What got me is that the main character's supposed to be this world-famous academic, right? So why's it take him so long to figure out the name of the big head the Templars supposedly worshipped?

Indiana Jones would have figured the whole puzzle out in, like, five pages. Six tops, if he stopped for a fistfight with some passing Nazis.

Posted December 15, 2005 6:48 PM by JonathanMoeller

Unless Indy had the runs - then he'd just shoot 'em. Five pages.

Posted December 15, 2005 7:04 PM by protected static

I know some actual scholars of the early Christian community are... displeased with the Da Vinci code. I don't have the expertise to evaluate their complaints myself. I do know a little bit about cryptography, though, so to try to get a general gauge on things, I picked a copy of another book of his, "Digital Fortress", out of a bin. The general background to this one concerns cryptography. I flipped it open to a randomly selected page, and found the Nazi Enigma cipher machine described as a "12 ton monster".

It's not hard to find pictures of an Enigma machine. Not hard at all. It's a little harder to get access to the actual device, but I have seen them up close. You can pick them up and carry them. And depending on the model, you may not need both hands.

Brown claims to be a crypto expert. His fans talk it up...

Posted December 15, 2005 7:16 PM by "Charles Dodgson"

When I was seven years old, in second grade, I wrote a mystery story that was a pastiche of Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and Godzilla (I was an eclectic child). My attempts at coded messages sounded a LOT like Dan Brown's.

...In fact, now that I think of it, the Da Vinci Code, in tone and style, distinctly resembles my second-grade story.

My favorite, however, is in Angels and Demons, where the protagonist mutters to himself "So...CERN has a particle accelerator."

I shouted at the page "CERN is a particle accelerator! You can't miss the thing, it's only several kilometers across!"

I love to MST3K Dan Brown.

Posted December 15, 2005 7:28 PM by Caroline

Oh, and "Charles Dodgson" -- I recommend Bart Ehrman's Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code for a cheerful and approachable and interesting introduction to the applicable scholarship. I think it's far more interesting than Da Vinci Code.

Posted December 15, 2005 7:32 PM by Caroline

Wait, I saw this movie. It had Bruce Willis and Sandra Bernhard and lots of exploding crap. (Well, not literally, but there were probably cuts.) And that picture was lousy, but at least it wasn't pompous-lousy. And it had one or two moments of actual invention, which Dan Brown's entire career hasn't managed. Love the moment in Digital Fortress where Super Cryptographer explains that a 64-bit cipherkey is 64 characters long. There are pretty average eight-year-olds who know the difference between a bit and a byte, and a few of them bust Windows-based systems the same way kids of my generation sent away for Sea Monkeys.*

And, yeah, you could make a big mess if you had just one lousy gram of antimatter, a speck so small it is positively weensy. You could also manage it with a billion metric tons of raspberry Jell-O plus Lake Baikal,** the difference being that there might actually have been that much raspberry Jell-O in modern history.

And I bet that even if the French guy were improvising dying messages like an Ellery Queen ghost on deadline, he wouldn't have called the painting "The Mona Lisa." Not when he could have turned its real name into CIA GONDOLA. "Send absolutely every available asset we have to Rome!"
"Sir, they have gondolas in Venice."
"Dammit, man, these people are devious!"

Crummy crypto joke:
Cryptographer takes cheap date to the flat where he takes cheap dates. ("How was I to know/She was with the Russians too?")
Cheap date says something to the effect of, "So, like, is this a real relationship?"
"Naah. This is my one-time pad."

*The object of power . . .
**Homage à Stan Freberg, by Christo.

Posted December 15, 2005 7:32 PM by John M. Ford

Is it worth reading this book for laughs?

A friend gave me his copy when he was done with it. I'm not sure if he was sincere or pulling my leg when he praised it.

Posted December 15, 2005 7:36 PM by Stefan Jones

That gives "Funny once, Mike" a whole new meaning.

Posted December 15, 2005 7:39 PM by Alan Bostick

The queerest thing about The Da Vinci Code is how it was repeatedly billed as clever and intelligent and written for readers who are smarter than everyone else. As I have previously blogged, if all it takes to be super duper smart is to throw in a couple of lame anagrams and some Fibonacci numbers then I'm including a Sierpinski gasket and a Koch Snowflake in the book I'm writing now and I'll be hailed as a freaking genius.

I'm really not supposed to be here. I'm trying to find the name of the director who was brought in on Kong when Jackson collapsed but it appears that all roads lead to Making Light…

Posted December 15, 2005 7:42 PM by Georgiana

Grumpy rant #1: Stpd bk. Clnky wrtng, dmb stry. Dnt wnt t rd t. Wnt rd it. t hs mr bd rvws thn ths stpd bks by Tm LHy. Nt gng t rd t; wld rthr rd th bck f th Chrs bx. Wld rthr wtch ll 'Rlly's Chrstms shw. Wld rthr t scrmbld ggs md wth dd scks.

Vowels available upon request.

Posted December 15, 2005 7:43 PM by Lizzy L

Lots of people told me to read it, but they were people I don't trust to give reasonable book reviews. So I wasn't going to, then my other half brought it home, not having as much resistance to book recommendations from suspicious non-readers. A book in the house is a book in the house, and I figured it was worth looking at. Silly me.

It was... eh. I was surprised that anybody in the art world calls it "Mona Lisa," as I thought that was considered ignorant. He did explain why the anagrams were in English -- they spoke English at home all the time despite being French. He didn't explain why it took anybody more than half a second to recognize the Fibonacci series; I saw it and rolled my eyes at the idea that anybody would think that was sneaky. The puzzles weren't all that puzzling, but they required the mind of the granddaughter to decode them because they were really more like hints at memories. The whole thing with the sex ritual seemed prurient and stupid to me; he had to really reach to find something so shocking that she would not talk to her grandfather again, and even then it wasn't terribly convincing to me. (I may have some details a bit off; it was a year ago that I read it.)

I was not terribly impressed; somebody who saw me reading it said I should read the earlier book, and I have not bothered. On the other hand, in discussing it with a friend and reading other reviews, I've found some interesting reading on Leonardo da Vinci by actual historians. So it wasn't 100 percent bad.

Posted December 15, 2005 7:59 PM by Ayse Sercan

My objection to "The Da Vinci Code" can be summed up in two words: Renowned curator.

Renowned curator.

Renowned curator.

It's like one of those horrible, horrible movies that they show on the Sci-Fi channel that you run across by accident and can't quite stop watching.

Renowned curator.

Posted December 15, 2005 8:00 PM by Damien Neil

Didn't read it myself, although in my day job (I am not getting much work done) I have some claim to be a scholar of early Christianity. Personally I'd rather people read the various Nag Hammadi texts that the bad theology is based on. It frustrates me that there are interesting aspects of the early church which a vast proportion of the population now know about entirely through the prism of this ridiculous Priory of Sion cr*p.

Possibly it's better that they know something wrong than nothing at all. But I'm not convinced.

On the other hand, I do really like the "san greal / sang real" redivider. But I don't think it's especially significant.

Posted December 15, 2005 8:03 PM by candle

Renowned curator.

Oh, but when I grow up I want to be Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard.

Posted December 15, 2005 8:07 PM by candle

Those are so much fun - the Wordsmith link is where I came up with mine: Heretic Spire, Damn Lie (for my full name). I liked it so well, I made it the subtitle for my webpage.

Posted December 15, 2005 8:11 PM by Cherie Priest

Thanks. I have a LOT of books in my in-queue I'm actually looking forward to reading. I'll politely push TDVC to the very back and, when I next move, donate it to GoodWill.

Posted December 15, 2005 8:16 PM by Stefan Jones

Dan Brown drives me crazy. It's like the man does just enough research to know a dictionary definition without digging deep enough to get to anything really cool.
The aforementioned "hmm..So CERN has a particle accelerator?" thing really set me against him.

