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
Philosophy I wonder what it *is* that I actually do? 14 Oct 2010 A note on credit: I have been accused elsewhere of having leached off Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, by Zack Weiner, whose cartoons I often use. Zack has not complained, and I am using the code he generates at his site, unmodified, and the images are from his site, not reposted… Read More
Philosophy On philosophical practice 8 Aug 2009 One might well want to ask how seriously this doctrine is intended, just how strictly and literally the philosophers who propound it mean their words to be taken. … It is, as a matter of fact, not at all easy to answer, for strange though the doctrine looks, we are… Read More
Epistemology Does teleology hang on in Venice? 18 Dec 201022 Jun 2018 Here’s an interesting paper, which I haven’t had time to digest, but which I thought I’d better mention before it enters the fog my brain contains these days… It’s by David Depew, one of my favourite philosophical writers on evolution (in no small part because he takes a historical approach… 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.