poor It's conversational. It reads as if it were dictated and published sans editing. This is what most readers want, it seems. Honestly, this doesn't bother me. I can't imagine the oral tradition our species has enjoyed since time immemorial to be any more eloquent.
- nappy-doo 2y agoA good friend of mine was friends with Dan Brown when they were both kids. Dan broke his back (or something else just as serious), and was in a cast for a year+. My friend used to say that he was normal when he got hurt, but turned into a real menace after the accident. My friend passed away a couple of years ago, or I'd have him fill in the details.
- AnotherGoodName 2y agoHeaven forbid anyone read the Hackernews darling, Snow Crash in a similar light. I sometimes get put in a position where i state my favourite book. Snow Crash. What's it about they ask? Well there's a guy who delivers pizza, 'a deliverator' they call him but his name is Hiro Protagonist (yes seriously that's the main characters name folks). It's set in the dystopian future where you have to deliver pizza in under 30minutes or face public execution for the entertainment of the people who didn't get their pizza in time. He uses a skateboard and grappling hooks to get around and has samurai swords because he studies the way of the blade. He logs into the metaverse where he's a hardcore hacker by night. He ends up meeting a biker who has a nuclear bomb in a sidecar with a tattoo on his forehead that reads POOR IMPULSE CONTROL... (i could ramble on for a while like this trying to explain what it's about but you probably get a sense for it). I actually think Neil Stephenson was intentionally trying to write the most ridiculous book possible but the truth is the book is FUN. I don't care about clever plots or prose. I want FUN. Da Vinci code is similar. It's an Indiana Jones movie in book form.
- lxgr 2y agoDifferent levels of self-awareness about ultimately not taking themselves too seriously, arguably. (Doesn’t mean one can’t enjoy both, of course!)
- hi_hi 2y agoI recently watched a new show called Prime Target. Watching it frustrated me as some aspects just didn't hold together, or were totally overstated. The wife would get frustrated with me in turn when I would point these out. "How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine". I wasn't sure how to answer that at first, but I think your comment solidifies it. I can accept ridiculous and unrealistic scenarios as long as they are fun, and held together within an equally ridiculous world. Theres a fine line between something that is clearly a dramatisation being frustrating or just fun.
- skydhash 2y agoI read Wuxia (chinese cultivation novels) which can go on for over thousand chapters. And often the plot is repetitive and thin, but I like it over cheap dramatisation that can be solved if the two parties decided to talk to each other (when there's no other reason that prevent them other than not wanting to). I'd take talking and not agreeing or being powerless over not talking and creating misunderstanding every day. Especially when the plot is all about not creating the chance to talk.
- tczMUFlmoNk 2y ago> "Thanks, John," he thanked will always be my favorite part of this. It makes me laugh like a babbling brook.
- titanomachy 2y agoBlrbrbrbrbbrbl
- andrewflnr 2y agoOh god, I had to read it three times to truly see it. (FWIW I started skimming pretty early in OP)
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoI never bothered reading the Da Vinci Code. Digital Fortress was so shockingly poorly written that I never wanted to touch anything else of his.
- lemonberry 2y agoBooks are like wine. Given a selection of wine, connoisseurs will select wines that the average drinker won't. But their experience and expectations are very different. Adventurous/curioust/openminded folks will cross the aisle and change their expectations. The rest will stay with their easy-to-drink wines or their complex. I tried reading "The Da Vinci Code" and it felt like a was a bad version of Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum". But that's me. Most of my friends would choose "The Da Vinci Code". And I imagine Eco and Brown had very different goals for their books. I did love Harry Potter and Hunger Games though! Not great works of literature, but they're super fun!
- michaelcampbell 2y agoInteresting; I've read them both and I can't really remember much of Eco's, but I do Brown's. I think I read The Da Vinci Code first though.
- lemonberry 2y agoIt's a been a really long time since I read "Foucault's Pendulum" and having never read "The Da Vinci Code" the similarities may have been projected onto them by me at the time. I probably wasn't as open minded back then either. Well, at least I hope I'm more open minded know.