The thing is that his central "secret" about early christianity is far less interesting than what we actually know about it. When I heard what it was, I just thought "so what?" There groups that thought the YHWH of the old testament was an evil god and Jesus came to save us from Him.

Also, what the heck is a symbologist? Maybe he meant "scholar of religion" or "semiotician", but couldn't be bothered to look it up.

Posted December 15, 2005 8:23 PM by Keith K

"George Herbert Walker Bush" is an anagram of "Insane Berserk Rebel Warthog." I do not believe this to be a coincidence.

Posted December 15, 2005 8:28 PM by Jim Kiley

I cannot figure out why Da Vinci Code is so popular, much less why it's critically acclaimed.

Quite aside from the lameness of the codes and the improbability of the characters, the plot is a mediocre hash of every "thriller" cliche ever used, from convenient omniscience as plot driver to last-minute abrupt double-triple-quadruple crosses by "deeply trusted" characters the protagonists have known all their lives. Take away the codes and Biblical revisionism, all that's left is a by-the-numbers hack job that would've embarrassed Robert Ludlum.

Posted December 15, 2005 8:53 PM by CaseyL

Lizzy L, dead socks really pep up scrambled eggs. (I love your self-disenvowelment -- very clever.)

I gave up on TDVC when they're at the bank and need a 10-digit password, and neither remembers the Fibonacci series they started with! After the "renowned curator" who drags himself 3 miles around the Louvre so he can leav stupid "clues" for his idiot daughter and the stalwart hero, that was too much.

BTW, what milage does a SmartCar really get? Brown's numbers didn't sound right on that, either.

Posted December 15, 2005 8:55 PM by jhlipton

I was disappointed too.

The depth of my disappointment was such that even though I lost only two hours to the book, and that three years ago, I still feel compelled to comment whenever I hear it maligned.

I was particularly annoyed by the bit where Robert Langdon claimed that love songs about unnamed "My Ladies" were actually about Mary Magdalen.

Also, the way Sophie turned out to be a direct descendant of Jesus, with a bunch of family alive and well and living near a chapel full of unsolved codes in Scotland was excessively contrived.

Posted December 15, 2005 9:15 PM by pirate queen

Language Log's Geoffrey K. Pullum got his milk thoroughly curdled last month by the renowned curator.

Posted December 15, 2005 9:17 PM by Lloyd Burchill

My college roommate and I, years after college, regularly e-mail and phone each other, and we each have recommendations when we do. I recommended "The Time-Traveler's Wife" because he was living in Chicago; he recommended I finally finish "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," which I found I loved.
When "The DaVinci" code blew up, there was a distinct lack of mention of it from either side. Which is odd; we're both relatively well read. We're at least always midbook.
I picked it up one day, read the first page, and set it aside. It read like a POD book. It read like a young, starting-out writer who wasn't yet aware of the economy and precision of words. It read like a cross between bad Dean Koontz and worse Tom Clancy.
Finally, one day, the book came up in a roundabout way; he was interviewing for med school residencies, and the the interviewer mentioned it. He feigned ambivalence. Because he, like me, had picked it up only to put it right back down.
I think it's telling when one must feign ambivalence.

And you know what I like most about MakingLight? I can ask, "So, what's the more known or famous or whatever name of 'The Mona Lisa?'" and I know both that someone will answer me and that no one will think me ignorant for not knowing.

Posted December 15, 2005 9:18 PM by Will Entrekin

"I shouted at the page "CERN is a particle accelerator! You can't miss the thing, it's only several kilometers across!"

Oh. My. God. I must find that part of the book so I can laugh at it even more.

And I second the question about the Mona Lisa - although I, personally, do feel a bit stupid asking since I minored in art history and have actually seen it in person.

Posted December 15, 2005 9:30 PM by Jenny K

Caroline, thank you. I got as far as 'CERN has a particle accelerator,' and pretty much shouted the same thing to my laptop screen as you did to your book. Then laughed. Then I went to Amazon.com and used the 'search inside' feature to find 'CERN' in the text of Angels and Demons. That line is the fifteenth occurrence in the text - how can you mention CERN fourteen times before getting to the fact that it's a particle accelerator? So I laughed some more. I suspect I am going to break out in snickers for the rest of the evening. So thank you again - you made my day.

Posted December 15, 2005 9:30 PM by debcha

The one that got me was toward the end of Digital Fortress, where the conclusion Dan Brown seems to push is that computer scientists and mathematicians know no physics at all.

Posted December 15, 2005 9:34 PM by Will "scifantasy" Frank

"So, what's the more known or famous or whatever name of 'The Mona Lisa?'"

La Gioconda - although of course, by Dan Brown rules, you should have been able to work that out without any aids because anagrams are easy like that. (Everyone knows, by the way, that Samuel Alito is an anagram of "I am a sellout"? Good.)

I guess it isn't the more well-known name - it's the name of the model, who was the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, but I suppose Mona Lisa is as well (technically "Monna Lisa", or "Madam Lisa"). An Italian site I just found randomly while googling suggests that "Mona Lisa" goes back to Vasari in 1550 and "La Gioconda" only to 1625. I don't suppose we know what Leonardo called it, or her.

My impression is that it's like The Laughing Cavalier - a name that's stuck regardless of the actual title of the painting. But certainly in Italy you would say "La Gioconda", and probably a professional art historian would do so as a matter of course.

I hadn't spotted, earlier, that 'renowned curator' were the first words of the book (so thanks for the link, Lloyd). Thankfully that's because I never got that far into it.

Posted December 15, 2005 9:48 PM by candle

I knew there was a reason I hadn't purchased the DaVinci code already. (Except, now that you've gone and made it ever so slightly more entertaining, I may have to check it out of the library.)

As I have previously blogged, if all it takes to be super duper smart is to throw in a couple of lame anagrams and some Fibonacci numbers then I'm including a Sierpinski gasket and a Koch Snowflake in the book I'm writing now and I'll be hailed as a freaking genius.

Georgiana: Minus the Sierpinski gasket, wasn't that part and parcel of the chapter intro gimmicks in the novel Jurassic Park. I seem to remember some Michael Crichton book which had a lot of Koch snowflakes and number theory running amok.

Posted December 15, 2005 9:57 PM by PiscusFiche

More to the point, a friend of mine was a curator at the Louvre, and they all called it "La Gioconde" (the French version of the same name). After reading the book that was the one thing that stuck with me; I don't know any European art people who call it "Mona Lisa."

Then I reminded myself that this was mainstream pap for an uneducated American audience, and nobody would have known what he was talking about if he'd used anything else. I try not to be too overly critical when I'm clearly reading rubbish, just like I try not to dwell on the historical inaccuracies in romance novels. I just wish other people would stop pretending there was some kind of grand secret in there.

On the other hand, I've always wondered how L. Ron Hubbard managed to pull off the Scientology thing, and now I see that people are so willing to find secret messages in a text that it would have been a bigger feat for him to write the same book and then avoid creating a cult.

Posted December 15, 2005 10:01 PM by Ayse Sercan

I found a rather telling/annoying mistake even before CERN was mentioned. The curator's assassin uses a gun that clicks when empty, but is loaded with a clip. Clips go into automatics, which lock open when the last round is fired. They also throw brass that he would need to collect, or leave a lot of evidence. Revolvers click when empty. Sure, I suppose you could make the argument he was using a revolver and loading with full-moon clips, but that's rather esoteric for people who don't spend much time with firearms.

For that matter, did anyone else notice that to write DvC, all he did was open A&D in his word processor and use the "find/replace" feature for names and places?

