"Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence."

From the Telegraph: Dan Brown's twenty worst sentences

Fifty factual errors from his books.

An analysis of the Wordle tag cloud for the first two chapters of The Lost Symbol. I really could have done without the description of a tattooed man, "His groin and abdomen formed a decorated archway".

And be sure to enjoy the comments: it's just like having a particularly inept and thoroughly snarked fanwriter show up here. We've got "Your just JELLOUS!", "Don't you have anything more important to do?", "He's ONLY had FIVE novels published, how many have YOU sold?", and of course "DUN LIEK DUN REED!!!1!"

Just 50?

There was a time when I unironically enjoyed The Da Vinci Code, and I have no idea how the hell I didn't notice how clunky and just plain bad his prose was. Even the conspiracy theories and blatant art history fails wouldn't be so bad (the concepts themselves could be fun in a stupid, pulpy way) if Dan Brown could actually write.

My favorite line actually appears in one of the comments in the Telegraph article:

Quote :

Susan turned to Soshi. "I need access to the Web. Is there a browser here?"

Soshi nodded. "Netscape's sweetest."

Susan grabbed her hand. "Come on, we're going surfing."

This actually made it into a published work that became a bestseller.

God, don't get me started on Dan Brown. If you think The DaVinci Code was painful, try being trapped on a fucking airplane with nothing but your mother's copy of Digital Fortress.

Well, this is Dan Brown we're talking about. It was never going to be that good. Especially given his reputation.

For me, the moment that has stayed in my mind was when the two central characters in dVC come across a document they can't read. The page is printed in facsimile in the book.

Bear in mind that the hero -- while he's usually called a "symbologist" -- is, in practical terms, an art historian. He specializes in the works of Leonardo.

The heroine is a world-class cryptanalyst.

The two of them take several pages to figure out that what they're looking at is a page of mirror-writing.

I can sleep a little better at night knowing that Dan Brown is nothing more than the James Fenimore Cooper of our time.

Some of these are epic:

Quote :

Langdon is shown lecturing his students that the Christian tradition of communion, eating the body of their god, comes from the Aztecs. Communion has taken place since the first century; the Aztec civilisation arose during the 13th century. Europeans did not reach central America, where the Aztecs lived, until the late 15th century.

Seriously, what a retard.

Geoffrey K. Pullum's first blog entry on dVC, with an index to his later postings. This is some of the finest snark it's ever been my privilege to read.

What really bugged me about The Da Vinci Code (the only one of his books I've read, thankfully) was that it was from the point of view of the wrong person, from a thriller/mystery writing point of view. Marty Stu Dan Brown Robert Langdon already knows most of the supposedly mysterious stuff in the book. This makes him a poor choice as the protagonist/viewpoint character because he's not that surprised by a lot of what goes on, and large chunks of the book are just him lecturing his poor ignorant female sidekick. If the main point of the book was to have Langon exposit all this pseudo-history/conspiracy theory stuff, why not make the woman the viewpoint character so that we're at least inside the head of someone who's as surprised by it all as we are (and also the person to whom the events have more personal significance, as it's her grandfather that dies at the start)?

Keith Fraser wrote:

What really bugged me about The Da Vinci Code (the only one of his books I've read, thankfully) was that it was from the point of view of the wrong person, from a thriller/mystery writing point of view. Marty Stu Dan Brown Robert Langdon already knows most of the supposedly mysterious stuff in the book. This makes him a poor choice as the protagonist/viewpoint character because he's not that surprised by a lot of what goes on, and large chunks of the book are just him lecturing his poor ignorant female sidekick. If the main point of the book was to have Langon exposit all this pseudo-history/conspiracy theory stuff, why not make the woman the viewpoint character so that we're at least inside the head of someone who's as surprised by it all as we are (and also the person to whom the events have more personal significance, as it's her grandfather that dies at the start)?

Maybe he wanted people to get inside his head and feel the burden of possessing his knowledge and needing to lecture the mere plebs about it. It's probably hard work, you know.

Or maybe he's just a piss-drinking asshole.

The most riotously uproarious thing about Dan Brown's works is that the Priory of Sion, which he insists is totally real in The DaVinci Code, was actually made up by two Frenchmen for the laugh.

The lady who did the sporkings of the entire Inheritance trilogy has done a sporking of the Da Vinci Code.

