[dxf]

I had read and enjoyed Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", and as I read Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" I found I kept contrasting Brown's work to Eco's. In the end, I didn't even finish "The Da Vinci Code", it just felt so weak to me.

But art, literature, music, and wine are all things of personal preference. You like what you like! And you shouldn't let anyone tell you not to spend your time reading Dan Brown (or whomever) if you enjoy it.

[majormajor]

I had a very same reaction - "this is Foucault's Pendulum with simpler writing and a bad case of wanting to be writing Indiana Jones" - and I think that really drills to the heart of the debate about quality/taste/literature/snobbery/whatever going on in some of the other comments here.

A big part of "taste" is exposure to a lot of stuff.

If you read 1 book a year, or predominantly only 1 genre even, your range of comparison points is going to be so much lower than someone who has read 10x or 50x or 100x more that. And that volume of data is what lets you really start to separate the wheat from the chaff. And this is why so much of what people experience as a teen or young adult sticks with them so long - all of those works have the opportunity to be the first thing of its kind that the person encountered.

If you aren't interested in reading that much more, and especially if you aren't interested in reading more complex plots/subplots/sentence and paragraph structures, then that's perfectly fine.

But if you ARE interested, and you enjoyed Da Vinci Code: definitely check out Foucault's Pendulum. It's got a perfect meta twist on the whole thing too that really makes it hold up today, too, IMO.

[Yoric]

I read Foucault's Pendulum several times. First time, I was about 13yo and I loved the story. Then I read it again as an adult and realized just how many subtle jokes and references I had missed upon my first reading.

Just don't forget that the Templars are always in it.

[m463]

> You like what you like!

I have found I have a personal star-handicapper.

For science fiction, what I watch can dip down to 2-star shows.

For a romantic comedy, I probably need 4 or 5 stars.

Drama needs 5 stars.

For documentaries, having a slew of 5-star important, well-done, insightful movies means little. I still rarely watch them.

[tnecniv]

I feel like certain dramas are just more forgiving. Like even if the prose is bad and the characters are flat in a sci-fi or fantasy novel, the concept of the world being explored can still be interesting. I love classic SciFi but I don’t go to it for the rich character development.

Meanwhile, drama relies much more on prose and character. If that fails, the central concept rarely backs it up.

[InitialLastName]

That's OK, I had the same feeling about Foucault's Pendulum and Illuminatus!. It's like there's a conspiracy among publishers to rehash the "what if the conspiracy theories are real" plot every few decades.

[majormajor]

SPOILERS (for 30+ year old book, hah)

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To me, the delightful thing about Foucault's Pendulum distinct from the broader "conspiracy fiction" genre is that there is no conspiracy discovered, only created.

And that's a fundamentally different story and investigation into human nature than a straight conspiracy story like Da Vinci Code - IMO, a much more interesting one.

[InitialLastName]

Spoilers for a 40+ year old book:

The conclusion of Illuminatus! is a level of indirection above that.

[majormajor]

To each their own; I didn't make it through the series but it felt much more fantastical vs "depressingly real" as it were.

[BEEdwards]

No conspiracy, the books sell. People buy and enjoy them. Not my thing, but it is what it is.