Angels and Demons

Dan Brown has depth. He writes crappy books made up of crappy sentences made up of crappy words; positively fractal. He deserves a line-by-line commentary like the one slacktivist’s doing on the Left Behind series. He deserves to have every line submitted to the Bulwer-Lytton awards.
Which does leave soething to explain.

Ouch.

Just… ouch.

Cryptonomicon consisted of nerdish Mary Sues afloat in a sea of Cliffs Notes for popular science books.

Best single-sentence description of that book I’ve ever seen. I almost didn’t make it past the dinner-table confrontation between the computer programmer Marty Stu and the Coterie of Snide Arts Majors. Later, I wished I hadn’t.

Now seems like a good time to float my vision splendid: I want to have a global Blog Against the Da Vinci Code Day next month to roughly coincide with the release of the movie starring Tom Hanks and his new sex murderer haircut.

Or is this a stupid mean idea?
What is a symbologist anyway?

Sorry, I see that I’m repeating myself.

I’ve just seen the Wikipedia plot summary:

Angels and Demons features Harvard symbologist, Robert Langdon, as he tries to stop the Illuminati, a legendary secret society, from destroying the Vatican City with the newly-discovered power of antimatter.

I refuse to believe that this book is anything other than a work of genius. The Illuminati! Vatican City! The newly discovered power of antimatter!

Well, it’s not quite line by line, but you might want to read what Language Log has been saying.

This is why I plan my flight reading list well ahead of time: so I can be sure I won’t have to read books I can guess well in advance are terrible. Though it does seem convient anytime someone admits to reading such awful books their story always involves long flights and gifts from friends. No one ever seems to actually purchase these books for reading at their own leisure.

Man, you bait people on Cryptonomicon, and get nothing. Slow Tuesday.

_She said that, though the writing style, descriptions, dialogue and characters are all rather pants, the structure is fantastic: in terms of when exposition comes, when new characters are introduced, when the cliffhangers happen and so on, he is an exemplary thriller writer. Hence, readers get hooked_

that justifies a&D and the da vinci code being the same damn book how?

i;m no genius and i’m generally too deep in suspension of disbelief while reading works of fiction but if i can figure out the whole story well before i am halfway through a book, it’s not worth reading.

” Hence, readers get hooked.”

Just say no.

I thought the first paragraph was brilliant. Right up to the point where I found out she had small breasts. Then I sort of switched off. But I suppose her small breasts and slender torso could be due to spending too much time being a strict vegetarian in dangerous ecological systems. I also wonder how she managed to be lithe graceful and tall while getting out of a helicopter. You’d think a physicist with long black swirling hair would be smart enough to keep her head down near whirling helicopter blades?

Ronald, when it said “descending from the chopper”, I figured she was doing it on a rope. It’s much more Bondish.

I think the best part of the Da Vinci Code is the passage where he explains the divine ratio and we must logically conclude that that having long legs moves your belly button down on your torso and having short legs moves your belly button up. Which suggests that dwarfs + pygmies must have their belly buttons somewhere near the centre of their chests.

I’ll admit to actually having spent my own money on THE DA VINCI CODE – I was hoping for something like THE DAY OF THE JACKAL with a smear of dumbed-down FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM on top. Never again.

I thought the best part was that a minor plot point in the Da Vinci Code, as I recall it, was that you had to *smuggle* food from France into the UK – you couldn’t just transport it within the EC.

Fortunately, I think it turned out that if you bribe UK customs officials they’ll let you through without trouble. I did wonder whether someone had cannily told Dan Brown all this to make money off him…

Geesh, you guys sure seem to know a lot about TDC and A&D. They are very good beach reading, but not really worth remembering. So why is it that ya’ll are obsessed with, and remember in such detail, books that you detest?

So why is it that ya’ll are obsessed with, and remember in such detail, books that you detest?

The way that the lyrics to bad chart-toppers stick in your head like a brain tumour?

I haven’t read either Brown novel (I value my time a little higher than that) but I would like to know whether it’s possible to read Foucault’s Pendulum beforehand as a kind of literary aperitif.

Nice to see the Our Better Educated ™ sneering at a popular author who actually tried to convey some (slight) erudition to the B and C students of the world. Is it any wonder the Right so successfuly uses you boys and girls for a political punching bag?

…and if the dreck is so base, so obvious, so poorly crafted, why aren’t all of ya’ll knocking off this kind of crap in your spare time and getting rich? Perhaps there is more to this turgid prose the meets the well-schooled eye.

-signed,

An engineering Ph.D. who makes a point of NOT sneering at people who struggle with even the simplest of differential equations.

What hacks me off about A&D is that Brown has clearly gone out and done enough research on esoteric topics like papal election mechanics and Swiss particle accelerators to have picked up the terminology…and then blithely perverts it to fit his own storyline. So a great elector becomes a conclave president, a camerlengo is not a cardinal, a CERN physicist can run antimatter experiments in the particle accelerator in secret, etc. He might call it literary license; I call it mendacious and lazy. Fiction should not actively make its readers stupider.

