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What is your opinion on Dan Brown novels?
Brown's Da Vinci Code was one of the first "proper" novel I had started with when I was a kid. I liked it enough at that time to buy his other novel, Angels and Demons soon after that. His books are usually categorized as Historical Fiction but you also wouldn't be wrong in calling them Realistic Fiction I think. Needless to say, massive controversy also surrounds Brown just like many other famous authors. At least /r/books is filled with many posts filled with both love and disdain towards this author!
What do you think about Dan Brown novels, have you read any of them?
I never cared for them. They aren’t very well written.
On the other hand, he is indirectly responsible for the funniest work of parody I have ever read.
Oh, my, thank you! This is beautiful!
I starting reading that link not expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. I read it laughing to the end. Masterful!
Michael Deacon wrote a sequel a few years later: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/05/21/look-out-kids-its-the-return-of-renowned-dan-brown/
I read it every time it's posted. Every single time.
I read one or two of them, and they were fun in the moment but I didn't think they were good. But also, that's fine? I just read a series of dystopian smut novels. The story was actually quite good and the sex was well written but I am not claiming they're fine literature.
It's fine to read fluff, whether it's Dan Brown or Booktok.
Yeah. In the end it doesn’t matter if it’s bad if you enjoy it. It’s fantasy, after all.
Digital Fortress, Brown's "first" book (see note below) was covered on the 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back podcast, which is a humor podcast that discusses bad books. The name comes from the length of Ready Player One, the first book they covered. Some tropes / comedy they found in DF include:
In the book's defense, Dan Brown was onto the whole NSA / cryptology stuff over a decade before it made headline news with Snowden. Although since it is written with the NSA cryptologists as the good guys, it takes a stance that may seem quite shocking or even naive if you read it nowadays: that the Electronic Frontier Foundation are the bad guys for not wanting the US Govt to put back doors in cryptographic systems. The pace of the book is great. It zooms along, swapping between events in Spain and the NSA HQ in America. There are some twists, cinematic-style set-pieces, and interesting characters, even if they are a bit cliché. I enjoyed reading along with the podcast, both in terms of the unforced-errors silliness and the story overall.
I've also read Da Vinci Code, but it was years ago when that was in fashion, and can't remember much about it. I remember reading it quite quickly, so I must have been into it at the time. We have a copy of that and the sequel (Angels&Demons) kicking about the flat somewhere, but I can't remember the sequel at all, so it must have been pretty forgettable. The Da Vinci Code movie is worth watching just to wonder WTF they were thinking when they did Tom Hanks's hair / wig like that.
Note: his actual first was written under the name "Danielle Brown" 187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman.
I had read the Davinci Code and thought it was interesting and entertaining. I don't know much about any of the historical elements in the book. Then I read Digital Fortress, which is about something I do know a lot about, and was just ... awful. The only good thing about it was that the audiobook helped me stay awake on a long drive because it annoyed me so much.
Digital Fortress gripe, mild spoilers
The plot is advanced at one point because someone in the NSA (or whatever the agency in the book is) is able to use someone else's account because it is standard practice not to lock their workstations. They just turn the brightness on their monitors down. At the super–secure government agency. Like seriously, even if you were going to do that, you would just turn the monitor off.
After that, I just assumed his other books were equally poorly researched and wrote him off.
Most IT places I worked, if you left the screen unlocked you'd come back to upside down/sideways Windows. Was kinda scary how many people didn't know the rotation shortcut considering we worked in IT, and this happened fairly regularly.
I definitely liked Angels & Demons as a kid but had 0 interest in the movie. Reading the book felt really naughty, like i was invited to read this secret adult manuscript about the inner workings of the conspiracy world. At the time i got off on listening to coast to coast am, talking to older kids about conspiracies and it was a big comfy book that hit the spot when it was talking about those things. But even then i thought the character(s) were stiff and it was hard to really get a feel for who they were and why they were. So i focused on the conspiracy stuff.
As an adult, I recently read a bunch of the early part of that book and holy moly it feels like young adult writing, and i dont mean a book for young adults. The prose and dialogue are just rough, i couldnt bring myself to keep going.
Im not aware of any controversy but i certainly categorize The DaVinci code in the same league as 50 Shades of Grey, its just soft-core conspiracy that's easy enough to read for the masses.
I read them in middle school and really enjoyed them. Looking back, that probably means they were not that good. I recall them being super intellectual, insightful, and complex, which I find really embarrassing to think back on today. That said, they were an enjoyable read with an assortment of historical easter eggs or wiki rabbit holes to dive down. I don't regret reading them, but I would not recommend them to a friend.
I read ...
Hopefully I’m not misinterpreting the intent of “realistic fiction” here as a genre, but… I don’t think Dan Brown of all people is terribly good at factual accuracy, and so I’m not sure I’d call his books “realistic” per se. The TV Tropes page Falsely Advertised Accuracy literally used to be called “Dan Browned” after him and the endless inaccuracies in his works. Hell, The Da Vinci Code was apparently notorious for getting things wrong.