Posted December 15, 2005 10:09 PM by Jason Allard

People of otherwise astoundingly good taste press the book on me.

My closest friend since high school, devotee of Tanith Lee and Angela Carter, admitted after a certain amount of grilling that the prose was perhaps not as scintillating as it might be. My parental units, who have not agreed with each other on anything for a decade, had passionate conversations about how eeeeevil the Christian church is and how many heretics they burned to cover up the Shocking Truth.

And my father has multiple university degrees, for Pete's sake.

(Unfortunately, this is when I came out to my family as kind of Episcopalian, which appeared suspiciously Catholic).

What frustrated me most is that the Da Vinci Code emerged as a template for Proper Feminist Religion, and if I was a Proper Feminist I'd buy into it, because even my lackadaisically orthodox Christianity was frighteningly misogynistic. And they imply that I'm gullible. Well, maybe. But if you get your religious beliefs from a book that badly researched, it's the pot calling the kettle black, isn't it?

Posted December 15, 2005 10:18 PM by Emily H.

I can't sleep on planes, so I used it to occupy me on a flight to Russia. Eh. As the comments above, I didn't find it particularly profound.

Posted December 15, 2005 10:30 PM by Alan Hamilton

I put it down, never to return, when the world-renowned symbologist was being shocked by the devilish cleverness of symbols that can be read when reflected in a mirror, as well as directly.

Since I had just been perusing a web site on these creatures the day before, my suspension of disbelief suffered a critical sprain.

Posted December 15, 2005 10:36 PM by Ambar

"Twelve ton monster" is, of course, an anagram for "Newton's voltmeter." That's the real meaning.

Actually, anagrams make some of the most secure comm methods. You get a Scrabble set and arrange the tiles into your message. Your correspondent, thousands of miles away, takes his Scrabble set and arranges the tiles into a message. The forces of Evil will be totally unable to intercept or jam the transmission....

Posted December 15, 2005 10:40 PM by James D. Macdonald

Uh, Jim, isn't that because no transmission is taking place? Is that the point? Are you being clever again? Igor feel slow.

Posted December 15, 2005 10:54 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Oh, and Will?

"And you know what I like most about MakingLight? I can ask, 'So, what's the more known or famous or whatever name of "The Mona Lisa?"' and I know both that someone will answer me and that no one will think me ignorant for not knowing."

Posted December 15, 2005 10:57 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

James: just make sure to keep your spoons away from the board so they don't start bending; otherwise, you might get intercepted by the EULER GIRL. Of course, if you actually play Scrabble with those tiles, you'd want to use the RIGEL RULE.

Sincerely, I, GEL RULER.

Posted December 15, 2005 11:04 PM by Christopher Davis

For anyone who does the London Times crossword or other cryptic puzzles regularly, and solves clues such as "Play disrupted--and it's us in court (5, 10),"* to take a recent example, these are child's play. I haven't read Brown's book, but if these anagrams are an example of his devilishly clever congeries...

And in fact the Times puzzle did have "Enigmatic girl cooing--a lad gets upset (2, 8)"** just a few days ago.

Posted December 15, 2005 11:05 PM by Robert L

*TITUS ANDRONICUS

**LA GIOCONDA

Posted December 15, 2005 11:07 PM by Robert L

Indeed, Teresa, no transmission is taking place.

The frequencies of letters in English is known. The longer your anagram the closer it will come to the frequencies, and the more it will resemble every other message with the same number of letters also written in English.

See too my review of another book that relied on anagrams here: Light Hearted Friend

Posted December 15, 2005 11:11 PM by James D. Macdonald

There is an inherent difficulty with Ancient Mystery Revealed! yarns, in that we are generally asked to accept that the clues have been lying around in more-or-less plain sight for centuries or millennia, and our characters have to put them together, run away from the bad guys, and blow a great many things up, all in under two hours of screen time.

That's another difficulty: like practically all thrillers nowadays, these books are screen treatments gracelessly expanded to prose. There's nothing wrong with conceiving one of the Big Scenes (the zeppelin, with its precious cargo of ancient Atlantean julienne slicers, bearing down on the Syracusan Duomo* as its Archimedian solar death mirrors rise from their crypts, click into place, and prepare for zep ignition), but it always helps if one actually makes it vivid and imaginable, instead of leaving that for the CGI dudes.

And Alan: I said "crummy," didn't I?

*Which (cue backstory) used to be a temple to Athena, who our renowned and fabulously cool curator heroes have discovered was the boss deity of Atlantis, before the Masonic copy-encodifyers hornswoggled Ignatius Donnelly.

Posted December 15, 2005 11:19 PM by John M. Ford

Good cryptography would be... ...welll... ...too cryptic for most humans to enjoy.

Many, many years ago I was wooed by a cryptographer. Anagrams were not his style - too easy. He never spoke plainly (in my recollection, at least - although I think he did once refuse a drink of milk by saying 'no'...) and it often took me so long to figure out when and where he wanted to meet that the information was no longer pertinent. He always loved to know I'd found out, though. Our relationship was (mostly) composed of him hoping I'd understand the key to his puzzles, so he could create even more cryptic ones.

I'd love to say that he left no mark on my life, but in fact, he did: after some trial and error I both became married a translator; this is a profession entirely dedicated to interpretation of cryptic messages. Is it a form of nose-thumbing at that twisted (but necessary, I suppose) profession? Perhaps. But I'm very happy with the man I make my life with.

Posted December 15, 2005 11:30 PM by Shunra

The DaVinci Code is a terrible book in nearly all respects, but the part I've seen knocked least is its attitude towards women. Thanks for reminding me, Emily H!

Aside from the typical "Oh, I'm so smart, and yet I'm astonished as you slowly grasp the plot and explain it to me, Gary Stu!", the book's all about "the sacred feminine"... Which immediately sets a warning to beeping. Every time I've seen talk along the lines of, "Oh, women are far more refined!" it's immediately followed by "Which is why they'd have no interest in doing manly things. In fact, we should protect them from it!"

I read with an eye to this. Why, exactly, is the "feminine" sacred? And I am rewarded with the thrilling revelation: it's because when a man blows his load, he's in touch with god in that moment of bliss!

Oh joy! Females are as sacred as a wad of kleenex! I can certainly see why the Catholic church has tried to supress such dangerous knowledge all these years.

Posted December 15, 2005 11:34 PM by Madeline F

Encipherment in the sense of general algorithms -- something you can in principle use to limit access to any message you transmit -- is hard to make exciting for a broad audience (I didn't say impossible). Sufficiently strong encipherment between two people who are well acquainted is not terribly hard, though it likely won't be useful for absolutely any message. Two people who are close have lots of mutual information that others are unlikely to share, particularly movie-style goons in black shades.

If you were actually a writer -- and this would work in a movie quite as well as a book -- one could have a character murdered at the very outset of the yarn (half the thrillers you see start this way anyway) with the audience knowing only that he or she Knew Something Worth Killing For.

Goon: "Excuse me, sir or madam. Pardon my nondescript foreign accent. I am a stage goon of limited intelligence, hired for one reel only, and I and my associates are looking for an old and rare book of great importance to -- uh, absolutely nobody."
Resourceful Librarian: "I'm sorry, this is the British Library. Have you tried Foyles?"

Then the close friend/spouse/lover finds a page of dying endearments (with some oddity that indicated they were more than that), and has to go back to what those references meant when the victim was alive and they were together. Everything we would know about the dead person -- and most of the other backstory -- would emerge in those scenes, some of which the viewpoint character might now interpret in quite a different way.

If you did that right, you wouldn't half need to blow anything up. Until the movie, of course.

