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I just started reading this book recently and I am personally shocked by how low quality the writing is. Who in the right mind would publish this unfinished novel?

Well, seeing the sales of it somebody who knows the market.

It's what used to be known as an airport novel. Strong on plot, sensationalist, easy to read, not particularly challenging. The writing is no better than it needs to be to drive the story along.

It's the literary equivalent of a big mac. It fills you up but it's not going to win any prizes.

That sort of writing sells by the bucketload. Many readers are more interested in plot than the quality of the writing.

I see. More effort would still have been appreciated though, there are some areas so unbelievably cringe worthy that I hardly find it readable.

Will wrote: "It's the literary equivalent of a big mac."
Brilliant. Yes, indeed!

Ethan wrote: "More effort would still have been appreciated though, there are some areas so unbelievably cringe worthy that I hardly find it readable."

I feel the same way about a Big Mac! But yes. And I had the same impression.

And each of you have written what, that we shall compare? Its so easy being the critic, another story to actually do the writing!

We are readers on a website devoted to readers. That means we are entitled to our opinions as readers. What we may or may not have written ourselves is utterly irrelevant.

Perhaps writers should stop being quite so precious and realise that the reader is king (and queen). If a reader doesn't like something, then they don't like it. It is not for any of us to say "yeah, and what have you written?"

Each of us has an opinion. Those opinions are equally valid, whether we are writers or we aren't.

Lynda wrote: "And each of you have written what, that we shall compare? "

Neither did I ever rule a country, nor play a foot ball game, or, heck, start a war ... yet I have no qualms criticizing people working in any of the above fields.

So, yes, it's easy to be a critic - more yet, in some cases it's important.* :)


*Never! underestimate the importance of criticizing football players�

Well, This is a very typical modern day American bestseller. It is in some ways more a movie script than a book. but these kind of thrillers and detective stories serve as a relaxation, after a stream of more difficult literature.

If one only reads Camus, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Nietzsche.. Well, chances are that it leads to lethargy, Pessimism and Depression ;)

Jukka wrote: "Well, This is a very typical modern day American bestseller. It is in some ways more a movie script than a book. but these kind of thrillers and detective stories serve as a relaxation, after a str..."

As much as I understand and respect your agreement, which I do, I must disagree. There are good writers that won't leave you feeling depressed, and one's who writer easy and quick-to-read novels that are high quality, and not painful to trudge through or insulting to our intelligence.
Scripts can be high quality too by-the-way.

Thank you Will and Gerd. I appreciate your point of view. You are correct the reader is the reason for a book to be recommended to yet other readers. However, has a very beginning writer, I've realized how challenging it is to make that perfect first sentence, a first chapter that draws one in and a last paragraph that makes a reader want to read more. Not to mention, the plethora of individual tastes/genres, etc. I have a whole new respect for the writing craft that I had not taken into account until trying it myself.

Agreed - it's a lot harder than it looks! But I wouldn't obsess too much about finding that perfect first sentence. Readers don't notice individual sentences as much as writers think. Most readers (other than critics) will generally get swept up with the story and bounce quickly from paragraph to paragraph. They don't notice individual words or sentences, unless they are particularly fine or particularly bad.

That's where authors like Dan Brown fit in. His books are never going to be hailed as literary classics but people do like reading them. They fill a need. That's why I called them the literary equivalent of a big mac. Sometimes a big mac is all you need.

Over the years, I have developed a personal three point scale for the quality of writing - it's either poor, good enough or great.

Poor writing comes in many flavours. It may have spelling and grammatical mistakes, newbie errors like not enough show vs tell, too much description or too little. Poor writing stands out and makes a book hard to read.

"Good enough" writing is writing that you don't notice. It chugs along merrily without spelling mistakes and newbie errors, but it isn't going to set the world alight. Dan Brown fits into that category for me. His books are efficient thrillers. Not great, but not awful.

Then we have the great writing. This is when you notice the writing for the right reasons. When it has a quality that makes it stand out.

Unfortunately there is a trap in this three point definition. Many aspiring writers want to jump straight into the "great writing" pot. This can mean that they will over-write with purple prose and the literary equivalent of jumping somersaults. Trying too hard to be great can be a newbie mistake as much as a said bookism or grammatical error.

