I listen to a few hundred audio books a year while working. There seems to be no correlation between the quality of the writing and the fame of the book. As disheartening as it is that thousands of great novels are never recognized, it is also awkward that some percentage of awful novels sell well and need to be reviewed.
I don't think we should make fun of Dan Brown, or assume that all of his novels will be awful, but we should take his individual novels for what they are, and for every one I've read, they're squarely in so-bad-it's-good territory.
For anyone else who enjoys such novels, I highly recommend Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. There's also commentary on the novel by the creators of RiffTrax in episodes 71 through 77 of the 372 Pages podcast: https://372pages.com/ep-71-if-bizarre-foods-went-horny
What I've realized is that the fame of the book is closely related to how interesting and unique the "elevator pitch” of the book. Which makes sense when you think about it; It's the elevator pitch that's spreading by word of mouth, not the book.
It's also become clear to me that there simply isn't a single "quality of writing" metric. Write quality is made up of dozens of factors (prose, character development, world building, plot development, grammar, uniqueness, pacing, dialog, etc). Each person balances those factors differently, and trying to squash them into a single metric is just bad communication.
Personally, I love sci-fi with good world building; As long as the book has great world building, a decent plot, and a unique concept; I'm usually willing to give it the label of "average writing" despite the bad prose, clunky pacing, and cookie-cutter character development. But other people immediately turned off by the negative factors (especially bad prose).
I dimly remember a time in the 90s when I thought technology was supposed to free us from the tyranny of "judging a book by its cover" and "following the crowd", when you could carry around a personalized algorithm to help you identify things you would like even if they were obscure or un-marketed.
It feels like that didn't happen, and we're still stuck with the same issue of promotions and gatekeepers and tastemakers, because those who control the algorithms (centralized, proprietary, remotely hosted) find it more profitable that way.
Did they ever make last.fm for books? Or other things? One of my ideas back in the day was "last.fm for meeting people", i.e. you could connect based on overlapping interests or aesthetic preferences in any dimension of life. That seems to have still not been invented yet?
I'm unconvinced by the profit motive argument: there's plenty of money to be made in the "long tail" of selling weird things (or experiences) to weird people!
Amazon has owned goodreads since 2013.I have been using thr platform for many years, and the service has been good. Having said that, I haven't seen much innovation being built but that might be a good thing with this product.
Any time it happens, things get twisted, or shut down. Reddit used to be good. Twitter used to be good. But the money people come in, the bots, the astroturfers, the guerrilla marketers, the spammers... If they stay alive regardless, in come the billionaires to offer ridiculous sums.
People complained that TikTok's algorithm was too good at finding niche and interesting content. The marketing was somewhat balanced, and tailored to people's actual tastes. That was before lobbyists and politicians discovered that it was severely interfering with their propaganda. Now I hear you can't so much as post 'Free Palestine', and kids are supposed to be grateful that we're allowed to have it on our phones at all.
All that said, for people with the right skills there is no shortage of entertaining content to discover; far more than could ever be consumed in a lifetime. It's really the most important news and views that gets suppressed the most.
Reddit was good, various forums were good for that too. The best way to get recommendation is through curated lists and you need people that are genuinely involved for that. You can still find some, but they can be very off the beaten path.
That's nonsense. If anything, for the prior decade, Twitter was well-known as the extreme left's judge, jury and executioner. All the cancellations people argue about? Overblown or not, Twitter was always at the center of it, and it was what made them possible.
(Though, to be honest, it wasn't a bias in the service itself, IMHO. Twitter was nothing but a resonance chamber. The bias was in what the outside world reacted to, and how.)
What Musk did to Twitter is unusual. The typical way "money people use money to destroy spaces" is through sterilization of the place to placate advertisers, and then through ongoing enshittification to extract as much as possible from what little users there are left. Other common ways are: buying up and merging with a shittier platform in the same or adjacent space, and a weird-ass pivot that makes business sense to everyone except the actual user base.
Bullshit, frankly. That was what your self imposed bubble was telling to themselves. Whenever measured, twitter bias was right wing - it took much more for them to stop right accounts then left ones.
> What Musk did to Twitter is unusual.
Yes, it is unusual to destroy financial value of a company that fast. I assume he will do the same to the country economics too. And you will blame everyone but musk and yourself for that.
He personally will maybe come off more rich this time, because you can steal from the government but he could really not from twitter. Corruption works for him.
> Whenever measured, twitter bias was right wing - it took much more for them to stop right accounts then left ones.
Was that why a chunk of left-leaning users famously left to form Bag, a "safe space" alternative to Twitter? Oh wait it was right wing and it was called Gab.
Doesn't really matter anyway. Twitter wasn't killed by bias, it was killed by a bored billionaire, but it would've been half-dead by now anyway like all social media sites, thanks to the usual cycle of enshittification.
> And you will blame everyone but musk and yourself for that.
You confuse me with someone else. I'm from the other side of the world, and my only interest in US economy is that the rest of the world kind of depends on the US keeping its shit together.
If you want to blame someone, blame people who have nothing better to do than to get endlessly polarized over non-issues, thus failing to come together to deal with the issues - and blame the industry that makes money off stoking this fire.
Yeah, Gab is super nice example of the asymmetry - the sort of behavior right wing Gab members displayed was much much less prominent on the left. So yeah, this is nice example of right wing extreme behaving in the worst way and then complaining it is fair people who behave better are not treated the same. When right wing harasses more, it is ok to kick them out more. The reality was that right wing harasses more, they get kicked, so services would kick off comparatively better behaved left wing people just to make right wing happy. That is right wing bias.
> Twitter wasn't killed by bias, it was killed by a bored billionaire [...] thanks to the usual cycle of enshittification.
He was not bored, he had political project. The enshittificationwas entrirely on Musk personal decisions, not on some impersonal rules.
> If you want to blame someone, blame people who have nothing better to do than to get endlessly polarized over non-issues, thus failing to come together to deal with the issues - and blame the industry that makes money off stoking this fire
I will blame people currently in power and those who voted for them. And nice to complain about polarization while talking about Gab as if it was not the group of people responsible for it.
The problem is, as usual, capitalism. The goal of people making stuff isn't to make good stuff, it's to sell lots of their stuff, at the highest price they can.
Certainly sometimes making bad stuff does make it so people don't want to buy it, and those who do buy it will only buy it for a low price, but surprisingly that's the case less often than you'd expect. (Blame the field of psychological manipulation that is advertising?)
And so on top of that, the algorithms that recommend things are eventually going to be subverted by the people who want to sell you things, so you end up with stuff pushed at you that "sells well" even if much of it doesn't actually match what you want.
One thing that might work is to decouple the recommendation algorithm from the entity trying to sell you stuff. I'd want an independent third party to give me recommendations on what to buy on Amazon, for example, rather than Amazon themselves recommending products to me. But you have to also somehow ensure that this third party isn't motivated by profit in a way that's related to what products you eventually buy.