I think "realistic fiction" as a genre is typically meant to identify works that aren't speculative fiction (aka scifi and fantasy) or historical fiction -- "realistic fiction" is usually used for works set somewhere close to the modern day at the time of writing in a world that approximates our own. Dan Brown's books definitely aren't accurate or realistic, but they're set (partially? I haven't read much of it) in the modern day in a world that's at least supposed to be the one we live in, which I think it what could get them categorized as "realistic fiction" the genre even though they're not very realistic.
As a former Catholic he got a lot wrong... Or I'm in on the conspiracy
Funnily enough this is the second time Dan Brown has been mentioned in the last 24 hours for me. The first was in the context of a discussion about the Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson Dune books, in which I said:
"House Atredies is one of the worst books I've ever read, and I've read The DaVinci Code"
I do stand by that, but it is a little unfair on The DaVinci Code. TDVC is certainly a bad book, but it's pacey and reasonably exciting junk with some fun (albeit extremely silly) set pieces - a bit like a Guy Ritchie or Michael Bay film. House Atredies is just bad on every level.
I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code. It's a fun, easy read. I was excited to pick up Angels and Demons after but I didn't finish it. It didn't pull me in the same way. Then the movie was disappointing so I haven't read any other Brown books.
I was always surprised that Angel's and Demons got skipped over for DaVinci Code. I thought it was way better. The big thing for me was the stakes. The first book was a race to stop all of Vatican city from being destroyed.
The the sequel is a race to uncover some historical knowledge about Jesus's life because .... reasons. I don't honestly remember why it was such a big deal worth killing over. It was like if Indiana Jones ended with the ark not shooting lightning and everyone went "OK cool" and went home.
The 3rd one is even dumber because half the plot is about stopping the bad guy from releasing an embarrassing video of some government officials and getting a religious tattoo, but everyone acts like it's a huge deal.
I don't remember if it's in the book too but the fact that there was a design of the word Illuminati that could be read upside down or right side up was the dumbest plot point.
Any graphic designer could have made that. It's not a conspiracy
Didn't the book also claim that it was almost impossible to create such an ambigram? And yet, there it was on the page 😂 I liked the book, but I did find that to be extremely stupid.
I couldn't remember. It was So dumb.
Like I'm channeling Benoit Blanc from Glass Onion
"NO, ITS JUST DUMB"
I read Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code maybe 15 years ago. Easily digestible, suspenseful page turners, though they didn't leave much of a lasting impression.
I recall thinking at some point that it felt like I was reading an adventure thriller movie, for better or for worse. I still feel like it might be appropriate to recommend something like that to a teenager/young adult who hasn't been convinced by their exposure to the literary canon that they could get many more hours of entertainment out of reading reading instead of watching a movie.
I always considered Dan Brown to be light airport reading. His characters explain stuff to the reader in a manner completely inconsistent with natural dialogue. If you've been distracted by having to look up your gate number on the departures board or find your way somewhere, there's no need to flip back to catch up, his characters will remind you of what's been happening. The stories are okay but just the way they're written keeps me from considering them to be good.
I didn't care for The Da Vinci Code, but I liked the movie fine. My main issue was the cliffhangers at the end of each chapter, they don't fit with how I like to finish up a chapter and then go to sleep. To each their own, of course.
If you enjoy the mystery aspect of the book, you might also enjoy Agatha Christie.
It's the book equivalent to junk food, you start reading, can't stop, and in the end you hate yourself. I stopped after the second novel.
His books all have the same plot and that got old for me after a while.
I know I read the Da Vinci Code, and at least one other- probably The Lost Symbol. This would've been just as I was graduating from high school, maybe starting college. What I remember is that I enjoyed them a lot.
Would I enjoy them now? No clue- the Internet keeps saying that the books I enjoyed when I was younger don't hold up very well (there's a very infamous fantasy series that is the poster child of 'awesome as a teenager, terrible as an adult'), and I already have other books that I want to read before I even try to go back to older books.
I read a few of his books and loved them, but I was so incredibly freaking annoyed the whole time I read Deception Point that I haven't picked up a book by him since. Holy crap that book was full of itself. I found myself skipping 75 pages (I distinctly remember this) of superfluous boring foreshadowing, JUST to get to the freaking point. Except then the point was also hella boring so I just tossed the book at my wall in frustration and never opened it again. Have never had a reaction to a book before or since then like that.
I read da Vinci, felt it was ok. Then I read some of his other stuff and realized they all have the same plot with the same twist.
He's a hack and his books are pure schlock. That's the long and short of it.
I have a personal sort of distaste, in that where I grew up/lived a bunch of the...less hinged, I'll say... got into those and basically treated it like more stuff to include in their working mythological take on life. Same idea as what folks sometimes do with Dante's "Inferno", or "Left Behind", it's like the lines blur a bit and folks talked like the work was true, because it validated some weird metaphysical thought they had. It's been a long time and my memory is fuzzy with it but that negative feeling has definitely never gotten better. I did try to check out "The DaVinci Code" at one point and felt it was written stupidly, so I've only seen a few pages.