So there is a great virtue in "good enough" writing. My advice to anyone starting out is not to aim for great writing straight away. You need to work your way up to that. You may find that you can carve out a perfectly good career by having a writing style that is "good enough" if your plot and characters capture your readers' imagination.

Dan Brown's writing is "good enough". He has sold millions of books.

I wouldn't worry to much about the little details as long as it feels presentable to you. Just write a few pages without worry and then go back and improve them. I doubt many of your readers will notice little mistakes unless they are critics like me lol.

I actually liked this book and Angels and Demons better than his last two books of the Robert Langdon series

Will wrote: "It's the literary equivalent of a big mac."

The Big Mac comparison may be apt. To me it read like a script for a Hollywood action thriller (the "Big Mac" of cinema). There's an audience, and thus a market, for both. That the success of these "big macs" helps the publishing industry stay afloat, and tangentially all the mid-list authors who don't have the fortune to pen "blockbusters," is not a bad thing, either.

One thing not to forget, too, is that unlike most literary "fast food," The Da Vinci Code stirred up some controversy when it came out, and arguably spurred the whole religious-thriller/religious-conspiracy sub genre. If I dare say, it helped open minds to heresies and blasphemies ... political, whether it meant to be or not.

Will wrote: "Dan Brown's writing is "good enough". He has sold millions of books."
Which means, pretty much by definition, that his writing is the kind that appeals to people who don't generally read books. Who (to put it as unkindly as possible) don't know any better.

That's what a bestseller is -- it's a book that appeals to non-readers. That doesn't mean it has to be a bad book, but it does mean that readers -- like the ones who populate this website -- aren't the target demographic.

No, I don't think we can say that. Someone who reads a Dan Brown is as much a reader as someone who reads highbrow literature and/or the classics. It most certainly does not mean that they generally don't read books or don't know any better.

A bestseller is literally that - a book that sells well.

What Dan Brown does is to invent or steal a controversial plot involving a conspiracy and to wrap a fast paced thriller around it in relatively simple language. That gives his readers what they want. None of us should get snobby about writing to the point where we deny readers their choice. If that's what they want, great.

What some readers (and some writers) get wrong is to get too hooked up on the quality of the writing. Many readers are more interested in the plot and characters than in the flow of words. I see a lot of talk on writing websites about the minutiae of individual words and phrases. But when I talk to real readers they often don't notice the stuff that writers obsess over. They are often more interested in characters and plot.

I don't care for Dan Brown's writing personally, but I have to give credit for the way he gives his audience what they want.

There aren't "true readers" and "the rest of the plebe" here. There are many different readers with different tastes. A bestseller appeals to several different tastes, which has a merit on its own.

I'm positively against what I call "snob readers", who believe that there is One True Literature and the rest is trash for the uneducated masses.

Yes, I have my tastes (Dan Brown not being high on my list at all), but I would have to be simple minded to think everyone must agree with my literary taste to be a "true reader". In the same way that I enjoy cuisine, and every now and then I also enjoy eating a Döner at a street cart (but they are delicious).

Laura wrote: "There aren't "true readers" and "the rest of the plebe" here. There are many different readers with different tastes. A bestseller appeals to several different tastes, which has a merit on its own...."
I think you are missing my point. To be a bestseller, a book must sell more copies -- MANY more copies -- than there are people in the US who routinely read for pleasure. In fact, most of the copies sold have to be sold to (or as gifts for) people who do not generally read books as a pastime. This is a simple fact about counting; there is no moral judgement or aesthetic elitism implied or explicit in it. Please don't put words in my mouth.

What it does mean, though, is that the people causing a bestseller to be a bestseller are generally not familiar with the tropes and conventions of whatever genre they are reading. It's pretty much all new to them. That cuts both ways -- the book has to grab them in a way that books usually don't, but it can also get away with plot and style features that avid readers might consider cliche, or overused, or a violation of some unwritten author/reader compact.

I am most explicitly NOT saying that bestsellers are bad because they are written for the ignorant masses. I am saying that bestsellers are necessarily being judged by wholly different criteria than most books, because they are being read mostly by a wholly different set of people. That's true whether you're talking about The Da Vinci Code or The Name of the Rose.