On top of that, the problem with every good service is that once it gets to a certain size, it attracts the sort of people who will make it a bad service, because bad services can make them more money.
Well, like everyone who "criticizes capitalism" online, they leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine the concrete entailments of what they vaguely propose.
And when you try to, it’s always “um where did they say that?”
If you're going to bring up capitalism in your crusade against... recommendation systems... I think it's fair to ask you to workshop your genius idea a little more past the shower thought stage.
You can critizise something without having to provide alternatives. I dont know why people like you or gp feel the need to become so defensive about it.
Capitalism is the status quo. Like any other system ruling us it should be discussed in order to keep an intellectually honest discourse [1].
It’s a weird tagline because the books are basically sexless. But the first one was definitely fun and original so who cares. Unfortunately, the next two simply weren’t good. I wonder if the series will see a conclusion.
I disagree. The follow-ups definitely wasn't more of the same thing if that's what you were expecting, but I feel they were interesting, challenging and original, and I enjoyed them. YMMV.
The success of major bestsellers depends entirely on how they trigger the fantasies and wish fulfilments specific demographics.
The Da Vinci Code hit the religious/occult conspiracy theory market, which was huge at the time, and added feminist overtones about the "divine feminine" which appealed to most female New Agers and a good few male ones.
His other books didn't have those ingredients, and they were less successful.
More recently we've had Fifty Shades and Romantasy. Working out the demographics and the reader appeal is left as an (easy) exercise for the reader.
Harry Potter and Young Adult classics like The Hunger Games are a little harder to analyse, but not much.
Someone like Stephen King is less obvious. (For most of the books "horror" is the hook, but American small town relatability is at least as important.)
Writing quality isn't quite incidental. But it only needs to be above a certain minimal level of competence, nowhere near what's usually called "good writing."
Books which have "good writing" but don't trigger a large demographic of readers with specific fears and/or fantasies - of any kind - do not do well.
I don't remember who originally stated it, but there is an old axiom that "There are three stages of Reading: 1. Infantile - to learn about the world, 2. Adolescent - to learn about oneself, and 3. Adult - to read simply for enjoyment".
I think a lot of the current market for (adult) books reflects the second stage.
It would be interesting to ask the person(s) sitting next to you on the next plane ride why they are reading, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell vs Dan Brown vs Ian McEwan.
When something truly new gets invented, its value is directly apparent and obvious. Subsequent iterations yields smaller and smaller incremental improvements, and at some point, the ROI on marketing becomes greater than ROI on actual improvements, and from then on, fame stops being correlated with quality.
> What I've realized is that the fame of the book is closely related to how interesting and unique the "elevator pitch” of the book. Which makes sense when you think about it; It's the elevator pitch that's spreading by word of mouth, not the book.
"High concept" doesn't refer to the elevator pitch being interesting or unique. The less interesting or unique the movie is, the more high-concept it is.
"High concept" refers to the elevator pitch being a complete description of the movie. Nothing in the plot that might take more than a couple of seconds to describe.
> High concept is a type of artistic work that can be easily pitched with a succinctly stated premise. It can be contrasted with low concept, which is more concerned with character development and other subtleties that are not as easily summarized.
> Extreme examples of high-concept films are Snakes on a Plane and Sharknado, which describe their entire premises in their titles.
Interestingly, this is exactly the opposite of what everyone assumes the phrase must mean, based on the ordinary meanings of "high" and "concept". Such is life.
> this is exactly the opposite of what everyone assumes the phrase must mean
Huh, yeah, that's surprising. I always assumed "high concept" meant that a work was more "cerebral" or something like that, while "low concept" is something lowbrow or simple to understand.
I had no idea that the term referred to how succinctly the work can be described or pitched.
It doesn't help that in some cases, it would actually correlate. Take the example from the Wiki:
> high-concept idea, such as "what if we could clone dinosaurs?" as in Jurassic Park.
"What if we could clone dinosaurs?" can unroll into anything between some extremely cerebral biopunk (think "Change Agent" but written by Greg Egan) and sharknando with raptors instead of sharks. In either case, the "elevator pitch" would be good, succinct summary - but, if you were to give that line to people and ask them to imagine what the book is like, the answer would depend entirely on the level of interests and sophistication of individual responders.
Or, in short: if you like cerebral stuff and you hear a "high-concept" pitch, you're likely to assume the work is "high concept" in terms of being full of deep ideas.
"High concept" is a bit of a different case in that nobody ever knows the actual meaning. It's too obvious that, in the absence of the existing meaning, it would mean "conceptually complex". It's not at all obvious why you would use a phrase meaning "conceptually complex" when what you want to say is "conceptually trivial".
Agree. For example, Dragon's Egg by Forward is not a well written book by most of those metrics, and yet I very much enjoyed the novel due to the creative story.
I went on a quest to read Hugo award winning novels a couple of years ago and have come to the conclusion that there is disappointingly little correlation between award winning and quality writing as well. Or the people who judge books have different criteria than I do as to what makes a book good.
Few works of art are great across all the metrics. A book (or a movie) can have a great overall premise and structure, but have lacking dialog, flow or other issues. Is it good? Perhaps for me, but not for you.
I just watched Lost Highway in the theaters. I had never had a chance to watch it on the big screen before, and I brought my SO. I love the movie since there's no clear cut interpretation, yet it also feels accessible. My SO hadn't seen it before, and while she thought it was fine overall, she really disliked that there isn't a canonical "this is what happened and this is what the things mean" explanation. The very thing that made me love the movie.
Hugo voters are members of the World Science Fiction Society (who are mostly Worldcon attendees). Which is to say, voters for that are chosen for enthusiasm for the genre, not taste.
Not to be the one to point out the pink elephant, but the Hugo Awards became somewhat politicized a decade or so ago and identity politics started to feature heavily into selections. If your criteria doesn't include that then the awards are now probably meaningless. But go back to the past, and there's a reason they used to have such prestige associated with them. For instance in the 60s some winners were Starship Troopers, Man in the High Castle, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress!
Come to think of it not sure if that says more about the 60s or the award though. Cripes there was something in the water back then.
Yes, 60s famous as period when the gender of the author or characters did not mattered in the slightest. It was totally only later when they started to matter, sure.
Of course it mattered, but it didn't define the results. Le Guin won it multiple times. And as far back as 1956, the third Hugo ever, a female author made it to the short list. But they weren't winning or being nominated because of their sex. They were just exceptional authors who happened to be female, which is as it should be.
Meanwhile male authors had to be less exceptional to win or succeed. Simple as that. Men had lower bar, every step of the way.
Also, claim that hugo winners won only because of their gender is crap. They won't the vite fairly. Unlike sad puppies, they did not even needed politically motivated coordination for that.
