johnsemlak
First Post
KenM said:
That's funny, I'm reading a paperback (in English). Is that only available outside the US?
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So I've finally started the Da Vinci code (possible spoilers)
- Thread starter johnsemlak
- Start date
That's funny, I'm reading a paperback (in English). Is that only available outside the US?
Dark Jezter
First Post
Last I heard, the paperback version of the Da Vinci Code wasn't coming out in the United States until this October or November. My information could be out of date, however.
mhacdebhandia
Explorer
I'll just chip in to say that I will never read this book. Dan Brown is an absolute sensationalist hack - you can tell you're in for a shabby ride from the first page of anything he's ever written.
Nyarlathotep
Explorer
I've always called it the dumbed down version of Focault's Pendulum... or the Chariots of the Gods version of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. (BTW this is the only board I frequent that has people who have read Focault's Pendulum... it gives me a warm glowing feeling 
).
I figure it's so popular for two reasons.
1) It's got a contraversial theme (and the loud denunciations from the church have just spured sales).
and
2) The blurb about everything being factual at the begining seems to make every one believe this is also a major scholarly work, with secrets that have never been revealed till now.
As you can tell, I didn't like it at all.
).I figure it's so popular for two reasons.
1) It's got a contraversial theme (and the loud denunciations from the church have just spured sales).
and
2) The blurb about everything being factual at the begining seems to make every one believe this is also a major scholarly work, with secrets that have never been revealed till now.
As you can tell, I didn't like it at all.
I read the Da Vinci Code. I was annoyed most of the time, but I'd paid for it, and I was stubborn, and it's been on the bestseller list for a couple years now. If I'm going to get over my snobbishness and admit that deep inside, I'd love to write something that was not only well-liked by critics but a big heaping barn-burner of a commercial success, it seems only fair to try to figure it out. Here's what hit me as I read it:
- Most non-SF readers are really surprised when they read fiction whose biggest commodity is ideas. The book contained very little that my father-in-law, a minister, hadn't learned in his first year of theology -- and most of that little was, well, the parts that Brown made up. Most SF people I've talked with seemed to be unwowed by it, but the people who read it as regular thriller or mystery readers seemed to be blown away by the sheer scope of the ideas. Moral for me: Out-there ideas will impress non-SF readers, but aren't going to impress the average SF reader. (I might differentiate between fantasy and SF here, since SF sells itself as the literature of ideas, and I don't think fantasy has that opinion of itself -- so when a fantasy novel with lots of new-to-the-reader ideas comes along, it's still pretty wild for the average fantasy reader (I'm thinking of Perdido Street Station, which wasn't to my taste but did have a lot of original ideas flying through it.))
- Most readers apprently don't care if the author uses cheap tricks on them. Man, the times I howled when Brown pulled an infodump in the middle of a chase scene. Or when he had someone infodump by remembering a class he'd taught, complete with dialogue from his students at the time. Or when he tried to build suspense by violating viewpoint rules, having characters whose heads we were inside allude to things interminably without ever actually telling the reader what it was they were thinking about. That stuff grated on me in a big way, but evidently, the average reader either doesn't notice or doesn't care.
- New ideas are better than a new plot. For all its new ideas, the Da Vinci Code is a stereotypical thriller in terms of its plot and characters. In fact, it's a pretty lazy thriller by those standards. If I get a bug up my ass to be original and not cater to cliches, the place to do it is in general world ideas, not in the plot (unless I am taken by the muse and absolutely absolutely must), because the readers seem more comfortable with a story that has the trappings of new ideas but a pretty vanilla plot once those trappings are taken away than they do with a story that has a non-normal plot and no trappings of weirdness.
(I'm not making sense on that last one, I think. By "vanilla plots", I mean that in a mystery novel, generally speaking, the protagonist finds out about a crime, spends time hunting down clues, has false leads or suspects that create some internal character conflict, and eventually finds out who did it -- either proving the innocence of the person close to the protaonist suspected in a happy mystery, or proving that the person close to the protagonist was the culprit, or responsible for some unpleasant red herring in a more tragic or psychologically harrowing mystery. If I decided to be original by having the protagonist not solve the mystery in the end, that would most likely come back to bite me in the butt unless I did the bestest job ever. If I wrote a romance novel, I'd better not have the heroine end up in a dysfunctional, quasi-abusive relationship just for the sake of realism and a twist ending.)
- Most non-SF readers are really surprised when they read fiction whose biggest commodity is ideas. The book contained very little that my father-in-law, a minister, hadn't learned in his first year of theology -- and most of that little was, well, the parts that Brown made up. Most SF people I've talked with seemed to be unwowed by it, but the people who read it as regular thriller or mystery readers seemed to be blown away by the sheer scope of the ideas. Moral for me: Out-there ideas will impress non-SF readers, but aren't going to impress the average SF reader. (I might differentiate between fantasy and SF here, since SF sells itself as the literature of ideas, and I don't think fantasy has that opinion of itself -- so when a fantasy novel with lots of new-to-the-reader ideas comes along, it's still pretty wild for the average fantasy reader (I'm thinking of Perdido Street Station, which wasn't to my taste but did have a lot of original ideas flying through it.))
- Most readers apprently don't care if the author uses cheap tricks on them. Man, the times I howled when Brown pulled an infodump in the middle of a chase scene. Or when he had someone infodump by remembering a class he'd taught, complete with dialogue from his students at the time. Or when he tried to build suspense by violating viewpoint rules, having characters whose heads we were inside allude to things interminably without ever actually telling the reader what it was they were thinking about. That stuff grated on me in a big way, but evidently, the average reader either doesn't notice or doesn't care.
- New ideas are better than a new plot. For all its new ideas, the Da Vinci Code is a stereotypical thriller in terms of its plot and characters. In fact, it's a pretty lazy thriller by those standards. If I get a bug up my ass to be original and not cater to cliches, the place to do it is in general world ideas, not in the plot (unless I am taken by the muse and absolutely absolutely must), because the readers seem more comfortable with a story that has the trappings of new ideas but a pretty vanilla plot once those trappings are taken away than they do with a story that has a non-normal plot and no trappings of weirdness.
(I'm not making sense on that last one, I think. By "vanilla plots", I mean that in a mystery novel, generally speaking, the protagonist finds out about a crime, spends time hunting down clues, has false leads or suspects that create some internal character conflict, and eventually finds out who did it -- either proving the innocence of the person close to the protaonist suspected in a happy mystery, or proving that the person close to the protagonist was the culprit, or responsible for some unpleasant red herring in a more tragic or psychologically harrowing mystery. If I decided to be original by having the protagonist not solve the mystery in the end, that would most likely come back to bite me in the butt unless I did the bestest job ever. If I wrote a romance novel, I'd better not have the heroine end up in a dysfunctional, quasi-abusive relationship just for the sake of realism and a twist ending.)
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