- maroonblazer 2y agoIf you enjoy this style of writing - TFA's, not D Brown's - then check out The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest[0]. Here's a sample: "Space Fleet Commander Brad Brad sat in silence, surrounded by a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, maintaining the same forlorn frown that had been fixed upon his face since he’d accidentally destroyed the phenomenon known as time, thirteen inches ago." https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2019 https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2019
- jszymborski 2y agoThe article reminded me of Philomena Cunk's narration.
- quuxplusone 2y agoFor another parody of this "brisk and strenuous" literary style, check out "London's Gold-Mines, or a Day Among the Dustmen" (1904): https://books.google.com/books?id=VecaAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA16 https://books.google.com/books?id=VecaAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA16 > [...] As the dust fell from his cart he thought that he saw some object glittering in the evening sunlight. He got down from his cart to the ground and walked down the slope of the shoot to the spot where he thought, possibly, the object might have fallen. He groped about in the refuse with the toe of his boot, which was tipped with iron nails, and soon disclosed the bright object which he had really seen. He picked it up between his fingers and examined it with his eyes. [...]
- bruceh48 2y agoAs my old Dad used to day.. "Anybody can be a critic, its hard to be a creator". How many of these armchair critics of Dan Brown have actually written even one book!
- opo 2y agoSomewhat related, there is also the famous quote by Teddy Roosevelt: >...“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
- Fraterkes 2y agoYour dad sounds like a bit of a dullard!
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- dang 2y agoNot in 2023 either: Don’t Make Fun of Renowned Dan Brown (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36818501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36818501 - July 2023 (165 comments)
- microflash 2y agoAh, the infamously quoted source of “pulchritudinous”
- GMoromisato 2y agoThe concept of a "guilty pleasure" is kind of weird, if you think about it. If you enjoyed reading a book, why does it matter that some narrow subset of humanity doesn't like it? Critics are supposed to be good at judging on two criteria: 1. Will the average person enjoy this? 2. Is it actually good? Why does it matter to me whether a book is "actually good" or not? One reason is that it's a status marker to like books that are "actually good" and not just popular. Maybe all that "actually good" really means is that high status people like it. But in my opinion, true high status comes from setting the bar, not following it. Stop trying to chase status by following the tastes of high-status people. Instead, just enjoy what you enjoy without apology and without guilt.
- qnleigh 2y agoI would like to think that there is more to quality than status... I feel like this attitude backfires by discouraging people from talking about things they thought were good in certain ways for fear of being dismissed as a snob.
- GMoromisato 2y agoMaybe there's more to quality that status, but I don't know what it could be. One argument is that people who read a lot of books know quality. But I don't buy it: maybe people who read a lot of books have different tastes. And in any case, that just reinforces my definition: quality is what a certain (elite) group of people say it is. Another argument is that complex books are better than simple ones. But that just means elite taste-makers like complex books, maybe because they've read so many books that straightforward ones are boring to them. But there's value in books that are easily understood--that's the whole point of writing: to communicate. One shouldn't value opaque books just because they're opaque. Yet another argument is that smart people like good books and dumb people like popular books. Smart people are able to appreciate good books that are beyond most people. The convenient thing about this is that you can show how smart you are by liking certain books, which is way easier than winning a Fields Medal or Nobel Prize. Snark aside, this is just defining "good books" as "books smart people like", which is (in my view) morally equivalent to "books high-status people like". As for "discouraging people from talking about things," I'm not yet arrogant enough to think that my post on Hacker News(!) is going to influence anyone. But if I did, I would tell people to stop worrying what other people think. Stop worrying about whether others think you're a snob or a mid. Like what you like and talk about it as much as you want.
- fortran77 2y agoI remember someone joked—-long before ChatGPT—that he could write a Perl program to generate Dan Brown books.
- jacobmarble 2y agoThis reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld's comments about his critics in "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee". Summarizing, when the audience laughs, they vote about the quality of the bit. When the tickets sell out, they vote about the quality of his work. So, who cares what the critics say? This might not make sense, but sometimes this perspective helps me (not a comedian, or anyone critics have ever heard of).
- KingOfCoders 2y agoI found the book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", from which he took all the ideas for his first bestseller, more interesting than his novel.