What authors of the past were neglected in your opinion, or perhaps unfairly promoted? In modern times I think this is fairly easy to demonstrate. Books like Project Hail Mary are insufficient to win, while the most winning works are not especially exceptional. Those that are, perhaps The Three Body Problem, tend be the exception rather than the rule.
The vote also is not fair. People publicly organize voting cliques on e.g. Reddit (to say nothing of what's happening in private), and the new system is extremely exploitable. But I think that's beside the point. The issue is the outcome. The Hugos used to not only reliably reflect the best in genre works, but also select works that would often be talked about decades later. How they achieved that is irrelevant, only that they used to be able to do so, and now do not.
I think the groups that coopt, or try to coopt, these sort of things (which obviously also includes the Puppy stuff), fail to realize that the prestige of something is not based on that thing itself - but on the value of that which it promotes. If MIT just started enrolling 'merely above average' students and printing out diplomas, then they'd quickly lose their prestige. The same thing has happened here.
I mean Project Hail Mary is also far from being exceptional. I didn't dislike the book and it was enjoyable but I would never think it deserves an award. In particular, the scenes with the alien fell really flat. Now I haven't read the winner for best novel of 2022 and to be honest I haven't read any amazing novel published in 2021.
Of course there are personal tastes, so I'd simply look at large scale data. The winner for 2022 is A Desolation Called Peace. [1] As per Amazon it ended up with far fewer purchases, lower reviews amongst those who purchased it (in spite of a rather conspicuous amount of reviews that are generally critical of the book then giving it 5 stars anyhow), and it won the Hugo.
Of course the Hugo obviously shouldn't just be "#1 book [in genre] on Amazon" because the entire point of awards is to focus on quality, which may not always be clearly reflected by sales. But when even the relatively small minority of people buying the winning book don't seem to like it as much as other books, something is quite wrong. Let alone the fact that Project Hail Mary came in last place, also behind books like She Who Became the Sun. [2]
identity politics sneakily becoming a required element in media (whether that be for genuine representation reasons, appeals to that market, whatever) isn't a necessary result of equitability in writing.
Hugo awards are by popular vote of fans attending conventions, and SF mostly prided itself on being about ideas, so you'll get what caught most people's fancy at the time.
I have come to accept that most books are good at something, and maybe even a few things, but not so great at many things. I embarked on a similar "read the Hugos" adventure and much of it is great in a sci-fi premise - understandable - but the characters or pacing or unfolding story is meh.
Example, The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber [0] is a great exposition of gravitational effects when a planet-sized object appears in the sky nearby earth. Characters and unfolding story are meh. I pictured it as a C-grade 60's movie with stilted acting. But the way the earth was reacting and the moon coming apart was a great fictional invention and the way it was done was novel at the time!
In similar vein, Conan stories are great fantasy adventures with well described fights, battles, scenes. I've never found a better author to describe a fight - or a battle between armies - with enough detail to make it interesting and exciting and yet in relatively few words. I've also never read stories as sexist and racist... but I don't go out of my way to look for that I guess. I accepted it was written in the day it was and had to sort the wheat from the chaff.
When awarding bodies grow in popularity, their roles switch from populist to elitist, as their membership becomes more elite.
This hit the Hugo awards extra hard, because their voting method is especially vulnerable to lobbying, and warring factions have been lobbying to sway the body of voters one way or another.
I've noticed the same thing, especially with Hugo awards.
On the other hand my favorite SF author, Gene Wolfe, has also won many other awards, like the Nebula and Locus awards. So you can find good stuff by using the awards as a starting point.
I did the same a couple of decades ago and enjoyed it. It was especially interesting to see a slice of early sci-fi. It's been a while, but I remember enjoying "The Big Time" and Connie Willis' books.
>I listen to a few hundred audio books a year while working.
What do you do that you can immerse yourself in novel and get work done at the same time? I want that job. I've never had a job that was mentally so untaxing that I could listen to a book at the same time.
There are many 'overwatch' type jobs, a number that carry heavy responsibility, that mostly only require "light regular attention" and the skill level to be on the ball and top of your game in bursts.
Versions I've had:
* Control room operator in an industrial plant (watch, make sure things are routine (listen to music | audio book), deal with "exceptions" (tradespeople locking machines out, bringing them back online, co-ordinating)).
* Maintaining throughput on data processing pipelines (eg: geophysical data processing, tape | drive | archive loading, initiating various steps, looking for "oddities" .. letting the machines run (listen to audiobook, watch console)).
* Several other variations I could list (but time is short ATM).
Physical labor. A friend of mine has a job like this, in their parents' egg wholesaler business. It's a hard job, but has two major benefits: keeps him in good physical shape, and lets him listen to audiobooks pretty much the whole time. I sometimes find myself envying him that.
For one, I thought I read way too much sci-fi in my life, but it turns out he's listened to every single book I did, every one I have on my "to read" list (except maybe Greg Egan stuff), and then a couple dozen ones I never heard of.
Not the same premise (I don't listen to audiobooks), but what helps me get through my reading list was buying an ereader and put my whole library on it. It goes with me everywhere, and every time I have an urge to take my phone, I open it instead. Can go through a normal book in a couple of days.
I really should hire someone to do it, and spend my time with electrical engineering. Even then, about half of the time I'm designing a product, I can listen to audio books. Component selection is the most mentally taxing part, followed by early stages of schematic capture. Once I have everything operationally figured out, the more mundane schematic work isn't at all taxing, and I'll do it while listening to audio books. Circuit board layout I almost can't do without listening to something. It's very similar to playing puzzle games.
That's even a bit short. The median I listen to is probably around 12 hours, and the more popular series tend to be in the 20 to 30 hour range. Brandon Sanderson titles can hit in around 60 hours.
I do the same, but at 2 to 4x speed depending on the book, that cuts down the time significantly. I don't listen while working though, as I work in software not in the other fields that were mentioned in the answer to a sibling comment which are more monotonous in nature perhaps.
Wow, how do you even process it at that speed? I normally listen at 1.2x, but feel like if I hit 1.5x, maybe 1.8x if it is a really slow narrator, I'm maxing out. I mainly am listening to it while I'm running though, so 5-20% focus on that depending on traffic or if I have to cross streets, the rest of my focus on the book. Are you just sitting and listening to it at that speed focused in on it, or are you just abled to digest it at that speed?
Practice. The more you listen the faster you can go. I can digest it at that speed, yes. Sometimes I watch shows like that especially if there's a lot of filler content, anime in particular. No one has time to go through a thousand episode.
some peoples brains just operate faster, like have a faster clockspeed in the same way CPUs do. i feel like people who can read extremely fast also correlate strongly to people who can listen to audio very fast. my partner is an unbelievably fast reader, like the fastest i've ever seen, but she also has a phd in maths and is generally brilliant, i have no idea where im going with this. some peoples brains are just wired for high amounts of data bandwidth. but also practice, and it also depends on the original speed of the speaker/content.
