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by willangelo 501 days ago
Honestly, Dan Brown was my first introduction to any sort of literature that was not manga/comics and I liked every book. Granted, I read the Portuguese translations so there might be differences in the “writing style”.

There is a lot of history and art embedded in the books (as I believe his wife is a historian and is greatly involved in the making of the books, if I’m not mistaken) which I believe is the highlight, a lot more than the plot or anything else. I distinctively remember reading The Da Vinci Code in my grandfather’s house - there is a piece in the book about secrets in The Last Supper and my grandfather had a big clock in the house with it as the background. I remember going to the clock to check out what the book was saying about the painting and being mindblown. I don’t even remember if everything made sense but that stuck with me.
2 comments
crooked-v 501 days ago
To some degree it reminds me various pieces of "thinky" scifi (a lot of Stephen Baxter or Larry Niven work, for example), where the plot and characters are constructed around exploring some interesting ideas or concepts for the reader. Often in that territory the writing is stilted by necessity, because the writer doesn't want to overload things with complex character relationships or elaborate internal lives on top of the Big Ideas.
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jgwil2 501 days ago
> Granted, I read the Portuguese translations so there might be differences in the “writing style”.

I'm certain that translation could only improve the books; the English writing is quite poor.

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acuozzo 501 days ago
> the English writing is quite poor

It's conversational. It reads as if it were dictated and published sans editing.

This is what most readers want, it seems.

Honestly, this doesn't bother me. I can't imagine the oral tradition our species has enjoyed since time immemorial to be any more eloquent.

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devilbunny 500 days ago
> to be any more eloquent

It usually is, though probably more for making it memorizable without major error than any other reason. Rhyme styles of oral traditions don't look too much like our penchant for rhyming the last vowel of sentences.

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willangelo 501 days ago
If the English writing is as bad as people say, I definitely agree
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