Brown's new book doesn't offer award-winning literary prose. But intellectual snobbery and review elitism is foolish in an era of growing cultural ignorance and counterproductive political sneering.
I get nervous when I only have one or two books backed up that I haven’t read yet, and nothing makes me happier than new books by authors I love (usually mysteries and spies) that I can look forward to. (Louise Penny, Elizabeth George, Mick Herron) Ditto new TV episodes. And on that subject, The Great British Baking Show is in a special class, and I hoard them. With every new horror perpetrated by the Trump administration, my reserves of hope get dangerously low. Nothing compares to TGBBS for an hour of feel good escape for boosting morale.
A book recommendation for you..Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. A thousand pages of everything you could want. One of my favorites.
Thank you! I'll check it out. (A small aside: I can't handle it being called The Great British Baking *Show*. Why isn't it Bake Off? I don't know why it needed to be rebranded for the US audience.)
If you like Cryptonomicon, then dig into his Baroque Cycle Trilogy; another 3000 pages that I will have to reread at some point. History, science, codes, travel, real and fictional characters, beginning in the 17th century. Cryptonomicon picks up with ancestors of the same characters, and the same themes, but bouncing back and forth between WWII and present day (when the book was written).
I second/third the recs for Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon - They move so fast but are so detailed and rich that you really want to go reread them but then you see how much bookshelf space they take!
Cryptonomicon is an amazing read, though the hardcopy edition weighs enough to harm someone hit with it. 😉
His have a heart attack if you see my ereader library. I would need several lives to read them all. 🤔 Maybe the secret to that is in one of those books...?
In your inimitable fashion, you have provided a commentary on criticism which makes me a better person and a less embittered writer. (NB., I am only tastefully embittered.) I don't judge readers on what they read. I stopped doing that when 'Fifty Shades' became the best selling novel of all time. Bless every member of the dwindling forty-odd percent of us still reading or listening. I do judge authors, however. It is, after all, a craft, and therefore invites judgement as opinion, rather than fact. But it is a fact that Brown often gets his facts very wrong. While every writer gets stuff wrong--sometimes a little off, sometimes missing the nuance that might cause a true expert to tut aloud--Brown often requires a fact to be true as a key element of his plot, and it isn't. Isn't close. I'm sorry to be that reader, but when that happens, it creates the cardinal sin of taking me out of my suspension of disbelief. He's lost me, and how many times per chapter must I force myself to re-engage before I say, "Nope." Plot will steamroll over many, many sins. Tom Clancy, may his memory be a blessing, is one of my favorite authors. Great plotting and, I thought for an innocent few years, a knowledgeable writer. But he was not an expert in what he chose to write about--he was an insurance salesman, I believe. I realized this when I would come upon his prose related to my own area of expertise (surgery). He was often at sea in the field of medicine. But I still love his books, because the failing was seldom encountered and never critical to the plot's survival. He knew better about what he needed to know better about. An author need not achieve perfection, but please do the work.
Indeed - that's why I poked fun at Brown a bit too - the critiques aren't wrong, it's more about a) the sneering disdain that I find distasteful; and b) the notion that fiction can be enjoyed subjectively even if it's not high art (or accurate).
Thanks for an amusing review! I m still giggling. I too adore dan brown despite the fact he doesn’t need my money. He’s a good listen while I m working on something else. Anyway, thanks for the laughs and writing that surprises by well timed breaks ‘in the 4th wall’. Perhaps there’s a better term for those moments when the writer is doing precisely what they are writing about?
I hadn't heard there was a new Dan Brown book — until Sunday when I went to a bookstore and saw a large cardboard cut-out stand-up advertisement, the sort of thing usually seen in movie theaters. He's popular in Colombia too, apparently! This was a big bookstore with a lot of academic titles (I didn't escape before paying for a couple books about "what is truth" and "is there such a thing as human nature", and, um, nine others). But we each need our silly along with the serious!
My household has been waiting three years for the next installment of the Stranger Things series; though filming was derailed by covid and then a writers' strike, the final season will air on Netflix in a couple months.
Something I remember about the Da Vinci Code is that, in 2003, the year it was published, a UCC pastor told me his congregation had formed a study/discussion group about it because their imaginations were fired up by the novel's "what if..." premise about the lineage of Jesus and the role of women. It made religion feel more alive for them — the idea that Bible stories could have modern connections. It caused them to ask "what if the Bible is really real?" in a way that blew their minds. Thus some people received it a bit seriously.