A working year is ~250 days. I suppose it is possible with a minor playback speedup to hit 1.2 books/working day, 300 per year. Which sounds unbelievable, but good for them for having a job which just requires a butt in a chair.
Good lord I could practically write an equally-long response post to this linguist dissecting his "takedown" (if it could be called that) of what amounts to a single sentence of the entire book, and bases his opinion on that it seems.
I'm fine with made-up technology and technobabble, but Digital Fortress had one thing that didn't make any sense: the supposed reason the new encryption scheme couldn't be cracked was "rotating cleartext" - that somehow the encrypted contents could magically change over time and the brute force cracking would have to start over.
You really should read Ice Station by Matthew Reilly. It's so bad its good. It has an attack killer whale the bites off one of the characters legs after launching itself meters into the air.
I have so many of his books; there was a time in my life when I was traveling a lot, under a lot of stress from various projects, and on the plane all I wanted to do was to turn my brain off. Those books fit the bill.
Thanks for the recommendation. The libraries near me only have the text version. Sometimes this happens if the audio book is an Audible exclusive. Audible can pay out as little as 25% of sales to authors, for audiobooks that aren't exclusive.
> For anyone else who enjoys such novels, I highly recommend Dan Brown's Digital Fortress.
I thought Digital Fortress was the better book honestly.
*Spoilers ahead* – In The Davinci Code you need to suspend disbelief on many aspects of the book. However with DF, most of it is just regular old US government conspiracy stuff that makes reasonable action books. The main thing you really need to suspend disbelief on is the creation of this perfect unbreakable code, but by the end you find out that such a code has not been created and that actually it was just a virus after all, which is really quite realistic.
It's still just a pulp action thriller novel, but I felt it was much more realistic. That said, I'm basing this on last reading it maybe 12 years ago.
My only memory of Digital Fortress is that my mom sold our copy of it on eBay when I was midway through reading it and that still ever-so-slightly irks me almost two decades later.
You didn't miss much, but if you feel you need to find out what happened, get a library card and sign up with Libby, to borrow the ebook or audio book for free. The libraries near me don't even have a wait list for the audio book.
That explains why movie sucked so much, regardless of good actors involved. Never saw appeal to even check those books, looked to me like some novels for my retired mom rather than something worth spending time on.
which type of fame? ephemeral best-sellers by New York Times?
because if you 'read' hundreds of books each year and you can't see sui generis in works like Don Quijote, Cien años de soledad, Fernando Pessoa, Ferreira de Castro, Raduan Nassar or getting down to english solely, Ulysses play on words or even biographies like Walden by Henry David Thoreau or On The Road by Jack Kerouac or poems by Walt Whitman, Maya Angelou and even translated stuff like Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Hans Staden etc. ※ i'm curious the motif of your dismissal. specially when people dedicate their lives to study literature and in some way or another, rank up classics again and again... please also consider some books were revolutionary or set a genre on the time they were released, so it's unfair to want contemporaneity into stuff wrote 500 years ago, although some are quite impressive how actual they are by their age; as well personal preference. i never got hooked by Great Gatsby, for example (although i finished it)
It's difficult to get older books in audiobook form from libraries, because only recently have audiobooks overtaken ebooks in popularity.
For works old enough to be public domain, They are usually available from LibriVox, although the narrators are usually not as well practiced as the commercial audiobooks.
I wouldn't say they are bad at all. They are just pulp/popcorn fiction and not trying to be more than that. MCU movies considered good are not bad just because they are not trying to be more than they are.
They cover over 20 chapters per episode. Any fewer episodes, and it would be difficult to keep track of what you've read, by the time you listen to the episode. They also play games based on the contents of the chapters, and answer listener questions, to fill out the episode.
I have genuinely been surprised by all the negative comments about Dan Brown and his novels. I read his novels when I was in middle/high school (in a developing country) and I loved them, especially The Da Vinci Code. I remember waiting to get my hands on it from the school library and then reading the entire novel in one sitting (which was a first for me).
It's been ages since I have read one of his books. After seeing multiple threads like this I am reluctant to read again one of his books. I am afraid that I might "overwrite/destroy" the good memories I have of the "feeling" of reading his books.
People just like to hate popular things. I also read Dan Brown's novels in high school/late middle school and remember thinking they were exciting page turners. They were never as good as most of Michael Crichton's novels, but on par or better than most of Cussler's IMO.
Maybe the prose really was repetitive and the plot banal, but it took genuine skill to write something that you physically struggle to put down.
I agree; I read them a little later in life than you and GP did (early/mid 20s), but I enjoyed them just the same. "Page-turner" is a good descriptor. I found the stories themselves to be fun and engaging, even if the writing and plots weren't the best.
"Good" is an overloaded word. We use it to mean both "enjoyable" and "well-made".
And we often confuse the two, thinking that if we enjoy something, that means it was well-made. And that if something is well-made, then we should enjoy it.
But it's not. For instance, I like the film, The Ice Pirates. It's stupid, it's cheap, and the plot doesn't quite make sense. But it's fun. I can't quite put my finger on it, but whatever is happening, it's the kind of stupid I apparently like. But I will never say it was a "good" film, in that it was well-made.
To contrast, The Fountain is a mostly well-made film. The acting, cinematography, score, visual effects, etc, are all well done. I cannot deny that. However, I loathe that movie. It is just incredibly mediocre at the end of the day. The story is just banal. It has one message, delivers it real early in the movie, and then just keeps beating that dead horse. And I can see how it's easy to get distracted by the pageantry of the film. But I cannot get over that one hump.
So, yes, Dan Brown may be a horrible writer. His books may have all the problems pointed out by the author of the article. Dan Brown may not write "good" books. That does not mean people don't like them. And it does not mean they are wrong when they do.
> I am afraid that I might "overwrite/destroy" the good memories I have of the "feeling" of reading his books.
I recently re-read Jurassic Park. What I recalled as a gripping scientifically plausible thriller when I read it as a teenager, read today as a screechy anti-science polemic nestled behind a monster movie plot.
That said, I still enjoyed reading it! It’s definitely a page-turner.
And I found that my new reaction to the book did not lessen my memory of enjoying it as a kid. In fact it led me to some contemplation of my life and how I’ve changed over time.
The book didn’t change at all, in fact it was the exact same hardcover copy I got as a gift when it came out. I came to think of it as a sort of intellectual mirror that just reflected me back at myself. I’ve gone back and read some other science fiction books I enjoyed as a kid now as well, to see what I think today.
I thought they were a fun read, but there was a widespread idea at the time that they were somehow something more than that with actual depth. The hatred is mostly a backlash against that.
I read them around the same time and they were fine. I think they are reasonable to read at around that age and when you get older you realize there’s not that much depth there.