As for the Da Vinci Code…that same exact book hits the bestseller list at least once every decade, usually as nonfiction. So if you’ve read any of the previous incarnations, you already know what the religious revelations are going to be…and then all that’s left to attend to are Brown’s plot and character development, which are awful, awful, awful.

I read (read=read about 20 pages and then skimmed) Digital Fortress by Dan Brown, and I thought it was absolutely terrible. That guy can’t write at all. The plots are hairbrained, and have too many events with not enough cohesion. The writing style is about the opposite of smooth. I’ve read better writing from my 4th grade cousin.
Despite this terrible experience, I was somehow convinced to pick up The Da Vinci Code. It was about as bad.

I can’t begin to understand what the hype is about this book…it just isn’t good.

… still waiting, by the way, for someone to explain to me why it is that ya’ll recall so many details from books you don’t like? Perhaps there is a social scientest in the room that can explain?

If you think A&D was the worst book you ever finished, I double dog dare you to attempt completion of Dan Brown’s true masterwork, “Digital Fortress.”

That said, I’m a sucker for Stephenson’s fiction. I actually like the long-winded and straight-as-a-coil-of-rope digressions on science, history, economics, cereal, etc. Great literature it is not, but I have a feeling I was the target audience anyway.

The DVC, as a best seller, has had a huge impact on discussion about Christianity in the popular culture, so much so that RC church spokesmen have debunked the book, and there’s a whole cottage industry of books about it, pro and con. When people talk about the book and its ‘impact’ on them, it’s always about the same tired nonsense: Jesus didn’t die, instead he married Mary Magdalene and they went on to found the Merovingian line of French kings.

I read it on a trans-Pacific flight and it was a perfect time-killer, with chapters barely one page long, a nonsensical “Harvard professor of religious symbology” as protagonist, and sentences that, when read aloud, sound like fingernails on a blackboard. But its influence all comes from its ideas, and it is worth discussing as a pop phenomenon and manifestation of the ever-recurring fascination with alternatives to the Jesus of the Gospels.

I’ve managed not to read the Da Vinci code. I’ve been told to read it by many people (even friends!), but from what I can tell, it sounds like Foucault’s Pendulum without the point.

Ya’ll is southern for y’all. At least according to the expert.

The “expert” in question – Larry the Cable Guy – was in fact born and raised in Nebraska. The accent (and attitude) are completely bogus.

This is not entirely off topic, by the way. Like Dan Brown, Larry the Cable Guy has taken to heart the dictum of H.L. Mencken: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Colin Watson (in ‘Snobbery with Violence’) long ago pointed out that the success of popular fiction has nothing to do with literary quality, intelligence or credibility and everything to do with appealing to the emotions and prejudices of your audience.
This can’t be faked just to make a fast buck: to create Bulldog Drummond or Doctor Fu Man Chu, you have to think, feel and prejudge like Sapper or Sax Rohmer.
Popular fiction is not usually original, it is highly derivative and full of stock characters and cliches that get worked to death.
The only thing that distinguishes Brown from countless earlier and future hacks is that apparently a lot of nonexpert people take his ‘ideas’ seriously.

Nebraska is southern. I drank sweet tea at a Cracker Barrel there once. QED.

response to #51,
Mr. Perdue,
Thank you for responding. You are correct that your premise, plot, and charachters are original and as an action adventure story are entertaining. I also don’t want to be critical of the re-publication. People should get paid for their work and if it sells, good for you. For what its worth it would be a great screenplay. Best Luck.

Special tag maybe?

the insinuation that tylerh … actually smarter than the Better Educated (viz, differential equations) was an especially nice touch.

Good point. Because we all know that there is a single kind of smarter and that people can be easily ranked by that.

Look, I freely admit that I not as smart writing-wise as most posters around here, but I vaguely recall from my struggles in writing class the concept of analogy: I don’t sneer at people who aren’t as facile with the tools of my specialty, so why must others sneer at lesser users of the tools of their specialty? Maybe not the clearest analogy (metaphor?) but I hope you can see my point. I am certain my claim is not a straw man like claim the “insuation that Tylerh is a man of the people.” How does a declaration of posessing a Ph.D. even begin to raise such a claim?

To clarify: I am not saying Dan Brown wrote a good book. But is there any evidence that was his goal? Dan Brown appears to have set out to write a popular book and succeeded wildly. Given how rarely any popular book is considered a good book, most of the comments on this thread strike my ears as more akin to junior high students desperately trying to sound cool around the lunch table than useful literary analysis.

I am not saying Dan Brown wrote a good book. But is there any evidence that was his goal?

Ouch. Supporting Brown as the rope support the hangman, as they say.