Thanks for sharing that, Tucker! I hope Stranger Things lives up to the wait. And yes, I avoided the broader social critique that is probably more influential when it comes to Brown...that he's anti-Christian. (Realistically, it's likely that millions more people have heard that critique than the ones about his prose.)
Every time you open a book, it will forever alter your reading life in unpredictable ways. I would have never have discovered and fallen in love with Hilary Mantel and her masterpiece Wolf Hall trilogy without my teenage obsession with A Song of Ice and Fire (ok, ok, Wheel of Time and then ASOIAF) leading to a deep interest in the real-life Wars of the Roses (not exactly a common topic in American high schools) which led me to discover the frothy fun historical fiction of Philippa Gregory which eventually led to Dame Mantel in my thirties. I’m sure every reader has a similar story (or two or three… hundred) of discovery. Using cultural taste as a gatekeeping mechanism may seem cool when you are an immature teenager/young adult, but I am glad I outgrew that phase and am now a very unhip (but quite contented) wide-ranging bibliophile who just wants everyone to read books again (please, really, any book at all).
People can be snobs about anything, but for some reason book snobs think they’re arbiters of our collective tastes. It’s unremarkable that someone likes a hamburger now and again, and sole meunière at other times. It’s just what you’re in the mood for. But for some reason, we’re supposed to feel guilty about reading simply for pleasure.
I adore To the Lighthouse, but Mick Herron aces Virginia Woolf on plot development. Why can’t we have both?
Perfect pitch review. Dan’s ideas are borderline preposterous and he writes woman characters as thin as high-finish 120gsm Stora Enso paper, but I couldn’t put his book down! Perfect airplane read…so long as you have a really long flight.
Haha thank you. To be fair, I think Langdon is pretty thin too. He seems to be primarily motivated by historical conspiracies, puzzles, and swimming. But I did love these lines from The Telegraph's review of The Secret of Secrets: "These criticisms miss the point: Dan Brown's novels have never been about sentence structure or turn of phrase. They are entirely plot driven, so it really doesn't matter if characters are lazily sketched and wooden – they are but cogs driving the narrative forward. Having a pop at the writing in Dan Brown's novels is akin to turning up at a music gig and complaining about the lack of comedy. You're in the wrong place, pal."
I just started reading The Secret of Secrets, and I’ll you, it’s pleasant escaping to Dan Brown’s mystical Prague in the evening, overwrought characterizations and clunky wording aside, than being overwhelmed by the harsh, authoritarian reality of Trump’s America. I’ve never been to Prague, but even with the Golem roaming the streets at night, I think a visit there would be a peaceful, interesting experience.
I also love the intrigue of Dan Brown's books! I have trouble these days keeping up with the books for the four book clubs to which I belong ---crazy I know!
That "murder review"... and to think that two months later Tim Snyder was on his way to being a hero outside the academy for his early and strong defense of Ukraine. I've added Gottschall's book to my reading list. Thanks!
I agree with your opening view that anyone reading a book these days is in the plus column. So many people I know don't read anything. It is frightening how many leaders in our country don't have any notion of the complexity of language. Speech has become so inflamed with polarizing criticism and even hate, we do not need critics who bash writers. I remember John Updike's novels which famously provided clever autobiographical drama and lifestyle tales from the perspective of a white male in the United States in the 60s, through the 80s. My husband purchased his entire oeuvre over the years and I read along just because the books were so good. If he wrote something now it would probably be highly criticized by women but that's another story.
The New Yorker Magazine employed Updike as a literary critic. He made criticism fun with his descriptions of what the reader will encounter in the book (no spoilers), the strength of the writing, and some background on the author. Then he gave examples of problems in the story, holes in the plot, stories that just didn't work and why, or grammatical issues. It was a critical analysis not puerile negative criticism. An Updike review was nuanced, with enough information to decide if one wanted the book tomorrow or waiting for the paperback was a better choice. Keep on Brian! Thanks for your unique point of view.
My son read loads of books when he was younger. And then he did English literature at school and hated the analysis part of it so much, that he has hardly read a book since. Such a pity.
Thanks so much for this, including the funny parts as well as the important ones. I've never read Dan Brown and he probably isn't for me (although the Gottschall book probably is). But I've seen exactly the same disdain for so many Stephen King novels I adore. With, again, the same frustrating awareness that not every critique is wrong, but that to me, they're mostly beside the point.