Although I do agree with criticisms of his writing and have felt the same in his later books (as I was too young to feel the poor writing when I read A&D, Da Vinci Code etc.), I know that I'll get his next book when it releases.
I like that his works mention random things that you can then read about from other sources, information that are tangents to search off of. It helps that all his books are easy page-turning reads.
But yeah, about his writing, I remember the latest (Origin) having some atrocious lines
Eh, if you like it, you like it. Unless it's hurting someone, why care about what gets people's dopamine receptors going? After all, that's why the concept of the guilty pleasure exists
I read a Dan Brown book once. I can’t recall which book it was, or any of the details about it, or even when I read it - but I remember it was the biggest “page turner” I’ve ever read. I don’t think there is any book I’ve read faster.
I used to look down on pop music. But then I realized how hard it actually is to write a catchy hit song.
Surely writing a book that people find so engaging that they can’t put it down must also require talent.
I've read all the twilight books. Not because they were good, not because I was engaged the entire time, but for the simple fact that I wanted to know how it would end.
Why not just read the last chapter?
Because I wanted the ending to make sense, and the series kept throwing in new characters to cover up its faults, like how Christopher Nolan throws an entire orchestra to cover up lack of drama or meaningful dialogue.
Sometimes you just know you're in for a bad time, but the starting premise is interesting enough for you to want to know how it all wraps up.
I read the Da Vinci Code very quickly and I enjoyed it. But a different kind of enjoyment, I realized afterwards I basically just read a movie. Very little internal monologue, or some other kind of description that other novels would have, something like that, was a long time ago.
The concept of a "guilty pleasure" is kind of weird, if you think about it.
If you enjoyed reading a book, why does it matter that some narrow subset of humanity doesn't like it? Critics are supposed to be good at judging on two criteria:
1. Will the average person enjoy this?
2. Is it actually good?
Why does it matter to me whether a book is "actually good" or not? One reason is that it's a status marker to like books that are "actually good" and not just popular.
Maybe all that "actually good" really means is that high status people like it.
But in my opinion, true high status comes from setting the bar, not following it. Stop trying to chase status by following the tastes of high-status people. Instead, just enjoy what you enjoy without apology and without guilt.
If the only metric by which you judge your media consumption is enjoyment then I could see how a term like guilty pleasure is not relevant to you.
If you generally seek media that challenges your comprehension, or grants you new insights into yourself or the world around you, then a Dan Brown book may feel a bit like eating a cookie. It’s not bad for you or anything, you might enjoy it a lot, but the calories may feel a bit empty after.
Yes, people have multiple goals for reading a book and pleasure is only one of them. And there are finite hours in your life, so you have to choose.
But I'm mostly arguing against having an absolute, objective scale for "good book" other than popularity. If a book grants new insight, but it's so boring that few read it, then maybe it's not a very good book.
I read books that I know they are bad as I'm reading them, and still keep reading them. One example is Dan Brown's books, other examples might be Twilight Saga, or books that are very repetitive to send the message like "Leaders eat last" or "Surrounded by idiots". They are written in an addictive way you have to keep reading, and makes them popular (not good). They have a lot of paragraphs or full chapters that are very clearly written in one go and never looked back to fix mistakes. Usually you could get rid of entire chapters and the book would be the same.
Then you have good books, where you can feel that the author took care of doing a good job. They are not redundant, and they don't use dirty cheap tricks to keep you engaged. They might be even repulsive or unnerving (I'm thinking of Kafka's The Metamorphosis or The Trial), and some people can find them boring.
The point is that you can read both of them. It's like watching a quality TV show (maybe The Wire), but also watch some Kardashians. You can easily tell which one is good, and which one is bad but made in some way that you want to keep watching even when you know you are wasting your time and getting nothing in return other than a goog feeling that disipates as soon as you end watching. It's like reading a danluu blog entry or wasting one hour in TikTok or Instagram: one of them is good, the others are tricking your mind to keep you engaged. There's nothing bad in wasting some time, but IMO it's important to be aware of what is happening, that not all content is the same, and that popularity doesn't necessarily means good.
My friend is a poet and will be the first to say we can objectively judge art. I agree to the extent that there are certain criteria we can look at and objectively make a judgement on the quality of the work. I think bad and good are probably reductive, but we can evaluate prose or cinematography for example and make objective judgements on the qualities exhibited by the work.
I think largely though the problem here is that “good” is too vague to mean anything to anybody without expansion. Good why? There’s a difference between saying a book is good and a book is well written. Likewise if someone tells me Dan Brown is bad they’ll have to tell me why. Maybe I’ll agree and no longer like the book, or maybe I’ll agree it falls short in plot or characterization but I’ll still like it, and then it will be a guilty pleasure.
The closest you can really get to objectivity is to observe which patterns of attributes tend to correlate well to people saying that that piece of media is good. In the end, "good" or "bad" is just my emotional reaction to receiving a piece of art, and there's plenty of art that have all of the usual attributes I associate with good art that leave me completely cold.
I prefer to ask whether a piece of art is "effective" or not. An EDM club banger, a classical piano sonata, and a rap battle are all trying to achieve very different things with valued qualities coming from their various subcultures, so ask what the artist is trying to achieve (intricate composition, or shifting units etc) and judge it only in that context
I'm a little surprised to see this discussion in 2025, when people can now watch Netflix offline. The term "airport novel," is no longer in common use, meaning a book you would buy at the Hudson News and read on the plane. Complaints of a bygone era.
I would like to think that there is more to quality than status... I feel like this attitude backfires by discouraging people from talking about things they thought were good in certain ways for fear of being dismissed as a snob.
Maybe there's more to quality that status, but I don't know what it could be.
One argument is that people who read a lot of books know quality. But I don't buy it: maybe people who read a lot of books have different tastes. And in any case, that just reinforces my definition: quality is what a certain (elite) group of people say it is.
Another argument is that complex books are better than simple ones. But that just means elite taste-makers like complex books, maybe because they've read so many books that straightforward ones are boring to them. But there's value in books that are easily understood--that's the whole point of writing: to communicate. One shouldn't value opaque books just because they're opaque.
Yet another argument is that smart people like good books and dumb people like popular books. Smart people are able to appreciate good books that are beyond most people. The convenient thing about this is that you can show how smart you are by liking certain books, which is way easier than winning a Fields Medal or Nobel Prize. Snark aside, this is just defining "good books" as "books smart people like", which is (in my view) morally equivalent to "books high-status people like".
As for "discouraging people from talking about things," I'm not yet arrogant enough to think that my post on Hacker News(!) is going to influence anyone. But if I did, I would tell people to stop worrying what other people think. Stop worrying about whether others think you're a snob or a mid. Like what you like and talk about it as much as you want.
Heaven forbid anyone read the Hackernews darling, Snow Crash in a similar light.
I sometimes get put in a position where i state my favourite book. Snow Crash. What's it about they ask?
