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Comment by Yoric | Hacker News Reader

I've had a slightly different experience of Dan Brown.

Some if it may due to my having read Foucault's Pendulum 5 years before Dan Brown, and part of the plot for Foucault's Pendulum is actually an algorithm for generating Dan Brown-style books. Written about 20 years before Dan Brown's novels. Of course, the fact that Umberto Eco writes much better (and with much greater humor) than Dan Brown didn't help me appreciate the latter.

Some of it may also be due to the fact that I actually love reading on religion, religious history and art history... and that Dan Brown's books very much felt to me like combinations of well-trodden clichés and combinations of barely half-understood history, art, religion, symbolism.

To each their own, I guess.

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I had it slighty worse: As a teenager I bought Holy Blood, Holy Grail on a whim (it were the 90s) in a bookstore because I was reading another Grail-focussed book series. HBHG is an utterly absurd book which could not even hoodwink a 14-year-old. One of the few books I deeply regret buying. Slightly later I read Focault’s Pendulum which of course inoculates one even more against this crap.

But of course Brown copied everything in his Da Vinci Code from HBHG which is obvious, when reading it. Every twist and turn is then utterly predictable. There was a copyright case in the 90s, annoyingly decided in Brown’s favour.

The real history behind HBHG is far more funnier: turns out the authors took their story from a french con-artist who fabricated documents and genealogies and deposited them into the Bibliotheque Francaise. And of course according the the con-artist the last descendant of the Merovingian Kings was himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Plantard

> One of the few books I deeply regret buying.

For me it was Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged, and I begrudged every single penny of the 50 pence I paid for it in the Oxfam bookshop on Byres Road.

It's the only book I've ever intentionally destroyed, too. I soaked it in waste Citroën hydraulic fluid, and took it out to the gravelly yard behind my flat, and burnt it. I couldn't bear the thought of anyone without the intellectual rigour to see it for what it is getting their hands on it.

Hah! I had a similarly visceral reaction to Fountainhead - I finished reading while pacing angrily, and afterward threw it as far as I could.

The only book I intentionally destroyed though was Kaplan’s Advanced Calculus, but that was just the frustration talking.

Why? I never get the hate for Ayn Rand - aside that it's weirdly cool to hate her books so people jump onto that bandwagon.

I remember really liking Fountainhead.

Atlas Shrugged is a long book with unrealistic characters. The whole thing feels out of touch, like a podcast run by elitist trust-fund people complaining about the mind-numbing mediocrity of everyone else.

I never read Fountainhead, maybe it's better.

It's also super frustrating to know the author lived on a public pension. Couldn't even live the fantasy.

There are those who believe it is morally questionable or even a crime to take back any portion of what was stolen from you in an armed robbery, it now belongs to those who employ coercion to obtain things etc.

We are not amongst them and have NEVER ONCE apologized about it or otherwise suggested we care to accomodate you perverse moral principle. But do go on ...

> There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2009/03/ephemera-2009-7.html

Fountainhead triggered a kind of moral indignation in me. I read it as arguing that the path to happiness and success was to ignore social mores, hold your vision firm, and take what you want. I think I described it as glamorizing sociopathy.

Also, I want to reject the imputation of faddish dislike for her. I read this 40+ years ago - I'm not some johnny-come-hately.

Avoid Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series then. But I still wish we'd gotten a third season of Legend of the Seeker.

Oof, yes. There's a reason the TV series was just set in the same world rather than being an adaptation of the books, and it's because the writing started out weird, and got progressively more insane with each volume. (Also, way too horny for even cable TV.)

I liked sword of truth but will admit it got a little darker than I'd have liked.

Are there any good books depicting failures of railway signals? Or just railway signal networks at all... Without all the rants and sex and rants in the middle of sex.

That's awfully precise, but how about this one?

Handbook of signalling symbols and terminology

https://rdso.indianrailways.gov.in/works/uploads/File/Handbo...

