darstec

I would ask the same question of those "tons of people." There is a much larger ton that bought that book, and others Dan Brown wrote. Apparently after being subjected to writing that was "too painful" it didn't stop them from purchasing his other books. And it is the money vote that counts despite the verbal outcry. I think this is the case of a town's citizens talking about shutting down the houses of ill repute while secretly patronizing them. And similarly the religious are genuinely scared to death of both Dan Brown's book and the houses of ill repute.

blastula

I haven't found any. Got any recommendations? Is there any good literature to be had in the "conspiracy to keep Jesus's bloodline secret" genre?

blastula

Ah I see you're assuming I'm "the religious." You're one of those atheists with an moronic chip on their shoulder. Or are you Dan Brown's mother or something? Clearly many people liked the book and therefore bought the book. I didn't say millions others found it painful (though maybe they have - how many millions, like me, didn't buy the book because the writing pained them?), I said I did. I'm saying I thought it sucked. Am I not allowed to have a different opinion from the masses? Do you think if lots of people buy something, it always means it's high quality? Would that make Christianity valid? <edit>

blastula

No man, Plantard invented it and has admitted to the hoax. There was an Abbey of Sion though.

Here's Brown's full priory "fact":

darstec

In sales that is known as the clincher. Whatever my orginal thoughts, it is no longer an assumption. Methinks you very well could be a Fundie posturing to make agnostics and atheists look bad when you restort to ad hominems.

Hm. You didn't read it but you know the writing was too painful. About 1900 years ago someone pretending to be a Paul of Tarsus received revelations too.

blastula

Wow, do you see "fundies" in your dreams. Do you check under your covers for "the religious" every night? <edit>
Boo!

blastula

Alright seeing as my last ad hominem was edited out, I'll respond another way.

Whether I personally am atheist, agnostic, fundie, or polytheist, is immaterial to the quality of the writing of that novel. It is an inferior deductive analysis that would conclude that the religion of a book reviewer is the determining factor for the content of any and all reviews. Even more inferior is the assumption that a non-theist would not have a negative opinion of the writing quality of a particular work of fiction.

I had no idea that The Da Vinci Code was such a sacred cow to anybody. Do you miss your bible darstec? Does The Da Vinci Code fill the void for your RC conditioned yearning for an inerrant holy text?

Is it ok if I say I thought Left Behind sucked too even though I only read 5 pages of that one?

darstec

RCs do not believe in an inerrant holy text. In fact the two last official bibles explictly state in footnotes the fables of Genesis, the patriarchs never existed, the gospels were not written by those to whom they are attributed, and which words and phrases we haven't the foggiest idea what they are talking about.

Besides being able to read the original languages (although not Coptic) I can plainly see the variation of one manuscript to another, so inerrancy is out of the question.

Could you give us about three examples of poor writing from The Da Vinci Code and demonstrate how those passages might be turned into good writing?

And just so we know you are still giving an opinion on the writing rather than content matter, could you do the same for the Left Behind novel? Do both novels share the same deficiency of skill or are they different?

johno

I love recycling my old book reviews. (Every time somebody reads one I gain $10^-5 or something like that.) For examples of truly dreadful writing in the da Vinci Code see

http://www.epinions.com/content_144862187140

and for some examples of even worse writing, the worst writing I have ever seen in print see

http://www.epinions.com/content_135725420164

Examples are given, together with explanations about why they are so appalling. I gave the da Vinci code three stars, Left Behind one, only because I wasn't allowed to give zero.

johno

The Bishop

That is a perfect example of Dan Brown writing something as fact, and getting every single element completely wrong.

I actually prefer Angels and Demons because it is so hugely, vastly, instantly recognisably wrong, on almost every single page. It starts with the blatantly and demonstrably false statement that throughout the centuries since the rumours of the Illuminati had been circulated, and their obsession with ambigrams, it had been considered "impossible" to create a working ambigram of the word "Illuminati". Since Brown actually had to have someone create an ambigram of that word (along with a lot of other words), it's patently obvious to the reader that not only can it be done, there can scarcely be any words which it is easier to do it with!

It's got I's, l's and t's at the ends, and umin in the middle. So exactly what was it that apparently stumped the finest scholastic minds throughout history(including hero Robert Langdon himself)?

Then we get the bad science. A&D moves on to describing antimatter in terms that would imply that it has never been successfully created (PET scanners, ie positrons, ie anti-electrons? No?), describes CERN incorrectly, has the director of CERN expressing incredulity that a scientist apparently was able to generate antimatter "out of nothing", and equates creating matter and antimatter out of energy to what happened at the Big Bang.

Then we move on to the heart of the plot, the election of Pope. According to Dan Brown, Popes are elected from a slate of four candidates, called preferiti. Wrong! There are no "candidates" in papal elections, of course, and those cardinals considered not unlikely to succeed are routinely referred to as papabile, not "preferiti".

It's the final twist, however, that really makes one utterly laugh out loud. The final machinations of the true villain of the piece are made clear, and it was all to do with revenge against the late Pope for having committed the ultimate sin of fathering a child. But the leading cardinal who acted as Devil's Advocate (something that applies to sainthood candidates, not Popes-to-be) had apparently done nothing about this. He then carefully explains that what happened was as follows: this priest and future pope had met and fallen in love with a nun, they had kept their love secret and unconsummated, they had undertaken some kind of IVF treatment and the nun had conceived and given birth to a son. And in all this, nobody "sinned", apparently. Not only that, but in this media-frenzy world, it was apparently not considered that a priest known to have had a relationship and a child might be an unsuitable candidate for the papacy. It's rather astonishing to consider how little one would actually have to know about the Catholic Church, just from osmosis, to understand how nonsensical this all is. A priest and a nun not only fall in love, but actually contrive a second Virgin Birth, and "it isn't a sin" simply because he didn't put his sausage into her hairy place.

I love this, from blastula's quote of the DVC Fact page:Yeah, those so-called "parchments" ... were typewritten!

Last gem: Christian iconography was derived from.... .the Aztecs!! Yes, a lost civilisation, completely unsuspected by the rest of the world until almost a millennium and half after Jesus lived and died. They're the ones that gave us the Cross, Dan. You keep 'em coming!