Well there's a guy who delivers pizza, 'a deliverator' they call him but his name is Hiro Protagonist (yes seriously that's the main characters name folks). It's set in the dystopian future where you have to deliver pizza in under 30minutes or face public execution for the entertainment of the people who didn't get their pizza in time. He uses a skateboard and grappling hooks to get around and has samurai swords because he studies the way of the blade. He logs into the metaverse where he's a hardcore hacker by night. He ends up meeting a biker who has a nuclear bomb in a sidecar with a tattoo on his forehead that reads POOR IMPULSE CONTROL... (i could ramble on for a while like this trying to explain what it's about but you probably get a sense for it).
I actually think Neil Stephenson was intentionally trying to write the most ridiculous book possible but the truth is the book is FUN. I don't care about clever plots or prose. I want FUN. Da Vinci code is similar. It's an Indiana Jones movie in book form.
I recently watched a new show called Prime Target. Watching it frustrated me as some aspects just didn't hold together, or were totally overstated. The wife would get frustrated with me in turn when I would point these out.
"How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine". I wasn't sure how to answer that at first, but I think your comment solidifies it. I can accept ridiculous and unrealistic scenarios as long as they are fun, and held together within an equally ridiculous world.
Theres a fine line between something that is clearly a dramatisation being frustrating or just fun.
> "How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine"
Marvel and Star Wars aren't fine--the writing is execrable whenever they aren't outright plagiarizing something else.
Star Wars was schlock meant to sell toys that just happened to become huge. Marvel is pretty much just straight up garbage across the board (some characters are interesting--the stories and world though are pretty uniformly trope-ridden crap).
Modern movies also have the problem that a lot of their revenue comes from overseas--China in particular. They can't risk having writing that is either too subtle for a foreign audience or cover themes that might get them banned by the government.
Thus we get Michael Bay syndrome--spectacle after spectacle and the minimum writing necessary to connect them.
(To be honest--this is nothing new to Hollywood--Michael Bay can trace his roots the whole way back through "Towering Inferno" to "Noah's Ark", etc.)
Haha, I love this. Strong opinions strongly held. Obviously you're not wrong, and I'm not arguing against this (mostly because I agree), but I do also think _some_ of the Marvel work can be quite....inspired (not sure thats too strong a stance, hear me out!), mostly around the animated medium. The What If series has been good, and I've loved the Spiderman animations, very similar to the recent TMNT movies. Just want to add the new Transformers animated movie was very enjoyable, which I wasn't expecting. So yeah, the Michael Bay-esque style gets old quickly in real life movies, but it can work really well when animated.
I'm sure alot of this can be traced back to Manga roots.
I was thinking more along the lines of simply the Hollywood movies where the dynamics are set by the enormous market forces which basically filters against anything which isn't lowest common denominator.
When you get down to comic books and animations, the market forces aren't quite so vicious and your "10% okay vs 90% of everything is crap" doesn't get so filtered out. Consequently, you get more of the standard curve--some stuff is bad, most stuff is average, some stuff is good, and a few gems poke up every now and then.
I read Wuxia (chinese cultivation novels) which can go on for over thousand chapters. And often the plot is repetitive and thin, but I like it over cheap dramatisation that can be solved if the two parties decided to talk to each other (when there's no other reason that prevent them other than not wanting to). I'd take talking and not agreeing or being powerless over not talking and creating misunderstanding every day. Especially when the plot is all about not creating the chance to talk.
Snow Crash is so hilariously, and intentionally seemingly low effort it couldn’t be pulled off without a lot of actual skill and effort. It’s literary modern art, and it is fun.
If you want the Snow Crash version of Da Vinci Code, then you might like The Illuminatus Trilogy. Robert Anton Wilson is something else. Umberto Eco's book Foucault's Pendulum is a slightly different vibe, but very entertaining read.
I’m convinced Dan Brown read Foucault’s Pendulum and thought “cool idea, I’ll write two dozen sequels where the Plan is real and nobody is punished for their epistemological sins. Also what the hell is a semiotician? My hero will be a Symbologist!”
I'm pretty much convinced that Brown cribbed his Da Vinci Code from a pulpy 80s book, this one. Annoyingly the authors didn't win their copyright case.
I remember reading it in the 90s and being very put off by the insanity and lack of logic. As it later turned out: The conspiracy theory of HBHG and DVC was in the end invented by a French document forger who in his own forgery seemed to be the last merovingian king/descendent of Christ:
I've read most of the first two books. They're difficult because there's often no real structure to them. It's like written acid. Everything just jams together and you'll read all of the words, but somewhere along the line you'll notice you've started with a cop investigating a crime and now you're in the submarine of a crazy rich person.
It's an interesting book, and it does engage, but it is also quite the trip.
Seconding this. Rare to see almost exactly the same vibe layed out like this by 3 different authors like they were doing exactly the same thing but optimizing for different levels of reader sophistication / paranoia / drug usage.
This is sometimes called conspiracy fiction, and one cool thing about it is that the form as such doesn’t strictly imply or require a specific genre, so it works just as well with any or all of sci-fi / noir / historical fiction. Apparently renowned author Dan brown can easily understand that mixing with actual treasure hunt instead of some kind of forbidden knowledge is part of the formula for giving it the most popular appeal.
While we’re at it as the op of the post I’d also suggest people give ‘murderbot diaries’ a read. Lighthearted fun books is my jam and these are right up that alley.
The super bike is later in the book and temporary. When delivering pizzas he has a car so cool and intimidating it makes other drivers get out of the way so he can deliver pizza faster. But he actually wrecks it and looses the delivery job near the start of the book. For most of the story he doesn't have any iconic means of transportation.
Hiro doesn't use a skateboard you're thinking of "YT" the courier.
Hiro uses a high-performance pizza-delivery-specific car early on and then later a motorcycle that has wheels that aren't even continuous discs, but made up of many individually coordinated linear actuators with grip-pads on the end.
Yep. His motorcycle is introduced in great detail and then afterwards Stephenson deliberately trolls us with "...after that, it's just a chase scene" and it's never mentioned again. ;)
The book also has a sex scene featuring (spoiler, I guess) a 15-year-old girl. It's probably possible to write something like that in a way that isn't gross, but Stephenson definitely didn't pull it off.
I like Stephenson, he's written some great stuff, but even ignoring that scene, Snow Crash is IMO just a bad book to read once you're out of high school.
It is kind of gross, but so are many things in many books, including in that one (eg all of the disembowelings)
For me it is less problematic than it could have been, because: YT is shown to be naive, reckless and impulsive, and Raven (is that his name? I think so) is an awful person just in general. The author is in no way implying that sex for those two is a good idea, in any way. It's just a thing that happened in the book.
It's also not a sexy scene, so it's not written to be titilating (IMO), and it's short and it does ~something for the plot.