- derriz 2y agoNow that's a great pulpy bestseller. It doesn't commit Dan Brown levels of atrocities on the English language but doesn't at all use a literary style - it's designed for low-effort reading. The biggest redeeming feature for me was that clearly it doesn't take itself too seriously despite faking a documentary tone. My copy of it included snippets from reviews including extremely negative ones.
- mpreda 2y agoThis was no nice! had fun reading it. Also learned the meaning of the conspicuous word pulchritudinous, which in the default Oxford languages dictionary Google uses [1] comes up with "Dan gazed admiringly at the pulchritudinous brunette" as usage example. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=pulchritudinous https://www.google.com/search?q=pulchritudinous
- 93po 2y agoi personally relearned what transitive verbs are, haha. but that, too
- Simon_O_Rourke 2y agoThis is all just crass literary snobbery... "look, just look how badly Dan Brown writes, I could do better, here let me weave in some reference to Keats". The fact is that Dan Brown is laughing all the way to the bank while this mere pamphleter rails against perceived slights against literary asceticism.
- sevg 2y agoIs this comment a bad joke? Or did you miss the fact that this post was a joke? > The fact is that Dan Brown is laughing all the way to the bank The author seems fully aware that Dan is laughing all the way to the bank, and alludes to it multiple times.
- beeflet 2y agoIDK its funny but at the end of the day it comes off as a jealous cope by critically unacclaimed unrenowned author michael deacon masked behind comedy
- Jean-Papoulos 2y agoI feel like Dan Brown's stuff is overrated, but not in a bad sense. The hook of the books is very good, while the rest of it is standard "adventuring". So if you expect more than standard adventuring, you're gonna be left disappointed (I include very average prose in this). Someone compared them to Cussler's work in this thread and I agree, the difference between the two is that Cussler never made the hook "cool enough" on the level of Brown.
- freetime2 2y agoI read a Dan Brown book once. I can’t recall which book it was, or any of the details about it, or even when I read it - but I remember it was the biggest “page turner” I’ve ever read. I don’t think there is any book I’ve read faster. I used to look down on pop music. But then I realized how hard it actually is to write a catchy hit song. Surely writing a book that people find so engaging that they can’t put it down must also require talent.
- tetris11 2y agoI've read all the twilight books. Not because they were good, not because I was engaged the entire time, but for the simple fact that I wanted to know how it would end. Why not just read the last chapter? Because I wanted the ending to make sense, and the series kept throwing in new characters to cover up its faults, like how Christopher Nolan throws an entire orchestra to cover up lack of drama or meaningful dialogue. Sometimes you just know you're in for a bad time, but the starting premise is interesting enough for you to want to know how it all wraps up.
- thih9 2y agoSometimes you know you’re in for a bad time and you don’t care - or even enjoy it, as long as it is distracting. Escapism and books mix very well.
- acchow 2y agoThere are only 2 books I could not put down once I started: The Davinci Code and When Breath Becomes Air. The first I raced through as fast as I could. The second I savored like a fine wine.
- acuozzo 2y agoHave you read Snow Crash?
- kelipso 2y agoI read the Da Vinci Code very quickly and I enjoyed it. But a different kind of enjoyment, I realized afterwards I basically just read a movie. Very little internal monologue, or some other kind of description that other novels would have, something like that, was a long time ago.
- teekert 2y agoOk, so why was this such a nice read? Yes the repetitiveness was comedic but it was certainly not annoying.
- brainzap 2y agoIsn't the formula of all his books, an old man meets a beautiful young women, they solve some mistery together and as the romance builds up, probably sex at the end.
- stonecharioteer 2y agoI understand why people read Dan Brown. Why do people read Murakami? That guy writes disgusting drivel.
- throwaway123lol 2y agoI loved these books when I was a kid, especially Digital Fortress! This article is so mean and ironically quite clumsily written itself. It's not that funny (although it's hard to be funny when you're being so mean-spirited!)
- yencabulator 2y 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. I chuckled.
- s1mplicissimus 2y agoUff I wanted to read a good flame on Dan Brown, unfortunately this critique just reads like someone just finished a tutorial on good writing and all they learned is strict rules set in stone. Are the Dan Brown books anything more than mediocre fantasy entertainment? Nope. But this critique doesn't do anything to convince me I should give a fork about their opinion, because their points are so superficial. Oh well at least it was way shorter than the books...