I will not read Dan Brown’s latest 17 Sep 2009 He’s a pap writer. Nicely chewed and digested screenplays for filming. Nothing deep, nothing that might stretch a reader. Obvious plot turns. So the reviewer at First Post UK suggests some other reading. I add this: I am surprised that the reviewer did not suggest some Umberto Eco novels. I have long thought of Brown as Eco Lite. In particular Foucault’s Pendulum, and of course, Name of the Rose, but even Baudolino shines next to the entire Brown corpus of pap. Philosophy Pop culture
Metaphysics In which I get Guardianed 29 May 201018 Sep 2017 Or is that Grauniaded? I always get it wrong. Andrew Brown, who writes, among other things, a blog at the Gurainad newspaper, linked to my comment that “religion” was a mess of pottage and not a single unitary phenomenon. He made some comments that we have often rehearsed on this… Read More
Biology Zimmer's evolving blog post on X-woman 28 Mar 2010 Carl Zimmer has a continually updated blog post on the mtDNA of “X-Woman”, which is being informed by his readers and experts. It’s a useful antidote to hasty and inaccurate reportage in the MSM, done well by a very good journalist. Read More
History Plato on the origin of the gods 15 Nov 2009 As for the other spiritual beings [daimones], it is beyond our task to know and speak of how they came to be. We should accept on faith the assertions of those figures of the past who claimed to be the offspring of gods. They must surely have been well informed… Read More
Eco, asked to comment on The Da Vinci Code‘s relationship to Foucault’s Pendulum, replied that Dan Brown was a character from FP, which is perfectly true. I just finished re-reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which is very very Eco. Though the things he does with Platonic metaphysics make me wince.
I love and hate Stephenson in roughly equal measure. On the one hand, he writes about the things I find interesting (and I have all his novels), but then he screws the pooch with his Pythagoreanism and occasional supernaturalism. I wish he wouldn’t. But I’ll read his next novel too…
Heh. I thought that the society in Anathem is what you would get if Pythagoras’ sect of mystic geometers had prospered and become the dominant world religion (except they seem to have dropped the dietary taboo against beans). But the supernaturalism, yeah: the immortal Enoch Root, the mysterious Solomonic gold, and all the reality-bending weirdness at the crisis of Anathem — the stories gallop along so well, a wonderful carnival ride of action and ideas all rooted in a universe we recognize as ours and then Boom! Something completely off-the-wall happens.
I like the inclusion of Rushdie in those slagging off the book, given the turgid prose he is oft praised for. Though he does occasionally write interesting stories.
Foucault’s Pendulum is a bit turgid. I did enjoy it (and the punchline, coming from an academic, is hilarious), but it takes a long time to set the whole thing up.
Dan Brown is crap, at least on the basis of the only novel of his that I’ve ever read The Da Vinci Code. Also on that basis I never want to read another one of his novels. I don’t think that Foucault’s Pendulum is turgid and although I will agree that it is probably not so well written as Name of the Rose I actually prefer it. If you like this sort of thing you will probably like the novels of Lawrence Norfolk, Lemprière’s Dictionary, In the Shape of a Boar and The Pope’s Rhinoceros.
I thought that The Da Vinci Code was readable and even mildly enjoyable, if predictable. Then I read ‘Angels and Demons’, at the recommendation of my brother, which was horrifyingly and offensively terrible.