7 ms·

I 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 d

I 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 ago
  Yeah that is quite the accomplishment. A few hundred? Most audio books are like six to ten hours of continuous audio!
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    I 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 ago
        Practice. 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 ago
        some 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.
  - 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
    A working year is ~250 days. I suppose it is possible with a minor playback speedup to hit 1.2 books/working day, 300 per year. Which sounds unbelievable, but good for them for having a job which just requires a butt in a chair.
  - dlcarrier 2y ago
    That's even a bit short. The median I listen to is probably around 12 hours, and the more popular series tend to be in the 20 to 30 hour range. Brandon Sanderson titles can hit in around 60 hours. Listening at double speed makes a big difference.
    - edanm 2y ago
      I usually read/listen to a lot of books, compared to most people, but not several hundred. And if you're reading Brandon Sanderson as part of that - wow! I'm envious :)
- defrost 2y ago
  There are many 'overwatch' type jobs, a number that carry heavy responsibility, that mostly only require "light regular attention" and the skill level to be on the ball and top of your game in bursts. Versions I've had: * Control room operator in an industrial plant (watch, make sure things are routine (listen to music | audio book), deal with "exceptions" (tradespeople locking machines out, bringing them back online, co-ordinating)). * Maintaining throughput on data processing pipelines (eg: geophysical data processing, tape | drive | archive loading, initiating various steps, looking for "oddities" .. letting the machines run (listen to audiobook, watch console)). * Several other variations I could list (but time is short ATM).
- skydhash 2y ago
  Not the same premise (I don't listen to audiobooks), but what helps me get through my reading list was buying an ereader and put my whole library on it. It goes with me everywhere, and every time I have an urge to take my phone, I open it instead. Can go through a normal book in a couple of days.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Physical labor. A friend of mine has a job like this, in their parents' egg wholesaler business. It's a hard job, but has two major benefits: keeps him in good physical shape, and lets him listen to audiobooks pretty much the whole time. I sometimes find myself envying him that. For one, I thought I read way too much sci-fi in my life, but it turns out he's listened to every single book I did, every one I have on my "to read" list (except maybe Greg Egan stuff), and then a couple dozen ones I never heard of.
- dlcarrier 2y ago
  Mostly remodeling my house, by myself. I really should hire someone to do it, and spend my time with electrical engineering. Even then, about half of the time I'm designing a product, I can listen to audio books. Component selection is the most mentally taxing part, followed by early stages of schematic capture. Once I have everything operationally figured out, the more mundane schematic work isn't at all taxing, and I'll do it while listening to audio books. Circuit board layout I almost can't do without listening to something. It's very similar to playing puzzle games.
phire 2y ago
What 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 ago
  I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Few 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 ago
  Hugo 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 ago
  Hugo 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 ago
  I 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 ago
Don'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 ago
  Good 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 ago
  Fun read. Minor typo: s/the the/the/g;
Izkata 2y ago
I'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 ago
  They 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 ago
You 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  Thanks 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 ago
  Indeed it is.
luqtas 2y ago
which 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 ago
  It'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 ago
spent 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 ago
That 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 ago
i cringed so hard when reading Digital Fortress. I could not put it down. spoiler: the answer is 3
yellowapple 2y ago
My 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 ago
  You 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.

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 ago
Yeah that is quite the accomplishment. A few hundred? Most audio books are like six to ten hours of continuous audio!
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  I 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 ago
      Practice. 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 ago
      some 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.
- 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
  A working year is ~250 days. I suppose it is possible with a minor playback speedup to hit 1.2 books/working day, 300 per year. Which sounds unbelievable, but good for them for having a job which just requires a butt in a chair.
- dlcarrier 2y ago
  That's even a bit short. The median I listen to is probably around 12 hours, and the more popular series tend to be in the 20 to 30 hour range. Brandon Sanderson titles can hit in around 60 hours. Listening at double speed makes a big difference.
  - edanm 2y ago
    I usually read/listen to a lot of books, compared to most people, but not several hundred. And if you're reading Brandon Sanderson as part of that - wow! I'm envious :)
defrost 2y ago
There are many 'overwatch' type jobs, a number that carry heavy responsibility, that mostly only require "light regular attention" and the skill level to be on the ball and top of your game in bursts. Versions I've had: * Control room operator in an industrial plant (watch, make sure things are routine (listen to music | audio book), deal with "exceptions" (tradespeople locking machines out, bringing them back online, co-ordinating)). * Maintaining throughput on data processing pipelines (eg: geophysical data processing, tape | drive | archive loading, initiating various steps, looking for "oddities" .. letting the machines run (listen to audiobook, watch console)). * Several other variations I could list (but time is short ATM).
skydhash 2y ago
Not the same premise (I don't listen to audiobooks), but what helps me get through my reading list was buying an ereader and put my whole library on it. It goes with me everywhere, and every time I have an urge to take my phone, I open it instead. Can go through a normal book in a couple of days.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Physical labor. A friend of mine has a job like this, in their parents' egg wholesaler business. It's a hard job, but has two major benefits: keeps him in good physical shape, and lets him listen to audiobooks pretty much the whole time. I sometimes find myself envying him that. For one, I thought I read way too much sci-fi in my life, but it turns out he's listened to every single book I did, every one I have on my "to read" list (except maybe Greg Egan stuff), and then a couple dozen ones I never heard of.
dlcarrier 2y ago
Mostly remodeling my house, by myself. I really should hire someone to do it, and spend my time with electrical engineering. Even then, about half of the time I'm designing a product, I can listen to audio books. Component selection is the most mentally taxing part, followed by early stages of schematic capture. Once I have everything operationally figured out, the more mundane schematic work isn't at all taxing, and I'll do it while listening to audio books. Circuit board layout I almost can't do without listening to something. It's very similar to playing puzzle games.

phire 2y ago

What 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 ago
I 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 ago

I 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 ago
Few 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 ago
Hugo 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 ago
Hugo 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 ago
I 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 ago

Don'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 ago
Good 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 ago
Fun read. Minor typo: s/the the/the/g;

Izkata 2y ago

I'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 ago
They 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 ago

You 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 ago
I 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 ago
Thanks 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 ago
Indeed it is.

luqtas 2y ago

which 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 ago
It'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 ago

spent 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 ago

That 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 ago

i cringed so hard when reading Digital Fortress. I could not put it down. spoiler: the answer is 3

yellowapple 2y ago

My 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 ago
You 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.