Posted December 16, 2005 12:33 AM by John M. Ford

OK, all those criticisms are fair except Madeline's. Yeah, his attitude toward women sucks. BUT he isn't saying the feminine is MORE sacred; just that the feminine aspects of sacredness were edited out by the patriarchy. In other words, the modern Church's ideas of sacredness are all masculine, and they ought to be more balanced.

I must confess I rather like this idea. Whether it has any basis in historical fact I strongly doubt; but then there really aren't any available historical facts about those specific people, so we can make up things that MIGHT have been true, right?

Ancient astronauts built the pyramids, too.

Oh, and: 'renowned curator' reminds me of Snoopy saying "Actually there aren't more than one or two world-famous grocery clerks." Can anyone who isn't an art historian or museum employee etc. even name a SINGLE curator? Of anything?

This is MakingLight, so I should probably specify that yes, that was rhetorical and yes, I'm sure you can each name five curators right off the top because you memorize the curator's name(s) on every museum exhibit you go to, which runs to a lot of memory because of course you go to the museum every day on your lunch hour, and no, I wish you wouldn't. You all intimidate the HELL out of me, you know that?

But I'm not bitter.

And: MaryJane Lenz. So there.

Posted December 16, 2005 12:51 AM by Xopher (Christopher Hatton)

Georgiana: Minus the Sierpinski gasket, wasn't that part and parcel of the chapter intro gimmicks in the novel Jurassic Park. I seem to remember some Michael Crichton book which had a lot of Koch snowflakes and number theory running amok.

The Dragon Curve is actually pretty interesting by itself and makes for a nice end-of-first-term programming exercise for undergrads. I prefer a formulation for it that is a bit different from the one given on the mathworld page, but that's neither here nor there.

As an allergory for "chaos theory says that bad stuff always happens, and I've got actual math so neener-neener", the Dragon Curve does less well.

I've never seen someone run amok with number theory, though I suppose the plot to the movie Sneakers comes close, what with someone being killed over a method of quickly factoring the product of large primes.

Posted December 16, 2005 12:55 AM by Daniel Martin

If you were actually a writer...

I'd like to be the first to say: Rosebud.

Thank you.

Posted December 16, 2005 12:56 AM by candle

Well, there's Thomas Hoving. But that's New York for you. And Henry Cole, but that's London for you.

Posted December 16, 2005 1:04 AM by John M. Ford

This made me laugh my ass off. Thank you!

Posted December 16, 2005 1:04 AM by La Gringa

I must confess I rather like this idea. Whether it has any basis in historical fact I strongly doubt...

Well, to some extent the Catholic church (in its earliest incarnation, well before there was a big church on the Vatican hill) *did* suppress aspects of (what passed for) Christianity which favoured women: have a look at those Nag Hammadi codices.

The Sophia of Jesus Christ introduces a strong feminine element; Thunder, Perfect Mind features an apparently pansexual (or pangendered) God; and one of the apocryphal gospels has Jesus kissing Mary Magdalene on the [this section of the manuscript is missing. Scholars have had fun trying to restore the correct word.]

Of course, the church didn't have to hide away all knowledge of this stuff, or kill anyone who threatened to talk about it. The implausible part is the wishful thinking that says that uncovering a single piece of evidence will destroy some major institution or power structure. These things don't survive by being incapable of incorporating, or else ignoring, new ideas.

Mind you, I must also admit to being sneakily amused by the idea of Opus Dei as a secretive assassins' guild.

Posted December 16, 2005 1:11 AM by candle

Stefan Jones asked: Is it worth reading this book for laughs?

IMHO, only if you're a masochist. the book's not even "so bad it's good." it's just... bad.

it makes me wonder, though. when people criticize the quality of the Harry Potter books, saying they're superficial, they don't really add anything new, I counter by saying that at least it gets non-readers to read. Order of the Phoenix is the longest book my brother has ever read, and for leisure at that. it's gotta count for something.

but I like the Harry Potter books. simplistic or not, they've got likeable characters (some of them startlingly three-dimensional) and good underlying values.

so I wonder. if The Da Vinci Code gets millions of people to read, including those who normally don't, is that at least somewhat a good thing? even if the book is not just terribly written, but misleading as well?

(I know, I know, in an ideal world we would get millions of people to read quality books. but. you get my point.)

Posted December 16, 2005 1:20 AM by antukin

I read that damned book a year ago or so, and I was very quickly struck by what appeared like the author's *enthusiasm* for his own research, such as it was. The bit where Langdon's on his way to the Louvre in the dead of night, but he pauses to reflect on the arcane fact that the perimeter of the Louvre building is x.y miles. [scratches head] Okay, how is this relevant? It read like authorial showing off, rather than anything more useful.

My wife, the smart one of the family, has not read the book, and has no plans to. I told her about the dying curator guy going to all this elaborate trouble, with the puzzles and the messages and the Fibonacci bit, etc etc, all as a ploy to tell crypto grand-daughter and Langdon what's going on. The wife remarked, "Why didn't he just call her on his mobile phone?"

I sat there, all stupefied. The text, to the best of my recollection, doesn't say the curator has a mobile, but I thought, gee, if only he did have one. Or, I suppose, he could have found a public phone nearby. You could cut the book's action by half. There he is, dying on the floor. Grabs phone, rings grand-daughter and maybe even Langdon too, tells them the salient details, and then dies. But I suppose that wouldn't be nearly clever enough.

What's been said here about CERN is his other book, and about 64-bit numbers, has left me gobsmacked, too.

Meanwhile, has anybody read THE RULE OF FOUR, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason? Came out around the same time, and billed as the thinking person's Da Vinci Code. I've got it, but have yet to approach it, fearing the worst.

Posted December 16, 2005 1:28 AM by Adrian Bedford

By strange coincidence, I was in my local shop about 12 hours before this went up and the young man behind the counter told me that he'd just finished his law exams and is reading a novel for the first time in four years, the novel in question being _The Da Vinci Code_. Before I could stop myself I delivered an inappropriate but heartfelt rant. I did read the horrible thing from cover to cover a year or so ago, and the best I could come up with then was to say that whereas _Foucault's Pendulum_ was a terrible book, at least it was full of scholarship; this was like _Foucault's Pendulum_ based on a skimming of Google. In the shop the other day I threw in the charge of ignorant anti-Catholic bigotry as well as terrible writing (because the shopkeepers are Catholic), I hadn't thought deeply enough about the stupid cryptography to mention that as well. Thank you for articulating this so well, Teresa. The young man in the shop said his previous most enjoyable reading had been John Grisham and words came out of my mouth I would never have expected to hear: I recommended he go back to Grisham. I don't know why I feel so strongly about the book-- perhaps because it takes subjects that I think are important and misrepresents them in a trivialising way. I do deeply resent the hours of my life that I gave to it. (At least I didn't buy the copy I read.)

Posted December 16, 2005 1:38 AM by Jonathan Shaw

OK, all those criticisms are fair except Madeline's.

Aw! Dang.

Yeah, his attitude toward women sucks. BUT he isn't saying the feminine is MORE sacred; just that the feminine aspects of sacredness were edited out by the patriarchy. In other words, the modern Church's ideas of sacredness are all masculine, and they ought to be more balanced.

Divvying up sacredness into masculine and feminine is just begging for the feminine part to get kicked to the curb. And the reason Dan Brown gives for why specifically feminine sacredness shouldn't get kicked to the curb is ludicrous. He cuts females out of general sacredness and offers something flimsy instead. That's why the book is terrible from an "attitude towards women" point of view.

Posted December 16, 2005 2:01 AM by Madeline F

the book's not even "so bad it's good." it's just... bad.

No, it's not bad; it's merely mediocre. In many ways, that is worse.

Posted December 16, 2005 2:10 AM by Ayse Sercan

"There he is, dying on the floor. Grabs phone, rings grand-daughter and maybe even Langdon too, tells them the salient details, and then dies."