There's a (tiny) part of my brain that I think internalizes the attitude. When I'm reading a genuinely exceptional, deep and beautifully-written work of literature -- Richard Powers's "the Overstory" at the moment, or Jennifer Egan's "a Visit from the Goon Squad" or Francis Spufford's "Red Plenty" or Nick Harkaway's "the Gone-Away World" within recent memory -- it wonders "So wait a moment, can you defend the fact that in the last decade you've read roughly 40 different out-of-print Doctor Who novels that came out during the years it was off the air?"
But of course, when I do read them, the answer is always "Yes". I've started so many great and interesting conversations with my kids when reading them Doctor Who books. We've experienced so many worlds and genres together that way, and watched impish improvisational cleverness strike blows for radical trust over tribalism and war; for curiosity and sense-of-wonder over profit; for basic chipper decency over following unkind rules. They're fun. If some of my favorite novelists are now people like Kate Orman and Lawrence Miles and Lloyd Rose who never managed to get any NON-timelord-themed fiction writing careers going, which if we're honest might indicate they're not objectively all I think they are ... well, I'm glad we got what we got. Those of us whom it was for, that is. And full respect to everyone who preferred romantasy. Or Dan Brown.
I entertain the idea that there are authors who love to write and I can pick up on that and love what they write. In my illusion is the idea that words flow from their love onto the page and then into my mind. Reality, however, dictates that they slave laboriously, perfecting their craft into printed form. Still, it ‘feels’ like they enjoy the process like I enjoy the result and we share the results no matter the difficulties weathered for my sake.
Books are like wine.
1. Individual tastes vary greatly
2. We all like something others would consider swill
3. We only display our best bottles (for the record, Fluke made it onto a shelf with Moby Dick and Brothers Karamazov 🤷♂️)
That's far too kind of you - I'm not in that league, but as I said in the piece, I'm not one to judge subjective perceptions of book quality ;)
Same shelf, but about 10 feet away. :) You’re in the same neighborhood as Malcolm Gladwell and Matthew Desmond, though. Still good company.
Malcolm Gladwell? Faint praise! ;0)
A humane and stimulating assessment that made me . . . almost want to read Dan Brown, even as I am enthralled by the latest Ian McEwan!
Thanks, Catherine! Dan Brown is not for everyone, but he is for some people, and that's great!
I get nervous when I only have one or two books backed up that I haven’t read yet, and nothing makes me happier than new books by authors I love (usually mysteries and spies) that I can look forward to. (Louise Penny, Elizabeth George, Mick Herron) Ditto new TV episodes. And on that subject, The Great British Baking Show is in a special class, and I hoard them. With every new horror perpetrated by the Trump administration, my reserves of hope get dangerously low. Nothing compares to TGBBS for an hour of feel good escape for boosting morale.
A book recommendation for you..Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. A thousand pages of everything you could want. One of my favorites.
Thank you! I'll check it out. (A small aside: I can't handle it being called The Great British Baking *Show*. Why isn't it Bake Off? I don't know why it needed to be rebranded for the US audience.)
If you like Cryptonomicon, then dig into his Baroque Cycle Trilogy; another 3000 pages that I will have to reread at some point. History, science, codes, travel, real and fictional characters, beginning in the 17th century. Cryptonomicon picks up with ancestors of the same characters, and the same themes, but bouncing back and forth between WWII and present day (when the book was written).
I second/third the recs for Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon - They move so fast but are so detailed and rich that you really want to go reread them but then you see how much bookshelf space they take!
I really liked Cryptonomicon (and Snow Crash). Neal Stephenson is a very interesting and original writer. I must try some of his other books.
Cryptonomicon is an amazing read, though the hardcopy edition weighs enough to harm someone hit with it. 😉
His have a heart attack if you see my ereader library. I would need several lives to read them all. 🤔 Maybe the secret to that is in one of those books...?
I mostly read ebooks. I read in bed and the others would crush me.