Critics at New York Magazine gang up on The Lost Symbol.

Renowned [i]New York[/i] Magazine book critic Sam Anderson wrote:

New York Magazine book critic Sam Anderson closed his heavily marked-up copy of The Lost Symbol with a sudden sense of dread. Tugging absently on his thick black sideburns, he allowed his eyes to drift up to the framed photo of Edmund Wilson that hung over his desk. The greatest American critic of all time, he thought. You would have known exactly how to handle this, Bunny.

In his breathtakingly rapid climb to the pinnacle of the literary world, Anderson had become known for his strong, uncompromising opinions. “The Grim Reader,” one blogger had called him, referring to his penchant for swiftly and mercilessly sentencing subpar books to brutal critical deaths. The word “critic,” Anderson often told his students, came from the Latin for “decisive.” He usually finished books with a burst of confidence, ready to jot down a quick assessment on an index card and then file it away among tens of thousands of other cards in the climate-controlled critical archive of his 8,000-square-foot Brazilian-rosewood-paneled private library.

But tonight, in the wake of finishing Dan Brown’s follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, he felt haunted by an unfamiliar sensation: confusion.

The feeling terrified him.

Renowned linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum wrote:

Consider the episode in chapter 47 where (plot spoiler coming!) Katherine Solomon is being chased around by an evildoer who cannot find her inside a gigantic pitch-dark warehouse. The attacker suddenly spots the faint glow of her cell phone at about waist height and hurls himself at it with arms wide apart — absolutely certain of where she is, and convinced that he will be able to grab her. And as a result he injures himself very painfully. His head crashes into a steel beam and he collapses to the floor with a cry of pain. Dan describes what happens next thus:

Cursing, he clambered back to his feet, pulling himself up by the waist-high, horizontal strut on which Katherine Solomon had cleverly placed her open cell phone.


Cleverly. Dan just couldn't resist explaining that to us. Could we not have realized — had he merely said the phone was on a wall strut — that the phone would be open? (We were explicitly told two pages earlier that it glowed only when open.) Could we not also have figured out that the strut must have been about waist-high, and horizontal (so the phone could be placed on it, you see)? And that Katherine (whose surname is still Solomon, as it had been on previous pages), the only other person in the warehouse with the evildoer, had placed it there? And (above all) that she had acted cleverly by doing this?

Am currently doing a team building excercise with my seminar study group. My task is to describe an on campus film museum exhibit in the style of another passage of prose describing a museum. Have chosen The Da Vinci Code. Fun times

I never read The Da Vinci Code, and after seeing the movie I don't particularly want to. I read Angels and Demons, though, and what really bugged me was the way every single thing about the characters: their hobbies, their way of thinking, the questions they ask, their appearance, is somehow necessary for the plot.

Vittoria, Langdon's falavour of the month, is a scientist at CERN. When she's introduced, Brown nonchalantly says she isn't gorgeous--however, whenever he describes her you can feel his boner tapping against the keyboard. Because the way he describes her, she is fappable in the extreme and hot to trot.

Vittoria practices Yoga in her spare time. Why yoga? Why doesn't she go running? Because running wouldn't enable her to wriggle out of a rope some shmuck tied around her a few pages later.

Why does Langdon talk with someone about how many square feet of surface you'd need to float safely down from a few miles up in the air? Because later in the story he will need this knowledge to make it down from a helicopter safely.

There is no coincidence, no spontaneity, no simple facts that are added just because they're plain NICE in this entire book. Langdon's Mickey Mouse watch fills me with loathing, as does his claustrophobia. It's all so easy, so nauseatingly cliche.

That said, I enjoyed the book when I was reading it. Angels and Demons is like an even more badly written version of the last two Harry Potter books: you enjoy them while reading them, but when you take a second to consider the plot and the writing, it actually stinks high to heaven.

Keith Fraser wrote:

What really bugged me about The Da Vinci Code (the only one of his books I've read, thankfully) was that it was from the point of view of the wrong person, from a thriller/mystery writing point of view. Marty Stu Dan Brown Robert Langdon already knows most of the supposedly mysterious stuff in the book. This makes him a poor choice as the protagonist/viewpoint character because he's not that surprised by a lot of what goes on, and large chunks of the book are just him lecturing his poor ignorant female sidekick. If the main point of the book was to have Langon exposit all this pseudo-history/conspiracy theory stuff, why not make the woman the viewpoint character so that we're at least inside the head of someone who's as surprised by it all as we are (and also the person to whom the events have more personal significance, as it's her grandfather that dies at the start)?