Ok, I haven't read the thing, and after reading this thread I have no inclination to do so, but now I'm puzzled. Were the anagrams written in blood, a la A Study in Scarlet?

Posted December 16, 2005 2:19 AM by Linkmeister

All right, who is going to develop a Da Vinci Code version of clench racing?

Now, this is what I call a Fibonacci sequence.

Posted December 16, 2005 2:46 AM by mythago

Were the anagrams written in blood, a la A Study in Scarlet?

"This is a toughie."
"Wait! It's REACH! He wanted us to 'reach' for something!"
"I think he meant it's under the CHAIR."
"But --"
"Look, I know he was brilliant and now he's dead and his tenure spot will go to that creep from the Pre-Columbian Pessaries Department, but we both know he couldn't spell for beans."

As for the book's success, there are a lot of bestsellers that seem to get by on being a kind of Splenda-dusted nonfiction. Arthur Hailey stumbled into this formula with Hotel and refined it with Airport, and for the rest of his career the infodumps got denser as the characters went transparent. Michener's done much the same thing with history -- Centennial, Poland, and the like.

I think one reason is that a lot of affluent people feel a bit guilty about reading fiction. It's just, you know, entertainment. It's not helping your portfolio or giving you a bigger, uh, car. But if you learn something from it, that's ROI and it's okay. Even if what you pick up is doo-doo. da'Vinci, International Man of Mystery threw in a conspiracy theory, so you could learn something that was secret, at least from anyone who hadn't read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Batman! And though it had its moment, there aren't that many who have, because most people won't read nonfiction at all. They'll read rants, and they'll look at picture books, but intellectual engagement costs effort. Remember that every equation in a popular work halves its audience, and power functions can turn nasty on you fast.

LeGuin noted some time back that people will buy bestsellers (and go to hit movies) because they can participate, through the Law of Contagion, in the money involved. Film is the most expensive art form we have, which is one reason it's taken so seriously.

And there's also the Book Everybody is Reading factor, which is like the Movie (or, if you live in New York, Broadway Show) Everybody is Seeing. It's easy to get left out of the conversation if you don't get the references. (Note that there's at least one book annotating the references, so you can both not read the novel and pretend you know more about it than people who have. Which leaves you both about even.)

Posted December 16, 2005 3:11 AM by John M. Ford

The Rule of Four is quite a bit better than the Da Vinci Code - it's reasonably plausible that this particular set of riddles could have gone unsolved et cetera, plus you actually believe that someone has to be quite clever (and work quite hard) to solve them. OTOH, the coming-of-age part which takes up about half the plot is pretty paint-by-numbers.

The thing that struck me about the DA VINCI CODE is that Umberto Eco both summarized and mocked its entire central conceit on one page of FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM.

In advance.

Posted December 16, 2005 3:16 AM by Tom Scudder

I got nearly half-way through 'Odd cheat, now binned by vicar', just because I felt I needed to know what *absolutely everyone* on my daily commute thought was so great about the book. The last straw - really quite a small error compared to some of the clunkers in this awful book - came when the Smart car's fuel mileage was mentioned in passing. Because the French - like many Euro countries - reckon their fuel efficiency the other way round to the anglophone nations, Brown followed suit and gave a figure in litres per kilometre, rather than miles per gallon. I don't remember the exact figure, but as I recall it worked out to about 250 mpg. They're good, but not *that* good.

Posted December 16, 2005 4:02 AM by Peter Flint

this is when I came out to my family as kind of Episcopalian

Parents! Does your teen come home late at night reeking of incense?
Does he or she have any older male friends who wear long flowing robes?
Have you ever heard him or her address a telephone caller as "Bishop" or "Your Grace"?
Has your child ever referred positively to Henry VIII, the execution of Sir Thomas More, the Doctrine of Supremacy or the Dissolution of the Monasteries?

If the answer to any of these questions is 'yes', your child may have become exposed to Episcopalianism.

DO NOT PANIC!

Episcopalians are made, not born - our ministry has saved countless teens from a life of Episcopalness. But don't just take our word for it!

"As a teen I and many of my friends experimented with Episcopalianism. But since my successful intervention I am now happily Jewish and have never looked at another archdeacon" - S.G., Hants.

"I had my first Episcopalian experience when I went to college. But after I realised it would only harm me, I sought help, and I have been in a stable Methodist relationship for the last thirteen years" - B.G. de V. P., London.

"When my daughter announced she was Episcopalian her father and I were horrified. Fortunately her intervention worked perfectly - after only six weeks she was cured and has been a Copt ever since" - A.M., Luton.

Posted December 16, 2005 5:21 AM by ajay

Tom: thank you for the heads-up re THE RULE OF FOUR. I read FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM years ago (in hardback, no less--[weep]), on the strength of how much I'd enjoyed THE NAME OF THE ROSE. And yes, now you mention it, I do remember the bit where the protagonist's enormously convoluted conspiracy theory about the Templars, et al, proved to be no more sinister than a grocery shopping list or some damn thing.

Wasn't FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM also the book where Eco has much sport at the expense of evil vanity presses?

Posted December 16, 2005 5:46 AM by Adrian Bedford

jhlipta,

a Smart needs 3.4 to 5.5 l of fuel per 100 km, depending on the model, that is, 43 to 70 mpg.

Adrian:

I read "Foucault's Pendulum" because I had enjoyed "Illuminatus!" (I was that kind of age) and liked it a lot - especially the evil vanity presses, and in generall all those needlessly complicated things being recognized as needlessly complicated, but fun to play with.

Posted December 16, 2005 6:01 AM by inge

I've skimmed bits of the DVC, and I remember an especially daft part in which the detective (Bézu Fache or whatever he's called) contacts Interpol to get the names of registered guests at all the hotels in Paris. Firstly, he wouldn't need to go through Interpol to get information from within France. Secondly, Dan Brown lifted the whole thing from Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal, which explains that every evening the Paris police collect registration cards from every hotel and send them to the Renseignments Générales (IIRC), the intelligent branch of the Police Nationale. I don't know whether that is or was true, but anyway Brown, trying to modernise it or just make it different from Forsyth's version, throws in Interpol.

Brown also seems to think that a safety deposit box in the Paris branch of a Swiss bank would enjoy the protection of Swiss banking secrecy rules, as if the branch has diplomatic immunity or something.

Posted December 16, 2005 8:01 AM by Gag Halfrunt

I didn't finish Foucalt's Pendulum and I did finish Odd Cheat.

However, I will say that Odd Cheat went very fast. . . and as long as you're reading fast enough, you get the impression that he's doing something smart.

A friend of mine said "I stopped reading [whatever Dan Brown book] when he started talking about Steve Jackson Games like they knew something about hacking."

I have what I call "The MacGyver rule"- science is hard, so I overlook the first blatant failure of knowledge in any movie, TV show, or episode of MacGyver.

That gets you to, like, sentence 3 of Angels and Demons. I think I managed to get to page 12, just because I couldn't believe what I was reading.

BOOK: CERN has a spare hypersonic passenger plane.
SANDY: I didn't just read that.
BOOK: And when you get to an altitude of 80,000 feet you are at 2/3 gravity, and that's what makes you airsick.
SANDY: Obviously the two pieces of insanity cancel, leaving no sentence there. Move along, nothing to see.
BOOK: All scientists are sneering atheist geeks, JUST like in the old '50s movies.
SANDY: Screw this.

Later, a friend of mine said "It was literally the exact same plot with the exact same characters as the Da Vinci Code" and I said, "So it WAS the guy in the wheelchair, huh?"