Idk, I’m reading a lot of sex between the lines in that one.

It’s thinly veiled, but c’mon: “Normal aspect double yellow of a distant signal in rajdhani route( where double distant signal is provided)” is a clear reference to some seriously kinky stuff “rajdhani route” to wit.

And the “symbols” and diagrams - don’t even get me started. It’s like a pictographic Kamasutra.

Well, if it's on the internet, it's probably porn already :P

yay, burn the books!

You've gone grey my friend. Wrongthink is being thunk by you.

Yeah, Atlas Shrugged was really bad.

unfortunately, it is rare that a 14 old kid who can read Focault’s Pendulum.

I did and I'll certainly try it on my kid :)

Some of the utter joys that Eco’s books give you, is that they grow with you. The more you learn about the world (and yourself), the more layers and nuances you’ll find in re-reads.

As a stubborn and curious 14 year old Foucault’s Pendulum is still a somewhat readable story, which I enjoyed and got the general gist. Later Re-reads of course brought more, because I have grown and known more in the meantime. I found that even more with re-reads of The Name of the Rose.

And of course that process is never finished. I’m sure, I’ll find even more stuff, if I were a full scale medievalist or could read better Italian than reading in translation, even though translations of Eco are said to be rather good. Reading, thought in that way, is never done.

Which I guess makes him a descendant of Jesus, in Diabolical logics? Such humility :)

The case that Brown plagarized Holy Blood Holy Grail is hilarious because Holy Blood Holy Grail claimed to be historical research rather than fiction. So how can you plagiarize actual history? The case was basically them admitting it was made up.

Without wading into the literary merits of either author, let me just drop a mention of the Ritman Library of Hermetic Philosophy in Amsterdam, aka the Embassy of the Free Mind.

https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/

Dan Brown helped pay for their digitization efforts and I’m grateful for that. The library is a real gem.

I've always been interested in visiting but I live in the US. Anything cool in particular about the place you'd like to share?

Well, they usually have a great exhibition of rare books — and their reading room is inexhaustible — but my favorite thing is the cafe. It’s a place in Amsterdam where you can just sit and strike up amazing conversations with people.

Now I’m deeply involved in their community and I love it.

I read Foucault’s Pendulum on vacation, and picked up Da Vinci Code on a whim in the airport on the way back because I was in the mood to continue the theme. To say he suffered in the immediate comparison would be an understatement.

All I can say in Mr Brown’s favor is that the book was at least the perfect length to finish during the flight.

One of the things that makes Dan Brown great airport reading is that you can set the book down, forget about what happened, and pick it up again pretty seamlessly because he will repeat all the key points. And this happens over and over again.

It also makes him terribly boring for "normal" reading of if you have a memory longer than that of a goldfish. Give me Umberto Eco any day.

I saw the film adaptation of Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose_(film)

That led me to read Foucault's Pendulum.

So reading Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and watching Ron Howard's film version of Brown's book gave me a sense of deja vu.

Opinion: Foucault's Pendulum was a faint shadow of The Name of the Rose, which I absolutely devoured in college. I think Name of the Rose was trying to be a long-form version of Jorge Luis Borges, there's even a blind librarian or someone.

Both of them are among my favorite books. I don't think I can pick one above the other.

You should read it again, or at least read the wikipedia entry to remind yourself of the plot. There is a blind librarian and he's very hard to miss :)

I don't think the book has anything to do with Borges. I think you're alluding to The Library of Babel. An altogehter very different kind of book (a short story, but it's not the form that makes the difference).

Comparing Umberto Eco and Dan Brown is wild to me. They write completely different books, with completely different pacing, for completely different audiences.

Eco himself joked that Brown was one of his "Diabolicals".

But I agree, they're radically different books which bear no comparison aside from the theme of secret societies. I adore Foucault's Pendulum, it's one of my favorite books. And the first two Robert Langdon books are really fun, despite their flaws, and despite the author's weird claims about factual accuracy.

