I must admit I'm usually a staunch Dan Brown fan. I loved Angels & Demons despite its faults, and to be honest I didn't find that many faults in the first place (for instance, I, unlike you, was pretty impressed by the ambigrams, not because I thought they were really impossible to recreate -indeed, he credits the designer who made them- but because I thought they were a great work of design). It does make a mess out of a lot of stuff, manipulating it to his convenience, but I'm mostly interested in the thrill, not in historical/art/scientific/religious accuracy, so I could look past that pretty easily
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I think I would have found the ambigrams more impressive if Brown had let them speak for themselves more, rather than making Langdon tell us every time they were mentioned how impressive they were. It's telling that this is an early book of his, because his writing did improve.
I think we have The Lost Symbol on our list, but I hadn't even considered Inferno. Thanks for the heads up!
That is LITERALLY everything I thought about this book, word for word, I read it back in high school when my reading tastes were still slightly suspect. Dan Brown: if 17 year olds think you're shit, you're shit
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Yeah, it's super obvious that Brown wants to make it look like he did all this research and everything he's telling you is true, when in reality he just throws in details to give that impression, while actually doing no research at all.
I have exactly zero knowledge of the layout of Paris or The Vatican, so that didn't bother me, but I do have a pretty good handle on Catholicism, which he got wrong as often as possible.
Basically, he suffers from 'good idea, poor execution'.
Oh wow. This sounds impossibly bad. All priests are virgins? Seriously?
DVC is the only Dan Brown book I've read, and I read it when I was 15ish, so before I had developed any critical thinking skills, and so I thought it was okay, but I remember my first Art History lecture at uni and my lecturer put up a photo of the cover and was like, "This is an example of really bad art history."
Yeah. It would be one thing if that were something a character believed, but it's mentioned (multiple times) that they're virgin sacrifices on the altars of science in a way that makes me think Dan Brown believes that to be true.
TDVC is ok, and a lot better than this one. The main problem with TDVC is that Dan Brown is trying to say the stuff he's writing about is REAL and TRUE OMG when it is clearly not. But it sold him a lot of books, so...
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I think we have The Lost Symbol on our list, but I hadn't even considered Inferno. Thanks for the heads up!
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I have exactly zero knowledge of the layout of Paris or The Vatican, so that didn't bother me, but I do have a pretty good handle on Catholicism, which he got wrong as often as possible.
Basically, he suffers from 'good idea, poor execution'.
Reply
DVC is the only Dan Brown book I've read, and I read it when I was 15ish, so before I had developed any critical thinking skills, and so I thought it was okay, but I remember my first Art History lecture at uni and my lecturer put up a photo of the cover and was like, "This is an example of really bad art history."
Reply
TDVC is ok, and a lot better than this one. The main problem with TDVC is that Dan Brown is trying to say the stuff he's writing about is REAL and TRUE OMG when it is clearly not. But it sold him a lot of books, so...
Reply
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