Posted December 16, 2005 8:14 AM by Sandy

Oh, by the way, I have to throw this in (I forgot yesterday):
"when the world-renowned symbologist"

Detective: So, what's the, uh, symbology?
Smecker: I believe the word you're looking for is "symbolism." What's the symbolism of the coins? (brief description of Egyptian practice of putting coins over eyelids, so the dead will have toll) And that's the symbolism of it, Detective Alapopskalia.
Detective: Hey, you're the first person who ever got that right.
Smecker: That's because I'm an expert in... nameology.

(from "The Boondock Saints," written and directed by Troy Duffy, starring Sean Patrick Flannery, Norman Reedus, and Willem Dafoe. It's usually $6 at BestBuy. It's very much worth the money [also worth it: "Overnight," a documentary that follows Duffy as he shot it. It's not pretty. Duffy was an overnight success in Hollywood. And he let it get to his head)

Posted December 16, 2005 8:21 AM by Will Entrekin

The thing that struck me about the DA VINCI CODE is that Umberto Eco both summarized and mocked its entire central conceit on one page of FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM.
Not that Eco's bitter. Though he did turn up in the Telegraph (link may be dead) this week to ramble on about the shrinking of God, or something. He used Dan Brown as an example of how we believe anything these days, which seemed to be slightly truculent point scoring to me. He also argues that Atheists are comforted by the idea that Jesus was the King of France...

I've noticed people can get away with being ridiculously general about what Atheists want or need. The New Yorker recently published an article where it said:

Atheists need ghosts and kings and magical uncles and strange coincidences, living fairies and thriving Lilliputians, just as much as the believers do, to register their understanding that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience, much less to our hopes.

Posted December 16, 2005 8:26 AM by Paul Herzberg

I will confess I actually enjoyed The DaVinci Code. I was ill and wanted something completely brainless that slipped down easily and that I could occasionally laugh at. It succeeded in that (and in helping me sleep).

And I enjoyed Foucalt's Pendulum immensly. I couldn't have read it when ill, however.

Posted December 16, 2005 8:56 AM by Francis

it's like fine literature, except run through a blender carelessly such that there are lumps that stick to your mouth when you try and gulp it down. and then you realize that it didn't even taste that good.

that's pretty much my da vinci code experience.

PS: props on the foucault's pendulum references

Posted December 16, 2005 9:31 AM by almostinfamous

My people! I have found you at last! (Huge hug for everyone)

There is an advantage, though, to having The DaVinci Code in your library. When your mother comes for a visit, and you are about to go screamingly loopy because all she can talk about are the harpies at her job and her favorite TV shows, you can bring up The DaVinci Code and have her kvell how marvelous, how well written, how interesting it is. Is she wrong? OF COURSE she is, but she's also wrong about her co-workers and her damn TV shows, but at least she's saying something POSITIVE.

My personal favorite is when the "renowned curator" is dying, and he's writing all these anagrams in his blood, and WALKING AROUND the museum to leave them all, and then, just as you think he's finally going to expire from shock and blood loss, decides to strip naked and contort himself into yet another "clue."

I said to husband, "I just want you to know if I'm ever gut-shot, I'm planning on screaming, "Oww!" and expiring immediately."

It's so bad, I'm in love. I put this with my other MST3K obsessions: Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee, and Colleen McCullough's series about the Roman Empire. Comedy GOLD, people!

Posted December 16, 2005 9:38 AM by Chryss

There is an inherent difficulty with Ancient Mystery Revealed! yarns, in that we are generally asked to accept that the clues have been lying around in more-or-less plain sight for centuries or millennia, and our characters have to put them together, run away from the bad guys, and blow a great many things up, all in under two hours of screen time.

Did you see National Treasure? I thought that was a rather well-done example of AMR! myself, in that there was a reason for Our Heroes to be able to put things together that no one else had been able to work out so far.

if The Da Vinci Code gets millions of people to read, including those who normally don't, is that at least somewhat a good thing? even if the book is not just terribly written, but misleading as well?

About the time DVC was really big, I read a comment somewhere to the effect of:
"The thing about that book is that people hear about it, and read it. They discover that reading is a pleasurable activity, but, having little to compare to, they impute this pleasure to that particular book, rather than reading in general. They start telling people how great DVC was, more people read it, and the cycle continues." So, no, I'm not convinced that DVC is going to do anything but (possibly) convincing people to read more of Dan Brown's books.

What puzzles me are the otherwise well-read friends of mine who also think DVC is the best thing since sliced bread*--I wouldn't have read it at all were it not for one such. He went on and on about it, so I read it.

It was like cotton candy: Mildly pleasant providing one turned off all one's quality filters** while consuming it, but liable to make one slightly ill afterwards.

*What's supposed to be so great about sliced bread, anyway?
**As opposed to, e.g. Xena Warrior Princess or The Mummy, which require the installation of the "same names" filter for me.

PS If this for some reason posts twice, someone please delete the duplicate.

Posted December 16, 2005 9:48 AM by Carrie S.

ajay: many giggles.

Way upthread:

There [were] groups that thought the YHWH of the old testament was an evil god and Jesus came to save us from Him.

Satan. It was Satan (or Lucifer, if you prefer) who came to save us from YHVH.

That's what I got from reading the Nag Hammadi texts - well, technically, it was the serpent, not necessarily identified as Satan, who came to liberate Eve and Adam from Eden, and explain to them that YHVH was not the only, or the first, or even the most powerful deity. Good stuff.

Posted December 16, 2005 10:24 AM by Laura Roberts

I realize, of course, that it's entering into a sticky issue, but I contend it's *not* at least somewhat good "The DaVinci Code" has gotten people to read. Largely, it's convinced them to read "The DaVinci Code" and, perhaps, "Angels & Demons" and "Digital Fortress".
It hasn't gotten people to read "The Great Gatsby," or "Catcher in the Rye," or "Foucalt's Pendulum." It hasn't gotten them to read "The Time-Traveler's Wife," or "The Lovely Bones."

Just because people are reading doesn't mean they're reading anything *good*. And yes, I'll argue that I think it's more valuable to read certain books than others.

This is part of the problem with majority rule. I once read P.J. O'Rourke state that, by majority rule, we'd all eat pizza every night and be married to Mel Gibson. Tongue in cheek, of course, but also somewhat true; pizza's a safe alternative, (most) people like it, etc. But just because it's cheese and tomato sauce and dough does not a balanced diet make.

(this is not to argue that what is popular can't be good. If everyone were reading "Night Shift" or "Different Seasons", I'd be far happier)

Posted December 16, 2005 10:26 AM by Will Entrekin

Sane hen edits eel yarn
Keen Chaplin edits yarn
Mind cold jam
Tricky Zen mule
Botanic Salk
Classier short
Pathetic shorthorn
Enamel dock
chord zeal
Hardy hart vault

Posted December 16, 2005 10:29 AM by Lucian Lamely

The great thing about sliced bread, of course, is that it's already sliced! The slices are nice and uniform and fit well into the toaster and make easy to hold sandwiches, and you don't have all those messy crumbs to clean up.

DVC is the only book a total stranger ever approached me and told me i had to read (at one of my daughter's soccer tournaments in Greensboro sometime in 2003). when i did read it, i had to keep reading to find out it it ever achieved any sort of redemption. It didn't, but as i recall, near the end, the main character walks out into the dusk and admires Venus's shining beauty high in the eastern sky.

You can't buy that kind of research anymore, can you?

Posted December 16, 2005 10:30 AM by Barry Ragin

When I came to the line in tD'VC about how Leonardo invented public-key cryptography, I was tempted to throw the book across the room and thoroughly wash my hands. There must be some reason why I not only resisted the temptation but continued to read the book through to the saccharine end...what was it?

Posted December 16, 2005 10:34 AM by Seth Gordon

"When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything." G.K.Chesterton (from memory).