Stephenson at the time Snow Crash was published could write brilliant sentences, so he took ten thousand of them and strung them together into a novel. He matured a lot after that, although I think it took writing the Baroque Cycle to work through his syntax obsessions.
the idea of an 0day for the brain via optic nerve stimuli in the same vein as adversarial failure cases for neural nets was the interesting bit for me.
i'm not really sure i grokked the whole 'sumerian is machine code for mankind' thing. might have to re-read it, my last go-through was in high school.
When you realize it was supposed to be a graphic novel, that makes the over-the-top scenes make so much more sense. It's a comic book without the comics.
Also learned the meaning of the conspicuous word pulchritudinous, which in the default Oxford languages dictionary Google uses [1] comes up with
"Dan gazed admiringly at the pulchritudinous brunette" as usage example.
Books are like wine. Given a selection of wine, connoisseurs will select wines that the average drinker won't. But their experience and expectations are very different. Adventurous/curioust/openminded folks will cross the aisle and change their expectations. The rest will stay with their easy-to-drink wines or their complex.
I tried reading "The Da Vinci Code" and it felt like a was a bad version of Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum". But that's me. Most of my friends would choose "The Da Vinci Code". And I imagine Eco and Brown had very different goals for their books.
I did love Harry Potter and Hunger Games though! Not great works of literature, but they're super fun!
It's a been a really long time since I read "Foucault's Pendulum" and having never read "The Da Vinci Code" the similarities may have been projected onto them by me at the time.
I probably wasn't as open minded back then either. Well, at least I hope I'm more open minded know.
I just read a few pages of the Davinci Code, but it seemed like an Indiana Jones style story. Which must have been kind of fun to write. Plus all the money from his books must be pretty nice. Reminds me of this quite from
Michael Caine on 1987's 'Jaws: The Revenge': 'Someone said to me, “I saw that 'Jaws 4' - it stinks” - and I said, “I haven't seen it, but I've seen the house it bought my mother, and it's marvelous.
I was gifted Michael Caine's book for Christmas and just finished it.
I was surprised and impressed just how enjoyable a read it was. Strong recommend to anyone who might be thinking about picking it up. One of the best memoir/autobiographical style books I've read.
If you enjoy this style of writing - TFA's, not D Brown's - then check out The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest[0].
Here's a sample:
"Space Fleet Commander Brad Brad sat in silence, surrounded by a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, maintaining the same forlorn frown that had been fixed upon his face since he’d accidentally destroyed the phenomenon known as time, thirteen inches ago."
Uff I wanted to read a good flame on Dan Brown, unfortunately this critique just reads like someone just finished a tutorial on good writing and all they learned is strict rules set in stone.
Are the Dan Brown books anything more than mediocre fantasy entertainment? Nope. But this critique doesn't do anything to convince me I should give a fork about their opinion, because their points are so superficial. Oh well at least it was way shorter than the books...
> [...] As the dust fell from his cart he thought that he saw some object glittering in the evening sunlight. He got down from his cart to the ground and walked down the slope of the shoot to the spot where he thought, possibly, the object might have fallen. He groped about in the refuse with the toe of his boot, which was tipped with iron nails, and soon disclosed the bright object which he had really seen. He picked it up between his fingers and examined it with his eyes. [...]
For those in this thread that enjoyed reading Dan Brown novels:
Don't give random people on the internet the power to take away joys of your past.
This is something I see come up a lot on the Internet. It begins with a critique of something (sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek) and almost immediately develops into OTHER people being criticized for enjoying something that someone else thinks is bad, often through the mechanism of the "this is terrible" people drowning out the "but I like this" people by a factor of 10-to-1, because it's the Internet.
Art is subjective. People consume it for different reasons, at different times, with different expectations and different perspectives. People also LOOK for different things in art (some people like themes, some people like history, some people like aesthetics, some people like fun, etc.) - and they look for different things in every piece of art they consume.
I've never read a Dan Brown novel. Maybe I'll like them, maybe I won't. But lucky for me it's going to be easy to go in with a clean slate and form my own -- oh wait.
> going to be easy to go in with a clean slate and form my own -- oh wait
Yeah, this post was kind of a "can't unsee" for me and totally ruined those books. Although, maybe it was just a decade of reading better books that did it.
Too old and cynical now to suspend disbelief for Dan Brown stuff (even the movies), but have in the past enthusiastically read series of certified potboilers such as
- the original James Bond novels
- the Dick Francis novels
If it works - for the author, make megabucks, or for the reader - be entertained, then so be it. It's not like the hit movies are the deeply cerebral ones either. The books can still suck from an artistic standpoint, and the critics can still rip into them.
Now that's a great pulpy bestseller. It doesn't commit Dan Brown levels of atrocities on the English language but doesn't at all use a literary style - it's designed for low-effort reading. The biggest redeeming feature for me was that clearly it doesn't take itself too seriously despite faking a documentary tone. My copy of it included snippets from reviews including extremely negative ones.
Somewhat related, there is also the famous quote by Teddy Roosevelt:
>...“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
I was backpacking through Europe when I read the Da Vinci code. It was dumb cheap fun, nothing bad about that at all. It was cool to be on a bus cross into a country that the characters were also trying to sneak into.
A good friend of mine was friends with Dan Brown when they were both kids. Dan broke his back (or something else just as serious), and was in a cast for a year+. My friend used to say that he was normal when he got hurt, but turned into a real menace after the accident.
My friend passed away a couple of years ago, or I'd have him fill in the details.
I feel like Dan Brown's stuff is overrated, but not in a bad sense. The hook of the books is very good, while the rest of it is standard "adventuring". So if you expect more than standard adventuring, you're gonna be left disappointed (I include very average prose in this).
Someone compared them to Cussler's work in this thread and I agree, the difference between the two is that Cussler never made the hook "cool enough" on the level of Brown.
This reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld's comments about his critics in "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee".
Summarizing, when the audience laughs, they vote about the quality of the bit. When the tickets sell out, they vote about the quality of his work. So, who cares what the critics say?
This might not make sense, but sometimes this perspective helps me (not a comedian, or anyone critics have ever heard of).
Honestly, Dan Brown was my first introduction to any sort of literature that was not manga/comics and I liked every book. Granted, I read the Portuguese translations so there might be differences in the “writing style”.
There is a lot of history and art embedded in the books (as I believe his wife is a historian and is greatly involved in the making of the books, if I’m not mistaken) which I believe is the highlight, a lot more than the plot or anything else. I distinctively remember reading The Da Vinci Code in my grandfather’s house - there is a piece in the book about secrets in The Last Supper and my grandfather had a big clock in the house with it as the background. I remember going to the clock to check out what the book was saying about the painting and being mindblown. I don’t even remember if everything made sense but that stuck with me.
To some degree it reminds me various pieces of "thinky" scifi (a lot of Stephen Baxter or Larry Niven work, for example), where the plot and characters are constructed around exploring some interesting ideas or concepts for the reader. Often in that territory the writing is stilted by necessity, because the writer doesn't want to overload things with complex character relationships or elaborate internal lives on top of the Big Ideas.
