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I want to punch that smug douchebag.
Dec. 9th, 2009 01:31 amI just finished Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol, and I am sort of divided. Tortured, actually, on how to grade this.
Dan Brown couldn't write his way out envelope constructed of wet toilet paper. His descriptions of buildings and landscapes sound like they were lifted directly from travel brochures and Fromer's guides. His dialog is hackneyed and stilted - no one talks the way his characters do. If it's not overly simplistic reactions, it's paragraphs of pseudo-academic exposition. He has this annoying habit of restating things in italics that drives me insane. Half the time they are repetitive thoughts and the other half they are pithy summations of the last three paragraphs. HIs main character rarely does anything but freak out and complain that nothing makes sense. And occasionally have a revelation about what a symbol means. His villains are cliche, replete with physical deformities. His romantic interests are tall, thin, and interchangable, lacking in any defining characteristics. Brown's plot twists are the worst thing twists can be - predictable.
However, I find that if I suspend my critical thinking ability, I actually enjoy these books. I don't try to solve the riddles and puzzles before the characters do. I don't think too hard about what's going to happen - I just let the plot take me wherever it's going. If I do think about it, I realize I'm reading dreck and it takes a minute to turn the dumb back on. It's like eating meat. Sure, it tastes good and you really enjoy it, as long as you're not watching a documentary about factory farming while you're eating.
As a student of religion, psychology, conspiracy, and the occult, I enjoy seeing my favorite esoteric subjects put forth so prominently in mainstream fiction. Sometimes I want to punch Dan Brown for wasting some of my novel ideas on BigMac books, but I get over that pretty quickly. I wills ay though, that the man really does his homework. His research is fairly right on - to the point where it's like he's just directly quoting - and yet where he changes or adds things, it fits in with the little world he's created. Of course it's all terribly simplistic - I've said it before; he's the poor man's Umberto Eco. Or rather, he's the idiot child of Umberto Eco and Michael Crichton.
So, on one hand, I want to give this book a terrible rating. C- or even a D. But the last two chapters were worth reading the 500ish pages before it. I'd give the last two chapters an A-, but they only work within context of what came before. So how does one reconcile this difference? I'm stumped for now, because though I bitched about the book the whole way through, I enjoyed it. I suppose it's like the BigMac I mentioned before - you know it's bad for you intellectually, but the body enjoys all that fat and smiles.
Dan Brown couldn't write his way out envelope constructed of wet toilet paper. His descriptions of buildings and landscapes sound like they were lifted directly from travel brochures and Fromer's guides. His dialog is hackneyed and stilted - no one talks the way his characters do. If it's not overly simplistic reactions, it's paragraphs of pseudo-academic exposition. He has this annoying habit of restating things in italics that drives me insane. Half the time they are repetitive thoughts and the other half they are pithy summations of the last three paragraphs. HIs main character rarely does anything but freak out and complain that nothing makes sense. And occasionally have a revelation about what a symbol means. His villains are cliche, replete with physical deformities. His romantic interests are tall, thin, and interchangable, lacking in any defining characteristics. Brown's plot twists are the worst thing twists can be - predictable.
However, I find that if I suspend my critical thinking ability, I actually enjoy these books. I don't try to solve the riddles and puzzles before the characters do. I don't think too hard about what's going to happen - I just let the plot take me wherever it's going. If I do think about it, I realize I'm reading dreck and it takes a minute to turn the dumb back on. It's like eating meat. Sure, it tastes good and you really enjoy it, as long as you're not watching a documentary about factory farming while you're eating.
As a student of religion, psychology, conspiracy, and the occult, I enjoy seeing my favorite esoteric subjects put forth so prominently in mainstream fiction. Sometimes I want to punch Dan Brown for wasting some of my novel ideas on BigMac books, but I get over that pretty quickly. I wills ay though, that the man really does his homework. His research is fairly right on - to the point where it's like he's just directly quoting - and yet where he changes or adds things, it fits in with the little world he's created. Of course it's all terribly simplistic - I've said it before; he's the poor man's Umberto Eco. Or rather, he's the idiot child of Umberto Eco and Michael Crichton.
So, on one hand, I want to give this book a terrible rating. C- or even a D. But the last two chapters were worth reading the 500ish pages before it. I'd give the last two chapters an A-, but they only work within context of what came before. So how does one reconcile this difference? I'm stumped for now, because though I bitched about the book the whole way through, I enjoyed it. I suppose it's like the BigMac I mentioned before - you know it's bad for you intellectually, but the body enjoys all that fat and smiles.
