8 ms·

I love Dan Brown's books. Maybe critics don't like him for his formulaic writing - copying the plot over and over after Angels & Demons. But IT WORKS. And it is

I love Dan Brown's books. Maybe critics don't like him for his formulaic writing - copying the plot over and over after Angels & Demons. But IT WORKS. And it is HIGHLY engaging and moves the reader through the book at breakneck speed just like the action in the books. Plus Even when you know the formula of his books, the twists and turns and gotchas turn out to be great. Plus the stories have amazing real world location and art references and descriptions and for anyone that has been or plans to go to the places in Brown's books, he makes these places really come alive and you actually appreciate more of the acrchitecture and art of the setting if you do visit if you knew little about either previously. And he adds just enough real history intertwined with his pseudo-history to make the books super interesting, and even give the curious reader a springboard to dive deeper into the questions his books raise for Mr. Langdon. Oh and then there's the worldwide sales and financial success he has achieved from his books...

ghaff 3y ago
Pretty much. "Beach reads" (and, yeah, a lot of genre fiction including most SF) fall into this category but criticizing popular reads because they're not somewhat arbitrarily-defined literature seems pretty pointless.
- notahacker 3y ago
  tbf, he isn't being parodied here for not being literature here, he's been parodied for the sort of poor writing editors are supposed to fix regardless of genre. Weird or mixed metaphors, the odd minor grammatical error, redundancy that isn't for dramatic effect (actually all stuff 'literary' authors are more likely to get a pass on as critics assume they were there on purpose) and an oddly journalistic approach to introducing characters. I mean, it's also true that renowned author Dan Brown does a lot of things well in a way that literature usually fails or doesn't even try: pacing, puzzles, intrigue, ideas and references that interest the reader. The book sales aren't completely accidental. He'd never have sold the same number of books if he tried to write like Tolstoy, or Pynchon, or even a fairly mainstream-friendly Booker Prize winner. But people would have enjoyed the books just as much if they'd been better edited.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    In 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 ago
        Dance with Dragons atleast had some plot progression. Feast for Crows on the other hand...
        Tainnor 3y ago
        This 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 ago
        I 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 ago
The first book I read was Angels & Demons, illustrated edition[0]. I was ~11 years old and my professor took my class to an used bookstore and we had to choose a book and summarize it. Oh God, how lucky I was to have this book recommended to me and to find the illustrated edition. The book's plot and illustrations complemented each other in such a way that I was entertained as children are entertained today with a smartphone. I don't remember if I read the last book in the Robert Langdon series, but I have to say that after reading Inferno, I had to read Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. Nowadays I'm always reading something. This first experience was important and the books I chose evolved as I matured in reading. 0: https://www.ebay.com/itm/184865824842
- arethuza 3y ago
  The first "grown up" novel I can remember reading at the age of 12 or so was "Catch-22" - I'm pretty sure this has had a long term effect on me...
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Good 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 ago
Its funny, as I get the impression that this also describes the Reacher series. And really any "pulp" fiction. So many successful stories are basically the same story over and over. Curious why this particular one would be so derided?
- majormajor 3y ago
  Just my opinion/reaction, but Da Vinci Code stood out to me compared to other "easy reading" as particularly blatant/lazy in its chasing and extension of cliffhangers.
  - taeric 3y ago
    I mean, it is no worse than many comics I have read. Or a lot of other, so called "young adult" novels. Is it better than a lot? I mean, almost certainly is in the mix there. It did enjoy a lot of time in the spotlight in ways that somewhat surprise me looking back. I couldn't say how it caught the attention that it did.
- themadturk 3y ago
  Probably because he's soooo bad, but also soooo successful.
- simplicio 3y ago
  Some of it is just normal "popular thing sucks" backlash. But it had a weird cultural moment in the early 2000s where the press went kinda nuts with some of the psuedo religious themes, and there was a brief cottage industry for talking heads talking up apocryphal biblical books, Knight Templar conspiracy theories, etc which I think rubbed a lot people the wrong way.
- psd1 3y ago