Sorry, but your numbers are way out. Here is the Wikipedia list of best selling books:



The top selling books of all time have sold over 100 million copies worldwide with the biggest seller "A Tale of Two Cities" selling 200 million in the 150+ years since it was published.

Modern bestsellers such as the Da Vinci Code generally sell less than 100 million copies worldwide and in all languages. The Da Vinci Code is one of the strongest sellers at 80 million copies in 40 different languages.

The population of the world is 7 billion, and the USA 318 million. Around 400 million speak English as their first language.

What proportion of people read for pleasure? This website suggests that 45% of Americans read more than 6 books a year:



So that's 318 million Americans. Let's take off the 23% of under 18s to get to 244 million American adults. Take 45% of the adults who are regular readers and that gets us to 110 million regularly reading American adults.

So we have 80 million copies of the Da Vinci Code sold worldwide. Even if every single copy was sold to an American that would still be less than the 110 million American adults reading regularly. Not to mention the 750 million people who live in Europe. And the 7 billion population of the world.

The idea that "many more" copies are sold of a best seller than there are regular readers is totally wrong.

Will wrote: "Sorry, but your numbers are way out. ..."

Thanks for the numbers, Will. Bringing data is always appreciated.

I think we may be disagreeing about what constitutes a "regular reader". The numbers you cite say that only about half of all American adults read even one book for pleasure last year. That seems to imply that the median of 5 books per adult is made up (at least on the low end) mostly by non-pleasure reading -- textbooks, self-help, reference, required for work, etc.

How many books per year does it take to qualify as a regular pleasure reader? Your mileage may vary, but I suspect most of us are not thinking of someone who has only ever read a couple dozen books for pleasure in their entire lifetime.

At any rate, that was where my comment was aimed -- at the fact that most of those 40 million copies of The Da Vinci Code went to people who read (say) fewer than six books for pleasure each year. I could still be wrong about that, but it's consistent with the numbers you linked to. When the mean is more than double the median, you have an extremely skewed distribution, in which the vast majority of the reading is being done by a small minority of the population. (As a comparison, the ratio of mean to median for US household incomes is only 1.4.)

If you don't like my terminology, I'm happy to adopt a more neutral term to refer to people who will not read more than a few dozen books for pleasure in their lives.

Your numbers are still flaky.

It's 80 million copies of Da Vinci Code sold worldwide, not 40 million.

The survey asked people how many books they had read in the past year. These were the answers:

None � 23%
1 book � 5%
2-3 books � 14%
4-5 books � 12%
6-10 books � 17%
11-20 books � 13%
More than 20 books � 15%
Don’t Know � 2%

If someone reads 6-10 books every year, that is 360 to 600 in a adult lifetime (assuming 60 years of reading in the average lifespan of 80 years). Much much higher than your "few dozen". Of the 45% who read more than 6 books in a year, 28% read more than 11.

And let's not forget that the Da Vinci Code sold 80 million copies across the entire world and not just in America.

Let's take the combined population of the US and Europe - 1.05 billion. Take 25% away to give us the approximate number of adults = 794 million. Now just for kicks let's apply the highest proportion of regular readers - the 15% who read more than 20 books a year. That gives us a total of 119 million Americans and Europeans who read more than 20 books a year. That's 1,200 books each in an average lifetime.

That's 119 million regular US and European readers and 80 million copies of Da Vinci Code sold worldwide.

That's before we get into readers other than Americans or Europeans.

However we slice the numbers, your argument is wrong. Your contention is that there are more copies of bestsellers sold than there are regular readers. Even if we pick one of the best selling books of all time (Da Vinci Code) and the most extreme definition of regular reader (20+ books per year) and we restrict ourselves to US and Europe - we still don't get more books sold than regular readers.

And let's not forget that you said:

"To be a bestseller, a book must sell more copies -- MANY more copies -- than there are people in the US who routinely read for pleasure."

Sorry, but this is totally wrong. And if it doesn't work for an extreme case like the Da Vinci Code, it certainly does not work for other bestsellers which sell far less than 80 million copies worldwide.

Will wrote: "Your numbers are still flaky.

It's 80 million copies of Da Vinci Code sold worldwide, not 40 million.

The survey asked people how many books they had read in the past year. These were the answers..."

