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Dan Brown

Read Deception Point and DVC. In that order. DP is yer plain vanilla action hero thriller. It is about as deep as a street puddle. DVC was fun because it was a bit different. As with all such plots, the end stinks (and the rest of the plot falls apart if you think too deeply about it). You make a lot of red herrings and layered deceptions, and you need to vrap it up in a remotely logical way before the book ends. Nobody pulled that even half good since Alistair McLean.

I consider both of them good "bring on your holiday trip, leave at the hotel" books. Good thing I borrowed DP and got DVC cheap at a flea-market.

Hans
 
Ehr, good point, except that some of the things he claims to be fact, are in fact, fiction.

Hans
 
HarryKeogh said:
Why does Dan Brown write in the forward to his books how pretty much everything presented in his novels are factual and accurate (when clearly they are not) and other authors of popular fiction like John Grisham will state how they had to make up stuff (change laws, places, etc) to suit the plot?

What the hell is wrong with Dan Brown?
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The same thing that's wrong with the Farrelly Bros who put "This is a True Story" in front of Fargo.
 
I agree that it was a pulp whodunnit, with far-reaching implications.

Very easy to read, with enough hints that the average dumbass can convince themselves that they knew the answers all along. But the writing was pretty bad, with the cliff hanges at the end of every chapter.
 
HarryKeogh said:
Why does Dan Brown write in the forward to his books how pretty much everything presented in his novels are factual and accurate (when clearly they are not) and other authors of popular fiction like John Grisham will state how they had to make up stuff (change laws, places, etc) to suit the plot?[/SIZE]
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In my opinion there are writers who are much worse in this respect than Dan Brown.

The bottom of the pit is probably Sven Hassel who claims to have written his own memoirs.

The only problem is that I have spotted plagiarized scenes that are lifted word-to-word from books such as Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk, Konsalik's Strafbataljon 999, Linna's Tuntematon sotilas, Heinrich's Das geduldige Fleisch (better known in English as "The Cross of Iron"), and several others that I can't remember offhand. In fact, I can't remember ever reading a single Hassel book where I didn't recognize at least one scene. Probably the most absurd plagiarization was when he lifted the plot of Kelly's Heroes and claimed that it happened to him in Russia.

Well, OK, there are another problems, like how his stories are internally inconsistent to the degree of absurdity with him being in three or four different locations at the same time and like there is actually no evidence that he ever served in the German army.
 
I just finished DVC on the plane to San Diego.
I just don't see what the big deal is. It's in the fiction section for a reason.
 
ImaginalDisc said:
Does anyone else find it odd that Dan Brown would claim that every single "fact" in his book is correct, and yet the darned title has a glaring factual error? It ought to be "The Leonardo Code". da Vinci was what he was called, but it wasn't his name. When the author of book doesn't even take care to keep his titles error free, I start to wonder.
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People have been referring to him as "Da Vinci" for a long time. Its a common practice, done in encyclopedias, articles, etc. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was actually the man's name, taken from the place of his birth. The book might have a lot of errors and woo-ish thinking, but this isn't one of them.

Edited to add: from Wikipedia, "Leonardo, the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary named Ser Piero and a local peasant woman called Caterina, was born before modern naming conventions developed in Europe; his name "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", simply means "Leonardo, son of [Mes]ser Piero, from Vinci". "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci
 
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Renfield said:
People have been referring to him as "Da Vinci" for a long time. Its a common practice, done in encyclopedias, articles, etc. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was actually the man's name, taken from the place of his birth. The book might have a lot of errors and woo-ish thinking, but this isn't one of them.

Edited to add: from Wikipedia, "Leonardo, the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary named Ser Piero and a local peasant woman called Caterina, was born before modern naming conventions developed in Europe; his name "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", simply means "Leonardo, son of [Mes]ser Piero, from Vinci". "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci
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The "di ser Piero da Vinci" is a descriptor not really a name. In scholarly circles (and the hero of the story is a Harvard professor) he is not referred to as "da Vinci". That would be like referring to Joan of Arc as "of Arc".

And for someone who seemed to know a lot about the "secrets" of the Catholic Church, Brown messed up on a basic tenet of Roman Catholicism. The "Immaculate Conception" is about the birth of Mary, not the virgin birth of Jesus. Mary was born without original sin, hence "Immaculate Conception". - Hi, my name is Jim and I'm a recovering Catholic.

I can't count the number of times I rolled my eyes at some of the things. The book takes place in about a 24 hour period and there are more coincidences per hour than can be imagined. But even with all that I liked the book, it would have been a lot better if a competent editor had gotten to it before publication.
 
Regardless of all the factual errors, I'm dying to see it on the screen. There's potential for a very entertaining popcorn-quality movie, in an Indiana Jones kind of style. A corpse on the Louvre, come on. And Audrey Tatou! Cool.
 
Diamond said:
I even felt sympathy for Opus Dei and the Roman Catholic Church afterwards for the portrayal made in the book.
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I second that. Any book which mentions the mythical "Illuminati" automatically goes bankrupt in the cool-points department; but after trying Angels and Demons, I almost wish the Illuminati were real, just so they could do something insidious to Dan Brown.

I will go to see the movie of The DaVinci Code. Being only two hours long, it would've been impossible for the producers of the film to include any of the effluvium which makes up most of the book, leaving only the marketable, halfway-decent material. I hope it makes a good movie.
 
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