I did the same and Focault’s Pendulum is one of my favourite books. So when the Dan Brown books came along, I enjoyed the, but the depth was lacking.

Also, Broken Sword existed since 1996 too.

Much like other comments point out - Broken Sword borrowed liberally from the same "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" book material that Dan Brown also took. Broken Sword even includes an informant character called "Plantard" - surely a reference to Pierre Plantard etc.

It's undoubtedly the common ancestor in HBHG that lead to Broken Sword and The Da Vinci Code having very similar plots and ideas - HBHG sold reasonably well, I don't buy into the idea Dan Brown needed to play Broken Sword to write the book - HBHG came out in 1982. There are many other trash-pseudo history books on the knights templar that allege conspiracy/cults etc pre-dating Broken Sword - as a kid I had an insatiable appetite for these books too.

Charles Cecil (driving force behind Broken Sword) has happily alluded to his own HBHG inspiration in interviews.

Foucault's Pendulum is so much better than any schlock Brown dumps out. ++ for mentionin it. Eco is one of my favorites.

Brown also gets facts wrong in his books. Which is irritating.

Right. For example I know the area around Temple Church in London really well - for a few years I used to walk through it twice daily on my commute. So when there was all the fuss about the Da Vinci Code I decided to read it for myself to make up my own mind, and terrible as it was the thing that probably annoyed me the most was he gets the geography of those streets wrong. It wasn't changed because the change helped the plot or anything like that - it was just wrong because he didn't care at all about getting details right. It was so _unnecessary_ an error it really drove me nuts.

I love Foucault's Pendulum. I always thought it's a fun sideswipe at the literary Foucault also, who with Derridas is so deliberately impenetrable there are a lot of parallels with the charlatans in the novel.

Does a writer have to be intimately familiar with every location they describe in their books? I know some are, and it's great when they get stuff right, but I don't think it's really that big of a problem when they don't.

Although I'm also reminded of how movies get things hilariously wrong in ways that can't be an accident. When I was young, there was a Dutch thriller called Ansterdamned, about a scuba diving murderer moving through the canals of Amsterdam. Lots of locations I recognise. Then there's a massive speedboat chase, and suddenly they're going through a famous and unmistakable canal in Urecht. Fun movie, but the sudden teleport to Utrecht is a bit jarring.

Lee Child, in his Reacher novel “Night School”, has a major part of the plot being played out in Hamburg’s “HafenCity” quarter. Reading it, you’re rather sure that the author has visited Hamburg and has traced himself the steps of his fictional character.

Only problem: the novel plays in 1997, a time, when the HafenCity quarter didn’t exist. Back then it was Hamburg’s old free port area, behind a customs border, not the “normal” city quarter as described. The current quarter is in effect a new development, which didn’t exist in 1997.

I agree they don't have to be, but a sense of authenticity of location can really add to the atmosphere of a novel. For example, in "Mrs Dalloway", you can literally retrace the steps of Mrs Dalloway through St James' park and St James' and on to Bloomsbury. The descriptions are incredibly precise and totally accurate. Likewise people walk through Dublin visiting the exact scenes depicted in "Ulysses".

Another example (slightly obscure) from London is "The Book of Dave" by Will Self, which is partly set in a post-apocalyptic future. The geography is very thoughtfully handled, but in this future the Thames has flooded and lots of London is underwater. Part of the fun is figuring out which bits of present London they are referring to when they talk about landmarks etc which survive[1].

Now it's fair to say all those examples are shooting a lot higher-brow than Dan Brown, but another example more similar in genre aesthetic to Dan Brown would be John LeCarre's "Smiley" novels (eg "The spy who came in from the cold" etc). To the extent I know the locations in the ones I have read, they seem to me very authentically described, which greatly enhances my sense of immersion in the atmosphere.

[1] eg "centrul stack" I'm pretty sure is the wreck of the Centerpoint Building, now an empty shell filled with seabirds.

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