WRT 40 million vs. 80 million, I was taking a swag at US sales (which drives the NYT bestseller stats). If you have better numbers for US sales, I'm happy to be corrected on that.

As for the rest, I was looking at the other survey question down at the bottom of the page you linked -- the one that asked specifically about books read for pleasure. I think we can agree that other books read are not relevant to the question at hand.

Roughly half of all adults surveyed read zero books for pleasure. You need to rescale your calculation above to the pleasure-reading distribution, not the all-books distribution. The median for all books is 5 per year. If you shift the entire distribution downward by 4 per year (as a rough guess, to make 1 the median number), you get a very different picture.

Nope, the numbers still don't work.

I can't find a figure for the US sales of Da Vinci Code. Worldwide sales are currently 80 million, so assuming US sales of 40 million seems very generous. It's 50% when the population of the earth is 7 billion compared to America's 314 million. But hey let's run with it. It doesn't make any difference to the outcome.

There are roughly 244 million adult Americans (let's assume that under 18s don't count). The second survey says that 55% of these read a book for pleasure last year - that's 134 million American adults who read at least one book for pleasure compared with 40 million assumed US copies of Da Vinci Code.

Let's try to be even more generous. Of this 55% of Americans who read one book, let's say that half "routinely read for pleasure". That gets us down to 67 million people. Still way more than our guess of 40 million US sales of Da Vinci Code.

To get down to 40 million readers, we would need to argue that around 16% of adult Americans regularly read for pleasure.

So to recap -

We've used the biggest US bestseller of all time (other bestsellers sell far fewer)
We've given a generous guess about the number of US sales (half of all worldwide sales)
We've used survey results for the number of regular readers
We've used pessimistic assumptions about the proportion of regular readers

And we still a long way from your contention that to be a bestseller a book must sell more copies - MANY more copies than people who regularly read.

I'm sorry, but however we carve this one it is busted.

Will wrote: "Of this 55% of Americans who read one book, let's say that half "routinely read for pleasure"."

That's the step where we disagree. I think that's an extreme overestimate. We already know that most of the books being read by less-frequent readers are not read for pleasure; this is going to skew the distribution of pleasure readers even more than the all-books distribution that was shown.

If 1/4 of adult Americans routinely read for pleasure, then clearly you are right and I am wrong. I suspect the number is at most one in ten, perhaps much less. Of those, not all have been at it long enough to fully evaluate a new book in its context.

Remember, the origin of this was an assertion about who is going to be familiar with the tropes, conventions, and quality range of a given genre. For that purpose, a reader needs to have been exposed to (say) a few dozen books in the genre in question. That's all I mean by "regular reader". Perhaps "experienced reader" would be a better description of the subset I'm trying to distinguish. That's going to be a combination of how frequently one reads for pleasure, and how long one has been at it, which thins down the relevant population even more.

Okay, let's play with the numbers a little. If we don't have a definition of "regular reader", let's look at the number of books that qualify for best seller status.

The top book on the New York Times bestseller list for 2015 is the Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. That book hit the number 1 spot on the NYT list on February 1 2015 before it had sold 1 million copies. It sold 1 million by early March and has since gone on to sell more than 3 million. It is a best seller by anyone's definition.

So for your assertion to be correct, there would need to be fewer than 1 million "regular readers" in the US. That's equivalent to 0.4% of the adult population.

Or Catch 22. That sold 10 million copies - equivalent to 4% of the population of the US.

And these figures for sales are worldwide and not just the US.

You want to go for one in ten adults being regular readers? Okay, with an adult US population of 244 million people, one in ten gives us 24.4 million readers. That is considerably more than Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (14 million), Dune (20 million), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (20 million).

How about one in 20? That gives us 12.2 million adult readers in the US, which is more than the number of copies sold of the Exorcist, a Brief History of Time or Wild Swans.

You want readers who have read more than "a few dozen books"? Okay, we have the Pew survey which showed that 13% of Americans read more than 20 books in a year. That will get us to "a few dozen" books in 2-3 years of their reading careers. And 13% of the 244 million adults in the US is 29 million readers. That's more than the number of copies sold of the Great Gatsby, the Wind in the Willows and 1984.