  Personally, I think his storytelling is poor, but it's not the worst. 5th percentile for plotting, say. But he plumbs new depths with his prose. I am not above reading trash, and you often have to accept crappy writing in genre fiction. My wife reads the trashiest pulp romance there is. But even considering the low-grade prose in our diet, Dan Brown's writing is worse by an order of magnitude. I'd rather gargle diarrhoea than read his shit again. I'd rather attend a school play. I have ADHD, but I once spent a day looking at a wall rather than allow his tepid faeces into my person. He passes the turing test: machines cannot write that badly. His word choice smells like burning tyres, his sentence structure is like a drunk driver in a car park. He's a phenomenon.
lifefeed 3y ago
Even if you love his books you are still free to appreciate a good parody. I enjoy Cormac McCarthy. I also enjoy the fake Cormac McCarthy twitter account https://twitter.com/CormacMcCrthy https://twitter.com/CormacMcCrthy .
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 ago
  Also, Broken Sword existed since 1996 too.
  - giobox 3y ago
    Much 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 ago
  I had it slighty worse: As a teenager I bought Holy Blood, Holy Grail on a whim (it were the 90s) in a bookstore because I was reading another Grail-focussed book series. HBHG is an utterly absurd book which could not even hoodwink a 14-year-old. One of the few books I deeply regret buying. Slightly later I read Focault’s Pendulum which of course inoculates one even more against this crap. But of course Brown copied everything in his Da Vinci Code from HBHG which is obvious, when reading it. Every twist and turn is then utterly predictable. There was a copyright case in the 90s, annoyingly decided in Brown’s favour. The real history behind HBHG is far more funnier: turns out the authors took their story from a french con-artist who fabricated documents and genealogies and deposited them into the Bibliotheque Francaise. And of course according the the con-artist the last descendant of the Merovingian Kings was himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Plantard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Plantard
esotericimpl 3y ago
[dead]
Semaphor 3y ago
His formulaic writing is one thing (one of my favorite authors, Glynn Stewart, releases about 1 military scifi novel every three months, it's pretty formulaic), but my issue was how he made things up, and had them close enough to reality that is really hard to tell the difference. Maybe it's more of an issue I have with people, but it still made me stop reading him.
themadturk 3y ago
I blow hot and cold on Dan Brown. I laugh at him as a writer, but there's not a book of his that I've read that I haven't enjoyed. He's like popcorn, hard to stop once you've started. And enjoying a writer's books often makes the even parodies sweeter.
TigeriusKirk 3y ago
I watched his course on Masterclass and found it helpful in learning to write his type of book. I was impressed that he is very conscious of what he does, how he does it, and he's quite good at explaining it to others.
JohnFen 3y ago
I find his books (well, I've only read two of them) to be tedious, personally. But then, I also find mindless action "popcorn" movies to be tedious, so perhaps that's not surprising. Different strokes!
jameshart 3y ago
Dan Brown books don’t contain ‘action’, they contain ‘motion’. I understand how the way Brown writes makes it seem like he thinks something exciting is happening but in fact all it is, is his protagonists are moving from place to place in a series of taxis.
- gumby 3y ago
  Sort of like Indiana Jones!
  - jameshart 3y ago
    With less punching.
- astrange 3y ago
  That works for Aaron Sorkin, except you also have dramatic lectures and women telling the male lead they're right about everything.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    while they're walking down a hallway and interrupting each other a lot.
- kybernetikos 3y ago
  Motion 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 ago
    Holy 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 ago
    Gibson 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 ago
I think his stock "evil ethnic yet cosmopolitan assassin with conspicuously foreign name" characters are kinda weird. (In Inferno it's a woman named "Vayentha" working for a guy named "Zobrist".) This might be a literary SF trope. One of the silliest was in Tad Brown's Otherworld[0], which has an evil yet cosmopolitan Aboriginal Australian assassin. [0] it's like a literary SF version of Sword Art Online, and if this makes it sound weird it's a lot weirder than that
- astrange 3y ago
  edit: Tad Williams
- musicale 3y ago
  Haha, Tad Brown indeed. He did inspire A Game of Thrones and, uh, Eragon. However, this kind of makes me want to pick up Otherland (?)
billfruit 3y ago
But 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 ago
Reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell. People love to hate on him but damn, do I find his books entertaining and insightful.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ghaff 3y ago