I doubt if Eco's bitter. He already knew when he wrote FP that Holy Blood, Sweat and Tears had sold more than he would ever sell of anything, and he's hardly hurting on the film rights from Name of the Rose.

But it's a little scary, when you look at a train carriage full of people and think, there are probably at least ten people here who believe Dan Brown is a scholar.

Posted December 16, 2005 10:36 AM by chris

Speaking of "Catcher in the Rye," I reread that as a 35-year-old and it was a totally different experience from reading it as a 16-year-old.

My sympathy and identification was with all the people that Holden Caulfield bashes into and dents.

I think that it's also possibly the source of an entire generation or two of really annoying narrators.

Posted December 16, 2005 10:40 AM by Sandy

It's actually Huge Berserk Rebel Warthog.

Posted December 16, 2005 10:41 AM by Captain Slack

"at least it gets non-readers to read" is valuable to the degree that the book is either worthwhile in itself, or that it prompts the reader to continue reading additional things. I am prepared to believe that some fraction of young Harry Potter readers get sufficiently jonesing waiting for their next fix that they might try reading something else with wizards in it. Try as I might, though, I can't imagine anyone's reading fires being stoked by Dan Brown.

People read it because it's Officially Approved as Safe. Their friends have all read it, it won't confuse them, lots of stuff happens, it's just controversial enough to feel Smart, and in general it flatters their intelligence all to hell. Symbolism! Just *mentioning* symbolism is deep thinking, in the same way that hiding a cross in a painting makes it more important.

I read it way long ago before it was famous, or I had heard a single word about it from another source. It was a gift from someone who I think had thought it looked interesting in the store. Gah. It has not one but two characters who enjoy trading indigestible page-long soliloquies, and is full of people who think symbolism is the deepest form of thought.

Posted December 16, 2005 10:48 AM by colin roald

The great thing about sliced bread, of course, is that it's already sliced! The slices are nice and uniform and fit well into the toaster and make easy to hold sandwiches, and you don't have all those messy crumbs to clean up.

Well, yeah, but why is sliced bread the benchmark, as opposed to the Hope Diamond, or penicillin, or something? I mean, sliced bread is great and all, but I can think of a whole lot of things that are greater, just off the top of my head--and many of them have happened since the introduction of sliced bread, too.

Posted December 16, 2005 10:50 AM by Carrie S.

I have a small flyer about the Astronomical Gnomon in the Church of Saint-Sulpice. It contains these sentences.

"It has never been called a "Rose Line"

"It is not a vestige of an ancient pagan temple. No such edifice ever existed on this site."

It has never been used to define a "prime meridian", a role now played by the Greenwich meridian...."

When I was in Paris this summer, our tour guide kept mentioning that there were tours that just did the DiVinci Code sights. I did read the book, just because so many other people were reading it. What I remember is how it paused at the strangest moments for long explanations. I have very high standards for conspiracy theories - it didn't come close to meeting them.

Posted December 16, 2005 10:52 AM by Laina

1. Jim Kiley wrote:

"George Herbert Walker Bush" is an anagram of "Insane Berserk Rebel Warthog." I do not believe this to be a coincidence.

Hahahahahahahahhahahaaaaaahahahaha! For some reason that just killed me.

2. Chryss wrote:

When your mother comes for a visit, and you are about to go screamingly loopy because all she can talk about are the harpies at her job and her favorite TV shows, you can bring up The DaVinci Code and have her kvell how marvelous, how well written, how interesting it is. Is she wrong? OF COURSE she is, but she's also wrong about her co-workers and her damn TV shows, but at least she's saying something POSITIVE."

Great tip!!! Just in time for Christmas!!! Has it occurred to you that there might be a book in there somewhere? Sort of an anti- Martha Stuart Holiday thing, e.g:

Ch. 1 - Drugging the Egg-nogg -- Pros & Cons
Ch. 2 - Training the Dogs to Bite When Drunken Guests Grab Your [Wife's] Ass.
...

3. My $0.02 on TDVC:

To truly appreciate TDVC, you should listen to the audio book version. The guy who did the reading affects French and British accents so ridiculous that you won't notice any shortcomings of the prose & plot.

God, I love this site.

Posted December 16, 2005 11:07 AM by Scott H

I managed to hold off on buying a copy of DVC for my mother until she heard enough about it to stop wanting it. (A lame-ish cable TV show on Leonardo helped with that.)

I have to get offline now and get some work done, so can't go back and find the link, but there was a story today about Dutch researchers "decoding" La Gioconda's smile -- 83% happy, etc. They weren't really serious, and it's an entertaining item. I found it on SFGate (where Jon Carroll also has a good column about "X," including "Xmas").

Oh, but wait.... I simply must add that my first novel The Illusionists (published ages ago, sank like a stone) has a character named Leodvin. Sounds kinda Anglo-Saxon, but I think you can guess where I really got it.

Posted December 16, 2005 11:11 AM by Faren Miller

Sandy: Your quotations from the text made me laugh out loud. Thank you. I may have to read the book if it's that funny.

N! N! (Fingers crossed in air, backing away in horror from the screen.) Gt th bhnd m, Stn!

Posted December 16, 2005 11:25 AM by Lizzy L

Great tip!!! Just in time for Christmas!!! Has it occurred to you that there might be a book in there somewhere? Sort of an anti- Martha Stuart Holiday thing, e.g

You need to get ahold of "Mastering the Universe" currently being broadcast on Radio 4 (and the penultimate episode (all standalone)) should still be on Listen Again.

Posted December 16, 2005 11:26 AM by Francis

I think that for many people, entertainment of any kind is primarily social. I mean, that's why we have fandom, right? And for the people who don't have fandom--maybe we at least have a friend we can squee with about Serenity, or Lord of the Rings, or whatnot. Or a friend we can press books upon, and have books pressed upon us by. And--sometimes it feels like half the point of the book, or the movie, is to be able to squee about it later.

So--I think perhaps for many people, there isn't much point in reading a book unless reading can be in some sense a social experience. And unless you're in a few contexts where reading books is the Done Thing--Making Light, library school, Livejournal among them--then there really aren't very many books that you can talk with your friends about, because your friends haven't read them. And the quality of the book is made almost irrelevant...

Posted December 16, 2005 11:28 AM by Emily H.

Carrie:

i always assumed it was because sliced bread made everybody's life a little bit easier, expecially working people.

this site claims that sliced bread came into being in the late 20s in the mid-west US, a time of change in American culture. Wikipedia claims the phrase is an outgrowth of an early Wonder Bread advertising campaign, which makes a certain amount of intuitive sense, even without research.

The late, lamented Random House Word of the Day, never got around to that phrase, although they did have a wonderful discussion of the New York colloquialism sliding pond. Cecil doesn't have anything on "sliced bread" either.

It seems that current usage is more sarcastic than the original earnest use of the phrase.

Posted December 16, 2005 11:31 AM by Barry Ragin

Lloyd, `last month'? Last *year*. This has been a minor bugbear of Geoff's for a while; he's even written a chapter in a book on _Angels and Demons_, specifically about the flaws in the book.

(Alas, I can't read it because I don't want to waste money on all those other chapters I won`t care a damn about.)

Geoff Pullum: the archetypal Angry Grammarian. :)

Posted December 16, 2005 11:37 AM by Nix

it won't confuse them

Oh, to have your faith in humanity....

I actually know someone who was confused by it. Of course, she also found Coraline confusing, and couldn't understand how the door in Howl's Moving Castle could possibly connect with part of our world, no matter how many times you tried to explain that it was magic.

My own lingering impression of The Da Vinci Code, actually, was that it was a member of that class of fanfic where the author has a basic grasp of grammar and nothing else, and where you feel they're jumping up and down waving their hands screaming, "Look at me! Look at me! I can do research!!" regardless of the quality of that research. The type who'd throw in a Babelfish translation and assume it a) made them look smarter, and b) actually made sense in the target language.