The numbers are crystal clear. A book can legitimately be called a best seller if it has sold 1 million copies. Many modern classics have sold 10 to 20 million - over many years and across the entire world. That is such a low proportion of the reading public that there is no sensible definition of "experienced reader" that will work.

I repeat - this one is totally busted.

Will wrote: "So for your assertion to be correct, there would need to be fewer than 1 million "regular readers" in the US."

I will certainly concede that a book can easily reach 1 million sales without having to be read by people who are not experienced readers.

You seem to be assuming that every experienced reader reads every bestseller, though. That's not the case, nor even close to it. My wife, who has read thousands of books for pleasure, has not read any of the books you list above except for Huck Finn. She's not unusual in this regard. If every experienced reader read every bestseller, your numbers would work.

And, again, the Pew survey is not asking specifically about pleasure reading, which skews the distribution.

I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I'm not making it up; it's based on an article I read back in the early days of the Harry Potter boom, that explored the demographics of who was reading those books and what else they read. And then discussed the more general case. I wish I had a reference for you, but I don't.

No, I'm not assuming anything. I am testing your assertion that:

"To be a bestseller, a book must sell more copies -- MANY more copies -- than there are people in the US who routinely read for pleasure."

This is clearly wrong, by any definition of "best seller" or "people who routinely read for pleasure". It is not a question of agreeing to disagree. It is factually incorrect.

Will you agree that it is factually incorrect?

Let's be perfectly clear here. Books like the Da Vinci Code are bought by people who want to read them. The Da Vinci Code has a Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ rating of 3.76 from nearly 1.4 million readers. It has sold more than 80 million copies worldwide. Other than the Harry Potter series, it is the most successful single book of modern times.

This is not a case of a bad book being bought by non-readers who don't know any better, as you seem to be suggesting. The Da Vinci Code is a product which satisfies its customers. The snobs who turn their nose up at it almost certainly don't understand what it does well.

So let's not try to invent spurious statistics to back up a claim that the readers of the Da Vinci Code are somehow second class or inexperienced, okay? It simply does not wash.

Will wrote: "No, I'm not assuming anything."

Yes, you are. You are assuming (among other things) that if there are X experienced readers in the US, and Y < X books were bought, then every book was bought by an experienced reader. This is certainly not true.

You're also making assumptions about the skewness (or lack thereof) of the distribution of pleasure reading rates.

This is not a case of a bad book being bought by non-readers who don't know any better, as you seem to be suggesting

If that makes you happy, go with it.

Nope. Go back and read the posts again. I have made no assumptions about who is reading the books. I have shown that your argument that there are more best-selling books than experienced readers is false.

I have tested this against a range of assumptions and definitions.

Perhaps if statistics aren't your strong suit, you had better not try to argue about them.

Gerd wrote: "Lynda wrote: "And each of you have written what, that we shall compare? "

Neither did I ever rule a country, nor play a foot ball game, or, heck, start a war ... yet I have no qualms criticizing ..."

I don't have a problem with anyone criticizing something. Art, books, movies, whatever. Once it's out in the public domain it's free game.

I think it's worth remembering that if publishers only put out "quality literature" they would soon all be bankrupt. Books like the Da Vinci Code pay the rent. That's why publishers have to promote mediocre and crank-it-out writers by sending them on tours, having book signings, etc. Hope this doesn't sound snobby. I read the book and sort of liked it.

Patricia wrote: "I think it's worth remembering that if publishers only put out "quality literature" they would soon all be bankrupt. Books like the Da Vinci Code pay the rent. That's why publishers have to promote..."

That doesn't excuse the artist for tossing out unfinished dribble to the members of an audience. Just because a corporation is a corporation doesn't mean it justifies the fault. Dan Brown, to whom I give the title of artist loosely is not exempt from his judgment simply because a group of profit-focused individuals chose to put it out there. I think all my judgment towards the book is completely fair. I'm not staying on the sloppy surface level, I'm looking deeper to actually analyze his clumsy writing, and I've come to one simple conclusion, he cannot write a story that surpasses being passable for the life of him.

Da Vinci Code sold 80 million copies.

That's either 80 million deluded people. Or maybe 40 million especially deluded people who bought two copies each.

Or maybe they are seeing something that you are missing.