In your inimitable fashion, you have provided a commentary on criticism which makes me a better person and a less embittered writer. (NB., I am only tastefully embittered.) I don't judge readers on what they read. I stopped doing that when 'Fifty Shades' became the best selling novel of all time. Bless every member of the dwindling forty-odd percent of us still reading or listening. I do judge authors, however. It is, after all, a craft, and therefore invites judgement as opinion, rather than fact. But it is a fact that Brown often gets his facts very wrong. While every writer gets stuff wrong--sometimes a little off, sometimes missing the nuance that might cause a true expert to tut aloud--Brown often requires a fact to be true as a key element of his plot, and it isn't. Isn't close. I'm sorry to be that reader, but when that happens, it creates the cardinal sin of taking me out of my suspension of disbelief. He's lost me, and how many times per chapter must I force myself to re-engage before I say, "Nope." Plot will steamroll over many, many sins. Tom Clancy, may his memory be a blessing, is one of my favorite authors. Great plotting and, I thought for an innocent few years, a knowledgeable writer. But he was not an expert in what he chose to write about--he was an insurance salesman, I believe. I realized this when I would come upon his prose related to my own area of expertise (surgery). He was often at sea in the field of medicine. But I still love his books, because the failing was seldom encountered and never critical to the plot's survival. He knew better about what he needed to know better about. An author need not achieve perfection, but please do the work.
Indeed - that's why I poked fun at Brown a bit too - the critiques aren't wrong, it's more about a) the sneering disdain that I find distasteful; and b) the notion that fiction can be enjoyed subjectively even if it's not high art (or accurate).
Thanks for an amusing review! I m still giggling. I too adore dan brown despite the fact he doesn’t need my money. He’s a good listen while I m working on something else. Anyway, thanks for the laughs and writing that surprises by well timed breaks ‘in the 4th wall’. Perhaps there’s a better term for those moments when the writer is doing precisely what they are writing about?
I hadn't heard there was a new Dan Brown book — until Sunday when I went to a bookstore and saw a large cardboard cut-out stand-up advertisement, the sort of thing usually seen in movie theaters. He's popular in Colombia too, apparently! This was a big bookstore with a lot of academic titles (I didn't escape before paying for a couple books about "what is truth" and "is there such a thing as human nature", and, um, nine others). But we each need our silly along with the serious!
My household has been waiting three years for the next installment of the Stranger Things series; though filming was derailed by covid and then a writers' strike, the final season will air on Netflix in a couple months.
Something I remember about the Da Vinci Code is that, in 2003, the year it was published, a UCC pastor told me his congregation had formed a study/discussion group about it because their imaginations were fired up by the novel's "what if..." premise about the lineage of Jesus and the role of women. It made religion feel more alive for them — the idea that Bible stories could have modern connections. It caused them to ask "what if the Bible is really real?" in a way that blew their minds. Thus some people received it a bit seriously.
Thanks for sharing that, Tucker! I hope Stranger Things lives up to the wait. And yes, I avoided the broader social critique that is probably more influential when it comes to Brown...that he's anti-Christian. (Realistically, it's likely that millions more people have heard that critique than the ones about his prose.)
You act as if buying nine books is a bad thing? 😉
Every time you open a book, it will forever alter your reading life in unpredictable ways. I would have never have discovered and fallen in love with Hilary Mantel and her masterpiece Wolf Hall trilogy without my teenage obsession with A Song of Ice and Fire (ok, ok, Wheel of Time and then ASOIAF) leading to a deep interest in the real-life Wars of the Roses (not exactly a common topic in American high schools) which led me to discover the frothy fun historical fiction of Philippa Gregory which eventually led to Dame Mantel in my thirties. I’m sure every reader has a similar story (or two or three… hundred) of discovery. Using cultural taste as a gatekeeping mechanism may seem cool when you are an immature teenager/young adult, but I am glad I outgrew that phase and am now a very unhip (but quite contented) wide-ranging bibliophile who just wants everyone to read books again (please, really, any book at all).
People can be snobs about anything, but for some reason book snobs think they’re arbiters of our collective tastes. It’s unremarkable that someone likes a hamburger now and again, and sole meunière at other times. It’s just what you’re in the mood for. But for some reason, we’re supposed to feel guilty about reading simply for pleasure.
I adore To the Lighthouse, but Mick Herron aces Virginia Woolf on plot development. Why can’t we have both?
Perfect pitch review. Dan’s ideas are borderline preposterous and he writes woman characters as thin as high-finish 120gsm Stora Enso paper, but I couldn’t put his book down! Perfect airplane read…so long as you have a really long flight.