Pretty much. "Beach reads" (and, yeah, a lot of genre fiction including most SF) fall into this category but criticizing popular reads because they're not somewhat arbitrarily-defined literature seems pretty pointless.

notahacker 3y ago
tbf, he isn't being parodied here for not being literature here, he's been parodied for the sort of poor writing editors are supposed to fix regardless of genre. Weird or mixed metaphors, the odd minor grammatical error, redundancy that isn't for dramatic effect (actually all stuff 'literary' authors are more likely to get a pass on as critics assume they were there on purpose) and an oddly journalistic approach to introducing characters. I mean, it's also true that renowned author Dan Brown does a lot of things well in a way that literature usually fails or doesn't even try: pacing, puzzles, intrigue, ideas and references that interest the reader. The book sales aren't completely accidental. He'd never have sold the same number of books if he tried to write like Tolstoy, or Pynchon, or even a fairly mainstream-friendly Booker Prize winner. But people would have enjoyed the books just as much if they'd been better edited.
- ghaff 3y ago
  In 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 ago
      Dance with Dragons atleast had some plot progression. Feast for Crows on the other hand...
      - Tainnor 3y ago
        This 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 ago
        I 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 ago

The first book I read was Angels & Demons, illustrated edition[0]. I was ~11 years old and my professor took my class to an used bookstore and we had to choose a book and summarize it. Oh God, how lucky I was to have this book recommended to me and to find the illustrated edition. The book's plot and illustrations complemented each other in such a way that I was entertained as children are entertained today with a smartphone. I don't remember if I read the last book in the Robert Langdon series, but I have to say that after reading Inferno, I had to read Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. Nowadays I'm always reading something. This first experience was important and the books I chose evolved as I matured in reading. 0: https://www.ebay.com/itm/184865824842

arethuza 3y ago
The first "grown up" novel I can remember reading at the age of 12 or so was "Catch-22" - I'm pretty sure this has had a long term effect on me...
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Good 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 ago

Its funny, as I get the impression that this also describes the Reacher series. And really any "pulp" fiction. So many successful stories are basically the same story over and over. Curious why this particular one would be so derided?

majormajor 3y ago
Just my opinion/reaction, but Da Vinci Code stood out to me compared to other "easy reading" as particularly blatant/lazy in its chasing and extension of cliffhangers.
- taeric 3y ago
  I mean, it is no worse than many comics I have read. Or a lot of other, so called "young adult" novels. Is it better than a lot? I mean, almost certainly is in the mix there. It did enjoy a lot of time in the spotlight in ways that somewhat surprise me looking back. I couldn't say how it caught the attention that it did.
themadturk 3y ago
Probably because he's soooo bad, but also soooo successful.
simplicio 3y ago
Some of it is just normal "popular thing sucks" backlash. But it had a weird cultural moment in the early 2000s where the press went kinda nuts with some of the psuedo religious themes, and there was a brief cottage industry for talking heads talking up apocryphal biblical books, Knight Templar conspiracy theories, etc which I think rubbed a lot people the wrong way.
psd1 3y ago
Personally, I think his storytelling is poor, but it's not the worst. 5th percentile for plotting, say. But he plumbs new depths with his prose. I am not above reading trash, and you often have to accept crappy writing in genre fiction. My wife reads the trashiest pulp romance there is. But even considering the low-grade prose in our diet, Dan Brown's writing is worse by an order of magnitude. I'd rather gargle diarrhoea than read his shit again. I'd rather attend a school play. I have ADHD, but I once spent a day looking at a wall rather than allow his tepid faeces into my person. He passes the turing test: machines cannot write that badly. His word choice smells like burning tyres, his sentence structure is like a drunk driver in a car park. He's a phenomenon.

lifefeed 3y ago

Even if you love his books you are still free to appreciate a good parody. I enjoy Cormac McCarthy. I also enjoy the fake Cormac McCarthy twitter account https://twitter.com/CormacMcCrthy https://twitter.com/CormacMcCrthy .