I am not condemning those who happen to find some enjoyment in the novel. If you like it, fantastic! In other words, I don't give a shit if you like the book or not. My personal feelings towards the book are irrelevant to you and yours are to me. Quality, however, is the only thing that matters here.
I don't know about you but when I go into any form of art, unless I feel like shutting my brain off entirely, I look for things that the average reader, movie-goer, gamer, or whatever else wouldn't. For movies I look at the cinematography, shot choice, musical score, mise en scene, dialogue, pacing, and art direction just to name a few.
I loved Force Awakens, though there is a part of the Star-Wars fanbase that absolutely hates it. It did have it's problems, but the positives outweigh the negatives when you look at the shear amount of care that was put into the filming of Force Awakens. Quite frankly, I respect the opinions of those who despise the film as long as they hold their argument with strong reasoning.
I hated Dark Knight. That's not to say it was bad, in fact it itself is a fantastic piece of art in its own respect, but I personally don't care for it, and I have my reasons, but they, like something as trivial as an opinion, are irrelevant to this conversation.
And don't use a products sales as some sort of quality assurance stamp. Transformers 4: Age of Extinction was the highest grossing movie of 2014, but as we all know, unless you've been living under a rock for the past couple of years you would know that Transformers 4 was a critical disaster, as the creators flung it out to the general public without giving two shits about proper storytelling or cinematography.
The Davinci's Code is a low quality book no matter how you put it, so go ahead and enjoy your McDonalds of literature. To be honest I don't give a fuck.

Then why do you feel the need to press your feelings on everyone else?

You didn't like the book - that's a subjective expression of your feelings. I didn't greatly care for it either. Both of us have a right to express our feelings.

But when we say something like it "is a low quality book no matter how you put it", that is subjectivity pretending to be objectivity.

"I didn't like it" does not equal "it is crap".

I don't understand why you think I'm trying to press my feelings on everyone else. I distinctly said that I don't care how anyone feels about the book.

I was not arguing for my opinion, but for the legitamate quality of the novel itself. Quality is not the same as my opinion, and I thought I made that clear. My opinion is slightly less brutal than the factual failure concerning the quality.

To be quite honest I don't really understand why you are defending the book. You said you didn't like it and you even compared it damningly to a Big Mac. Aren't we arguing the same thing? I'm thoroughly baffled as to why this has turned into such an uproar.

Yes, I hare Davinci's Code and don't believe it deserves the credit or sales it achieved. Did it do everything wrong? No, infact it does more things right than I chose to express, but the negatives so heavily outweigh the positives that I have trouble taking it seriously.

"I don't like" is not the same as "you shouldn't like."

Take what I say as a grain of salt. I'm just one person who does not have even the slightest bit of relevence towards you or your life.

Thought it was a bit of a page turner myself. It's fiction - there has to be a bit of leeway. Liked trying to decode it even if I didn't have a hope. The movie should not have been made.

"the factual failure concerning the quality" ????

Define "factual".

Factual - "based on or restricted to facts" - Dictionary.reference.com

Good. Now tell me how your opinion of the quality of the Da Vinci Code is based on or restricted to facts.

My opinion is not factual in it's entirety, but the quality itself is poor.

I don't care how low quality Taco-Bell's food is. I personally still love the food, while at the same time knowing it was low quality.

Dan Brown's work in DaVinci Code is low quality.

On a quality scale it's bad. My opinion of the book is not possitive because in this medium qualiy is everything, at least in my eyes. I don't care if you like it or not. You do you.

No, your opinion isn't factual. It's your opinion. I'm glad we've established that.

The Da Vinci Code is a book that divides opinion. Some people like it, some people don't. But what we have are a small number of book snobs who try to "prove" that the people who like it are wrong. What these review fascists are trying to do is to insist that their point of view is the only valid one. That if you happened to like the book then there is something wrong with you as a reader.

David tried to prove that the Da Vinci Code was bad with some statistical argument that frankly didn't stand up to even the slightest of analysis. You are trying to insist that it's "factually" low quality, as if there was a factual way of assessing the quality of fiction. Which there isn't.

At the time of writing, the Da Vinci Code has been reviewed 5,661 times on Amazon.com. 49% of those reviews have been for the full five stars. A further 17% gave it four stars. For a "factually poor quality" product, that's an awful lot of happy customers.