Haha thank you. To be fair, I think Langdon is pretty thin too. He seems to be primarily motivated by historical conspiracies, puzzles, and swimming. But I did love these lines from The Telegraph's review of The Secret of Secrets: "These criticisms miss the point: Dan Brown's novels have never been about sentence structure or turn of phrase. They are entirely plot driven, so it really doesn't matter if characters are lazily sketched and wooden – they are but cogs driving the narrative forward. Having a pop at the writing in Dan Brown's novels is akin to turning up at a music gig and complaining about the lack of comedy. You're in the wrong place, pal."
I just started reading The Secret of Secrets, and I’ll you, it’s pleasant escaping to Dan Brown’s mystical Prague in the evening, overwrought characterizations and clunky wording aside, than being overwhelmed by the harsh, authoritarian reality of Trump’s America. I’ve never been to Prague, but even with the Golem roaming the streets at night, I think a visit there would be a peaceful, interesting experience.
I also love the intrigue of Dan Brown's books! I have trouble these days keeping up with the books for the four book clubs to which I belong ---crazy I know!
Guilty as charged 😬, but sold!
That "murder review"... and to think that two months later Tim Snyder was on his way to being a hero outside the academy for his early and strong defense of Ukraine. I've added Gottschall's book to my reading list. Thanks!
I agree with your opening view that anyone reading a book these days is in the plus column. So many people I know don't read anything. It is frightening how many leaders in our country don't have any notion of the complexity of language. Speech has become so inflamed with polarizing criticism and even hate, we do not need critics who bash writers. I remember John Updike's novels which famously provided clever autobiographical drama and lifestyle tales from the perspective of a white male in the United States in the 60s, through the 80s. My husband purchased his entire oeuvre over the years and I read along just because the books were so good. If he wrote something now it would probably be highly criticized by women but that's another story.
The New Yorker Magazine employed Updike as a literary critic. He made criticism fun with his descriptions of what the reader will encounter in the book (no spoilers), the strength of the writing, and some background on the author. Then he gave examples of problems in the story, holes in the plot, stories that just didn't work and why, or grammatical issues. It was a critical analysis not puerile negative criticism. An Updike review was nuanced, with enough information to decide if one wanted the book tomorrow or waiting for the paperback was a better choice. Keep on Brian! Thanks for your unique point of view.
My son read loads of books when he was younger. And then he did English literature at school and hated the analysis part of it so much, that he has hardly read a book since. Such a pity.
I've met people who have told me that they have never read another book after leaving school. To me, that's incredibly sad.
Thanks so much for this, including the funny parts as well as the important ones. I've never read Dan Brown and he probably isn't for me (although the Gottschall book probably is). But I've seen exactly the same disdain for so many Stephen King novels I adore. With, again, the same frustrating awareness that not every critique is wrong, but that to me, they're mostly beside the point.
There's a (tiny) part of my brain that I think internalizes the attitude. When I'm reading a genuinely exceptional, deep and beautifully-written work of literature -- Richard Powers's "the Overstory" at the moment, or Jennifer Egan's "a Visit from the Goon Squad" or Francis Spufford's "Red Plenty" or Nick Harkaway's "the Gone-Away World" within recent memory -- it wonders "So wait a moment, can you defend the fact that in the last decade you've read roughly 40 different out-of-print Doctor Who novels that came out during the years it was off the air?"
But of course, when I do read them, the answer is always "Yes". I've started so many great and interesting conversations with my kids when reading them Doctor Who books. We've experienced so many worlds and genres together that way, and watched impish improvisational cleverness strike blows for radical trust over tribalism and war; for curiosity and sense-of-wonder over profit; for basic chipper decency over following unkind rules. They're fun. If some of my favorite novelists are now people like Kate Orman and Lawrence Miles and Lloyd Rose who never managed to get any NON-timelord-themed fiction writing careers going, which if we're honest might indicate they're not objectively all I think they are ... well, I'm glad we got what we got. Those of us whom it was for, that is. And full respect to everyone who preferred romantasy. Or Dan Brown.
I entertain the idea that there are authors who love to write and I can pick up on that and love what they write. In my illusion is the idea that words flow from their love onto the page and then into my mind. Reality, however, dictates that they slave laboriously, perfecting their craft into printed form. Still, it ‘feels’ like they enjoy the process like I enjoy the result and we share the results no matter the difficulties weathered for my sake.