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 ago
Also, Broken Sword existed since 1996 too.
- giobox 3y ago
  Much 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 ago
I had it slighty worse: As a teenager I bought Holy Blood, Holy Grail on a whim (it were the 90s) in a bookstore because I was reading another Grail-focussed book series. HBHG is an utterly absurd book which could not even hoodwink a 14-year-old. One of the few books I deeply regret buying. Slightly later I read Focault’s Pendulum which of course inoculates one even more against this crap. But of course Brown copied everything in his Da Vinci Code from HBHG which is obvious, when reading it. Every twist and turn is then utterly predictable. There was a copyright case in the 90s, annoyingly decided in Brown’s favour. The real history behind HBHG is far more funnier: turns out the authors took their story from a french con-artist who fabricated documents and genealogies and deposited them into the Bibliotheque Francaise. And of course according the the con-artist the last descendant of the Merovingian Kings was himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Plantard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Plantard

esotericimpl 3y ago

[dead]

Semaphor 3y ago

His formulaic writing is one thing (one of my favorite authors, Glynn Stewart, releases about 1 military scifi novel every three months, it's pretty formulaic), but my issue was how he made things up, and had them close enough to reality that is really hard to tell the difference. Maybe it's more of an issue I have with people, but it still made me stop reading him.

themadturk 3y ago

I blow hot and cold on Dan Brown. I laugh at him as a writer, but there's not a book of his that I've read that I haven't enjoyed. He's like popcorn, hard to stop once you've started. And enjoying a writer's books often makes the even parodies sweeter.

TigeriusKirk 3y ago

I watched his course on Masterclass and found it helpful in learning to write his type of book. I was impressed that he is very conscious of what he does, how he does it, and he's quite good at explaining it to others.

JohnFen 3y ago

I find his books (well, I've only read two of them) to be tedious, personally. But then, I also find mindless action "popcorn" movies to be tedious, so perhaps that's not surprising. Different strokes!

jameshart 3y ago

Dan Brown books don’t contain ‘action’, they contain ‘motion’. I understand how the way Brown writes makes it seem like he thinks something exciting is happening but in fact all it is, is his protagonists are moving from place to place in a series of taxis.

gumby 3y ago
Sort of like Indiana Jones!
- jameshart 3y ago
  With less punching.
astrange 3y ago
That works for Aaron Sorkin, except you also have dramatic lectures and women telling the male lead they're right about everything.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  while they're walking down a hallway and interrupting each other a lot.
kybernetikos 3y ago
Motion 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 ago
  Holy 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 ago
  Gibson 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 ago

I think his stock "evil ethnic yet cosmopolitan assassin with conspicuously foreign name" characters are kinda weird. (In Inferno it's a woman named "Vayentha" working for a guy named "Zobrist".) This might be a literary SF trope. One of the silliest was in Tad Brown's Otherworld[0], which has an evil yet cosmopolitan Aboriginal Australian assassin. [0] it's like a literary SF version of Sword Art Online, and if this makes it sound weird it's a lot weirder than that

astrange 3y ago
edit: Tad Williams
musicale 3y ago
Haha, Tad Brown indeed. He did inspire A Game of Thrones and, uh, Eragon. However, this kind of makes me want to pick up Otherland (?)

billfruit 3y ago

But 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 ago

Reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell. People love to hate on him but damn, do I find his books entertaining and insightful.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]