You rated it one star. I rated it two stars. It's at this point that we have to ask ourselves the $64,000 question. If we rated it so poorly, what is Dan Brown getting right to sell so many copies (80 million) and get 66% of reviews at four stars or higher?

Of course, you could close your mind and just dismiss all those happy punters as idiots or not experienced readers or some other such insulting opinion.

Or you could open your mind and try to work out what Dan Brown is giving his readers that other authors aren't.

As a writer myself, I believe in respecting readers. All readers. I have a policy of not insulting them or dismissing them by saying that their point of view doesn't count. Or that I know better.

And when I see a successful author like Dan Brown I try to work out why he is successful.

I never once said that it was wrong or even ignorant for people to like this novel. I've said that at least five times by now.

It sells well because of intellegent marketing. Not because of it's quality.

Dan Brown choses to foccus on the scandal of the plot rather than quality writting.

When I read a book I make a point of taking notes in the margins on how a passage could have been improved or if it is written beatifully I may foccus on that. In The Davinci's Code there was an unbelievable amount of passages that came off poor at best. I can say without a doubt in my mind that this novel was written poorly. I can still tell that he at one point had a soild idea and that he tried, but now it's end result has been published.

Some of his lines I recall being downright laughable. If I had the book with me I'd show some evidence but it isn't with me at the moment.

I don't think it's wrong to like the novel. If I did, I would be the biggest ass on this site wouldn't I? I don't feel you can really keep barking on about how I'm apparently so terribly ignorant and trying to shove my opinion down peoples throats when that's the exact opposite of what I'm doing. I'm stated my opinion and offered facts to support it. I'm not telling people to bend over and submit to the god of I-dont-give-a-fuck-cuz-you-dont-matter-to-me-lol-I-am-cool-and-by-the-way-Davinci's-code-sucks.

Do I smell a troll here? It's hard to tell whether you really don't know the difference between fact and opinion or you're fishing for a reaction.

If you've got a genuine point to make, then by all means make it. Show us some of those lines that you find laughable. Give us some of those "facts" because you haven't given us any yet.

But please don't troll. That was tedious when it was first invented and is way past its sell-by date now.

Edinburgh professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum says “Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad,� and he’s right.

Angels and Demons, opening sentence: “Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.�

The vehicle was easily the smallest car Langdon had ever seen. "SmartCar," she said. "A hundred kilometers to the liter."

A voice spoke, chillingly close.

Yanking his Manurhin MR-93 revolver from his shoulder holster, the captain dashed out of the office.

Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.

Five months ago, the kaleidoscope of power had been shaken, and Aringarosa was still reeling from the blow.

My French stinks, Langdon thought, but my zodiac iconography is pretty good.

etc.

Edinburgh professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum is stating an opinion, not a fact.

As a professor of linguistics, he is focusing on one element of the book - the actual use of words. Judging from the number of blog posts he has written about it, it has become something of an obsession for him.

And he has almost entirely missed the point. Dan Brown has written a highly effective popular book. Yes, the language is a little purple at times. The details are lurid. The plot is provocative. But that is precisely what his audience wants.

If he had written it in terms that Pullum would have found acceptable, it would not have sold 80 million copies. A book is a product which needs to satisfy its customers, not some dry academic treatise which a pedant or a snob might not take issue with.

Looking through your list of quotes, I don't see one which is objectively bad given the genre and style that Dan Brown is writing in. His style is to give his readers a large amount of occasionally lurid detail. And his readers lap it up.

What most non-writers don't realise (and a few writers too) is that a large proportion of readers do not analyse every word that they read. They ignore sentence structure. They forgive cliche. They don't have a clue about POV.

Readers skip lightly over details like that because they are usually more interested in plot and character.

Here's a blog post putting Pullum's obsession into context:



As I said, you need to look at what Dan Brown does right. That will give you a better understanding of the real relationship between writing and reading.

Will wrote: "No, I don't think we can say that. Someone who reads a Dan Brown is as much a reader as someone who reads highbrow literature and/or the classics. It most certainly does not mean that they generall..."

Chapeau!
You put my personal reaction to his words in a much more polite commentary.