I particularly hated the way someone would use a word, and then there'd be something like, "...and he knew, because the root of XXX came from the ancient Whatever word for YYY, that what the person was actually saying was...." Yes, because everyone knows and uses words based on their historical meaning rather than what they mean now, and expects their listener to do the same. On Making Light, I could see it; in DVC, not so much.

I still haven't forgiven my father (who gave me his copy, as he often does with books he's finished, not being much of a re-reader) for not telling me how bad the book was until after I'd read it--"Yeah, I thought so too; I just wanted to see if you would feel the same."

Posted December 16, 2005 11:45 AM by Jennifer Barber

Lizzie: no, nay, never! Do not open the Brownomicon and blame it on me!

I'm trying to think how to put this.

If someone tells you the movie "Anaconda", it seems like the kind of thing you could spend 90 happy minutes MST3K'ing. "The anaconda pukes someone up! On someone else! And there's the part where it's swimming around and you can see the person it just ate inside them! And they cruise through the jungle like they're on jets! These snakes strike from, like, fifty feet away!"

If you actually WATCH "Anaconda", you will get no enjoyment from these events. It has all the ingredients to be an excellent bad movie, but the cook screwed it up. It's just. . .bad.

Angels and Demons may sound like a good time, but it is not.

Posted December 16, 2005 11:46 AM by Sandy

I read the book as an exercise in "Okay, I'd like to be a very popular novelist, so what in this book do I think has resulted in it being on the bestseller list for half a decade or so?"

I did finish it, though I didn't really enjoy it a whole bunch. And yeah, it was pretty stupid in a lot of ways. I did, however, feel like I took away some useful thoughts, at least for my own writing. The short versions of what I remember are:

1) The average reader doesn't care about cheap author tricks. Dan Brown would do those awful things where you're in somebody's head and they'd see something horrifying, and then they'd talk about how horrifying it was for six pages without telling you what it was, and then they'd do a scene-cut. Blatant POV violation, but the average reader just went, "Oooooh! Suspense!" So I'm not going to worry quite as much as I used to about keeping my point of view sacred.

2) The average reader doesn't really care how you infodump. Apparently the average reader is just fine with having the main character be in the middle of a frantic chase scene and then flash back to a course he taught several years ago on art history -- and then give you that scene complete with dialogue from students he was teaching, only to then flash back to the chase scene with a muttered, "Damn it, man, focus on the present! There's no time to recollect!" And there, you've just infodumped, and you didn't have to try real hard to integrate it seamlessly into the present.

3) The average reader likes to THINK of themselves as cultured and open to new things, but really wants to feel comfortable. Take away the trappings of the cool gadgets and pseudoscience, and what you have is a by-the-numbers thriller with a by-the-numbers plot and by-the-numbers outlandish characters. This, for me, was the most valuable lesson -- if I decide to break some rules and write something weird and different, I'm going to try to make the weird and different be the setting or the philosophizing or whatever. I'm going to keep my plots nice and accessible.

I emphasize that I didn't actually enjoy the book, that I alternated between bemusement and annoyance for a lot of it, and that I read it because it had been on the bestseller list for-freaking-ever, and regardless of how much I might turn up my nose at it, there's got to be something useful to learn there for anyone who wants to be a popular author. (Which is not to say that everyone should want to be a popular author, or that being a popular author requires being exactly like Dan Brown. But he evidently did some things right, given his sales figures.)

Posted December 16, 2005 11:55 AM by Patrick Weekes

Sandy: What about the part where the Anaconda coils around that dude and then bites down on the helpless dude's head and SNAPS HIS NECK? C'mon. That part was awesome. Watching an Anaconda neck-snap somebody like the ex-Navy Seal protagonist of a mass-market action thriller is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Posted December 16, 2005 11:58 AM by Patrick Weekes

Thank you all for confirming my suspicion that TDVC isn't worth wasting time perhaps better spent by re-reading Cryptonomicon.

Michael Crichton ... eeeeeeek. My experience with him ended when the 9-year-old girl in Jurassic Park exclaims, "Oh, this is UNIX! I know this!" I threw the book across the room and that was that. :P

Posted December 16, 2005 11:59 AM by meredith

"the main character walks out into the dusk and admires Venus's shining beauty high in the eastern sky."

He fell victim to one of the classic blunders! Got him with the old "Earth revolving the wrong way" trick. Huh - haven't got anyone with that since Larry Niven back in the seventies.

On the writing style, I have heard people in the publishing industry say that while he is a dreadful writer and ignorant to boot, he is good at structure; i.e. DVC is an almost textbook example of how to structure a novel of suspense in terms of where you introduce a new plot detail, when you have action, when you have exposition and so forth. Anyone want to comment?

Posted December 16, 2005 12:02 PM by ajay

I agree with the recommendation of _The Rule of Four_ as a not-agonizing substitute for the Odd Cheat. And if you like _The Rule of Four_ and don't feel like reading _Hypner... spelling ... Poliphilii_, I recommend _The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance_, Joscelyn Godwin, which is dreamy. Make space in your garden first...

The only thing that really annoyed me about _The Rule of Four_ is that it seemed much more fascinated with Being Erudite than with the actual subject of erudition, but that can also be thought of as a natural flaw of the annoying protagonists. It's sort of _The Secret History_, with even better real-estate.

My favorite Dan Brown idiocy is at the end of _Digital Fortress_ (I skimmed!), when a roomful of cryptanalysts describe a letter sequence starting 'quis' as "a bunch of random letters". Ohhhhh, yeah.

Posted December 16, 2005 12:10 PM by clew

I just want to add that "Ace Dindon Lavoir" sounds like the name of someone who played for the Montreal Canadiens in the 1930s. If I ever write a story where such a character is needed, I shall have to use it. ;)

Posted December 16, 2005 12:16 PM by Lea

New Scientist a while back had a bit about Dan Brown and antimatter. Apart from how many years of USA GNP it would take to produce that much antimatter, there was the question of just how easy it would be to smuggle it anywhere in a sodding enormous magnetic confinement device at superconducting temperatures.

Posted December 16, 2005 12:22 PM by Alan Braggins

Cryptonomicon does manage to come up with a novel cypher using a deck of cards. Better than that though is the protagonist's complaint of "you want to 'send me a message' ? I do have email"

Posted December 16, 2005 12:25 PM by Kevin Marks

In French anagrams, would an "e" with an accent aigu be considered distinct from an unadorned "e" (or from an "e" carrying a different mark)? I could see not wanting to deal with that in an emergency.

Posted December 16, 2005 12:28 PM by Dave Levin

Yeah, well, Stephenson did it the right way and got a real cryptographer (Bruce Schneier) to produce Solitaire, then renamed it and used it in the book.

Posted December 16, 2005 12:33 PM by Nix

And Mr. Brown laughs all the way to the bank! Especially since the Catholic Church has put together a team to debunk him...which will make him all the richer from all the idiots that will run to read him because they are certain the Church is up to something. At least, that's what I heard...
I remember watching an interview with the guy where he slyly referred to "making the fictional facts meld seamlessly with the truth". The problem is, IMO, that HE didn't know which was which himself!

Posted December 16, 2005 12:34 PM by Emma

Emily H.'s point about reading as a social exercise is well made; hell, it's the only reason I'm still reading The Tale of Genji (skank! Sorry, it's become a reflex by now.).

Posted December 16, 2005 12:42 PM by Kate Nepveu

Re the Addendum: Dear me. I think I'd rather appear in the first two pages of a Destroyer novel.

Posted December 16, 2005 12:45 PM by Emma Bull