fiction files redux discussion

Anybody picked the latest Robert Langdon adventure yet? I got it this morning...well, I made my girlfriend buy it because I'd only hate myself if I went in and bought it myself...this way, I can say somebody gave it to me...it's a bit like buying a big mac and gorging on it...then admonishing oneself afterwards.

Anyway, so far...I am enjoying the hell out of it...surely the point? I like that this one is exactly the same as all the others...that it took him so long to write...it's a fucking joke really...Joyce wrote Ulysses...Brown wrote The Lost Symbol...he's probably been too busy laughing for the past few years in his gold, jewel-encrusted bath to care!

Anyway...back to the adventure!

I'm waiting for The Lost Symbol to be delivered from Amazon. I'm no defender of Brown's literary style, but he doesn't strike me as much worse than most of the mainstream.

I was given The Da Vinci Code for XMas one year by my future MIL and although it was far from the best work I've ever read it did make me very happy that she gave me a book. Now over the years we've swapped lots of popular fiction, it's what she likes and I'm pretty open to reading anything anyway.

Oh yeah, I totally agree - Brown isn't the best writer ever...nobody ever said he was...he's been influential in his own way...and maybe posterity will be kinder to him.

I've always said I enjoyed the heck out of Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code. Sometimes great, thrilling reads don't have to have the intellectually-minded author haunting the material.

pirating books...is nothing sacred?

Lost Symbol

nothing is, i know. i live in pirate land.

. . . ugh . . .

I really don't understand why anybody would pirate books...especially for reading on a computer? It's not as if the price of a paperback or hardback even is ultra-expensive...plus there's a hallowed "thing" called a library.

From the Poe biography I read recently, one of the reason's he didn't make any money was because there was no copyright in his day...so people just reprinted all of his work without giving him any money.

I never undestood the pirating of movies too...why watch an inferior quality version to the real thing?

Martyn wrote: "I really don't understand why anybody would pirate books...especially for reading on a computer? It's not as if the price of a paperback or hardback even is ultra-expensive...plus there's a hallowe..."

I pirated this book. My hub and I had nothing left to read on the bookshelves, it was the weekend, and we were/are utterly broke.

It was one of those marital moments when (I hope you married folks'll understand) that I had to have something for us to read together.

I absolutely hated this book. I enjoyed DaVinci Code, and even Angels and Demons to a lesser degree. But I HATED reading this....ESPECIALLY out loud. Oh God, it was just awful. It felt so.... elementary and formulaic. ugh. yuck. nasty. hated it. Capital H. I feel no guilt whatsoever for having downloading it for free. None at all. I'm glad I didn't contribute to his profit for that piece of crap. LOL...and yes, that is how I REALLY feel.

It's easy to make fun of Dan Brown. Heck, I've done it, right here AND back on the MySpace Fiction Files. He's fond of dialogue like this:

"You need to tell me and you need to tell me NOW!!"

Jack Bauer has nothing on some of Dan Brown's characters when they're stressed out.

But the guy can plot thrilling scenes. Not aesthetically beautiful ones, no, but his stories make me think of Robert Ludlum, if Ludlum had been interested in ancient, arcane info.

I'm usually not good at predicting stuff in books--I guess my willful suspension of disbelief mode is pretty strong. I predicted just about everything in this book. And I was still swept along in the chase. Now I have a hankering to go visit D.C. again.

Are the characters all that believable? No. Does Dan Brown sometimes write bad dialogue? Yes. Is the plot outlandish? Yes. Are the number of chapters in this book ridiculous? Yes. Will any of the scenes in this book stay in my head for a long time? Nope. Do I think I could write a better book? Honestly, yes. (And I'm trying.) But even when it was bad, it was entertaining. It's the literary equivalent of TV, like watching a "Law & Order: SVU" marathon (although Benson and Stabler are more realistic and I'm secretly in love with Mariska Hargitay).

All that said, I can't imagine reading this book out loud or listening to an audio tape of it. But the movie will come along sooner or later, I'm sure. (And "The Da Vinci Code" film with Tom Hanks was better than the book, I thought--although you can SEE how Brown is seeing his newest book as a movie.)

"It's the literary equivalent of TV, like watching a "Law & Order: SVU" marathon".

This is precisely what my problem is with this book and books like it. My beef is not with Dan Brown, but with what he's repetitively producing.

When I watch shows like CSI, I feel like our intelligence is being insulted.... everything is spelled out for you.

We all understand, I think, that the masses of tv watchers might be counted on to know who the vice president is if they weren't spoon fed every bit of knowledge and pseudo-knowledge they consumed.

Why perpetuate the problem?

What? Oh... that's right. The paycheck.

I had a college professor suggest I write romance novels, just to make a few hundred extra bucks here and there. I just can't bring myself to do that, though.

I do understand that there are folks out there who read to take a break and not to challenge themselves, but all I'm asking for is a little tiny bit of meat in a book...just a slight challenge to the mind. Don't waste someone's $22 using quadruple-spaced chapter headers every three pages and the same plot formula you used in your previous books.