Well, Dawn Brown is better at writing about smugness than... anything else, so writing from Langdon's point of view is naturally the easiest thing to do.

I kind of liked The Da Vinci Code, as an easy read, and I watched Angels and Demons and it was okay, but god, what a smug shit Langdon is.

Fitchsticks wrote:

Am currently doing a team building excercise with my seminar study group. My task is to describe an on campus film museum exhibit in the style of another passage of prose describing a museum. Have chosen The Da Vinci Code. Fun times [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

I demand post.

Actually, I rather like his books (especially A&D and Digital Fortress) but I do realise there's a lot of flaws in them, including the fact that they all follow the same basic formula which makes them a bit predictable.

This new one is probably the weakest storyline, for one thing the narration is very cloak and dagger about the identity of the main villian Mal’Akh but it's glaringly obvious who he is and the Solomans are such a weird, rich family that it's hard to find them very likable.

Dan Brown's success is an affront to everything good about literature. His books are mindless tripe aimed at the lowest common denominator. They might be fun for some people, but to me they're almost painful to read. They have far too many errors that just hurt. He hasn't even gone through the effort to look up most of his facts on a search engine.

kleine_kat wrote:

I never read The Da Vinci Code, and after seeing the movie I don't particularly want to. I read Angels and Demons, though, and what really bugged me was the way every single thing about the characters: their hobbies, their way of thinking, the questions they ask, their appearance, is somehow necessary for the plot.

It seems Dan Brown took a lesson in narrative economy, and misunderstood it. Yes, it's good to tell details only if they're necessary, but advancing the plot is not their only function. They can be used to establish a setting (Dan Brown prefers to describe settings in exposition-mode), tell something about a character (and god knows Dan Brown's characters need polishing), give a feel for the story, and so on.

I wondered for some time what DvC would be like but didn't want to shell out for it. Then one day a friend of mine, who's a bit of a media buff, offered me a copy of DvC, A&D and Digital Fortress. I think he was glad just to see the back of them. All three of them have a mysterious murder in the first chapter.

I'd just like to ask those who've read other Dan Brown stories: does that formulaic murder happen at the beginning of all his stories? I've read quite enough of his tripe now and don't want to check.

Another thing that irritates me about his books: Vittoria was described in A&D's blurb as 'mysterious' and 'beautiful'. Why? Even when I read that blurb I thought, 'what's the point? Why can't you just make her an average woman? Is it necessary for her to be beautiful?' I'd have respected him as a writer if he hadn't made her gorgeous; I felt that she was just going to be literary eye candy. It felt pointless and, frankly, shallow.

And don't even get me started on the fact that she was also described as mysterious in the same blurb. She's a fucking scientist! And she's your main character! How mysterious is she going to be?!

Jesus.

Little Egypt wrote:

I wondered for some time what DvC would be like but didn't want to shell out for it. Then one day a friend of mine, who's a bit of a media buff, offered me a copy of DvC, A&D and Digital Fortress. I think he was glad just to see the back of them. All three of them have a mysterious murder in the first chapter.

I'd just like to ask those who've read other Dan Brown stories: does that formulaic murder happen at the beginning of all his stories? I've read quite enough of his tripe now and don't want to check.

Another thing that irritates me about his books: Vittoria was described in A&D's blurb as 'mysterious' and 'beautiful'. Why? Even when I read that blurb I thought, 'what's the point? Why can't you just make her an average woman? Is it necessary for her to be beautiful?' I'd have respected him as a writer if he hadn't made her gorgeous; I felt that she was just going to be literary eye candy. It felt pointless and, frankly, shallow.

And don't even get me started on the fact that she was also described as mysterious in the same blurb. She's a fucking scientist! And she's your main character! How mysterious is she going to be?!

Jesus.

Evasive, yes. Private, yes. Mysterious? Overdone.

Little Egypt wrote:

I'd just like to ask those who've read other Dan Brown stories: does that formulaic murder happen at the beginning of all his stories? I've read quite enough of his tripe now and don't want to check.

Yes.