It usually is, though probably more for making it memorizable without major error than any other reason. Rhyme styles of oral traditions don't look too much like our penchant for rhyming the last vowel of sentences.
> The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors.
That's Dale Brown, not Dan Brown. And yes, having read more than my share of Dale Brown novels, they didn't really improve from the first. Nonetheless, they were a great guilty pleasure read for me in middle and high school.
Wow, I completely forgot about Dale Brown! That was a very specific time in my life when I was into Tom Clancy due to my dad having all his books on a shelf and I had run out of Clancy novels to read.
Oh, right. The Da Vinci code guy, not the techno-thriller guy.
Real Tom Clancy books were OK. But he's been dead for a decade. Tom Clancy branded books are still coming out, written by somebody, but they are not very good.
If you like series that went on too long, the sequel to Fourth Wing (Hunger Games with dragons) is out, there's yet another Hunger Games fill-in book soon, and something is happening in the Harry Potter space.
When the da Vinci code came out I was traveling every week for work as a programmer consultant. I saw so many middle-aged women reading this book in airports that I became convinced that it was a self-help book.
I read the first few paragraphs of this submission (sorry, didn’t finish, I swear I already read this years ago) and to my surprise I realized that I’ve read every single book Dan brown published.
I loved these books when I was a kid, especially Digital Fortress! This article is so mean and ironically quite clumsily written itself. It's not that funny (although it's hard to be funny when you're being so mean-spirited!)
Isn't the formula of all his books, an old man meets a beautiful young women, they solve some mistery together and as the romance builds up, probably sex at the end.
The word "like" in this context, is an invitation to Betteridge's law of headlines, except its like (sorry) "Betteridge's law of simile"
It invites you to step beyond the 4th wall, go meta and ask yourself "but IS IT" and usually, the answer is ..
Brown, and Rowling both got to an income level where the file notes in the publisher said: "their literary agent knows we think it's too long, but the contract says we can't tell them that, and in any case it's profitable. don't worry"
If you want a contrast, read Len Deighton's self-reflections in re-issues of his book. He really loved critique. It hurt, but it helped. He also liked being plugged into the tech scene enough to get offered early sight of some of the first word processing systems, and talks about the impact they had on his writing. I happen to like both what he writes, and how he writes. Sometimes, I find myself reading authors where I'm reading in spite of how the words resonate off the page.
This is all just crass literary snobbery... "look, just look how badly Dan Brown writes, I could do better, here let me weave in some reference to Keats".
The fact is that Dan Brown is laughing all the way to the bank while this mere pamphleter rails against perceived slights against literary asceticism.
An oddly ugly actor, with a strange voice who happens to also be a great character actor can become perceived as good looking and an audible charm without changing a thing.
Similarly, the repetitive and technically flawed but also predictably distinct tempo of an author who writes books that are consistently easy and enjoyable to read without too much mental hardship can become beloved.
Never underestimate the power of anything, no matter how seemingly worthless on the face of it, to signal something good to people.
When we ask “how can people like that?”, we may be seeing the reliable flaws quite accurately. What we are missing is it is exactly those particular flaws that have now become a signal of something those people like.
The flaws are just the consistently awful din outside a loved restaurant. Unacceptable anywhere else, but welcome when dining there.
What sounds like cacophony to many, is now hypnotic tempo to others.
—
TLDR; Branding lesson: any distinctive disadvantage can be counter intuitively leveraging for good effect, by incorporating it as a signal of something good. Soup nazi.
TLDR2; Health lesson: You can learn to like the taste of almost anything, if it makes you feel good after you eat it.
TLDR3; Social lesson: This is how beloved assholes become loved for being despicable assholes. People like something about them in spite of their being an awful person. Then they start associating their irredeemable asshole-ishness with what they like about them. Then they love that they are a destructive asshole. It’s one of their best features!! This dynamic underlines the worship of the asshole qualities of many real and fictional assholes. Slovenly lazy rude unbathed detectives are a classic. Certain repugnant politicians.
OK Cupid, the dating website, used to have a blog that wrote on topics relevant to data analysis from their site (much of which was repurposed in the book "Dataclysm" by Christian Rudder, one of OKC's principals).
One of the topics refers just to this phenomenon. OKC data scientists found that among people who had similar attractiveness ratings (i.e., the hidden average rating you got on your looks by other users who rated you), people whose attractiveness was higher variance got many many more private messages.
In other words: imagine two people who were rated, on average, a 3/5. One way to achieve this is by always being rated 3, for 0 variance. Another way to achieve this is to be rated 50% 1, and 50% 5; high variance. The person who was half 1s and half 5s would get many more messages than the "straight 3".
OKC's blog theorized that this is because while half of the people rating the high variance person were not at all likely to reach out to them, the other half see the high variance peraon as very desirable. On the other hand, everyone sees the straight 3 as a straight 3, and are less motivated to message them.
The advice given by OKC was just like your branding advice: play up your divisive or unique characteristics, rather than downplay them. The people who like big noses (or lots of tattoos or whatever) are looking for you!
I think we also underestimate how much we value uniqueness, and therefore appreciate and admire people who can be confident despite conventionally undesirable differences. The confidence passes both a fitness test, and a test of unique value, by demonstrating that a handicap for most people, doesn’t impede them in anyway way. Those people also make us more comfortable about our own differences or insecurities.
Never really understood why these modern best-seller writers are so popular. It's not as if the text is even easy or enjoyable to read! At least with guys like Tom Clancy you got a load of military hardware stuff to get off on.
Believe it or not but a vast majority of readers have no interest drowning in materiel specs while reading a book.
Ridiculous, I know. I had the same reaction when someone recommended I read the abridged Moby Dick(without knowing I've read the unabridged thrice), because who wants to hear about all those random whale facts?
I don't remember it that way. I took it more more as being about the definition of "fish", and demonstrating that whalers don't think about things the same way that non-whalers do. It's not ignorance; he acknowledges repeatedly throughout that whales breathe air, and nurse their young, and other mammalian traits.
Never really understood why people like Tom Clancy, it's not as if it's enjoyable to read about a bunch of mililtary hardware. At least with Dan Brown you've got a load of interesting mysteries and locations to get off on.
(more seriously: I think both authors understand their markets and are savvy about delivering what they want, critics be damned)
I don't think we should make fun of Dan Brown, or assume that all of his novels will be awful, but we should take his individual novels for what they are, and for every one I've read, they're squarely in so-bad-it's-good territory.
For anyone else who enjoys such novels, I highly recommend Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. There's also commentary on the novel by the creators of RiffTrax in episodes 71 through 77 of the 372 Pages podcast: https://372pages.com/ep-71-if-bizarre-foods-went-horny
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