«leftbraned

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• btw, we saw it last weekend. it was… just as good as the book.

• did i see it? you so crazy. don't you know i never see big hollywood blockbusters or remakes.
  which reminds me... i'm counting down the days until poseidon comes out. sounds like a neat idea for a movie.

• still debating whether to see the movie. (and, if so, whether to see it now or wait and get it through Netflix.)

  it got a horrible rating at rottentomatoes.

  did you see it?

• So... What did you think of the movie? Was the movie everything the book wasn't. Ie, was it good? Or, was the movie even worse than the book?
  For some reason I hunch you might not have made it out yet.

• i lent my copy of TDC to a friend. once she returns it, i'll try to find some of the passages which made me cringe and post them here. :)

  (hmmm, come to think of it, i haven't heard from her in a while. maybe she's mad at me for lending her such a crappy book? :-p )

  p.s., i owe many of my favorite books to you (Life of Pi, High Fidelity, et al.). our disagreement over TDC is but a small spot on your otherwise stellar recommendation record. (of course, you remember that other book we disagreed on... :D )

• Ah, Neal Stephenson. A Legend. I've read Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, even "In the Beginning was the Command Line", and I just started Quicksilver. When I find an author I like I end up reading a lot of their books. And I have done the same for Dan Brown.

  Your use of the tem "Originality" is an interesting one - I suppose I accept that some good things stem from an unoriginal start (e.g. PC/Windows, most rock songs, and remakes of old films) and the question is whether they have any intrinsic value in the other things they do well - for instance, convey something to a new audience. Now there will always be people who prefer the "original" such as UNIX, Classical music, and old movies, but other people are happy for these things to be "updated" into new forms. Another good example would be what Stephen Hawking has done for Physics - not necessarily creating new concepts, just getting them to a wider modern audience.

  We can agree to disagree on this one, I suppose. As you know your favorite J.K. Rowling bases a lot of her characters/settings on mythology and other sources so I suppose you are going to have to figure out a way to reconcile that ;)

  p.s. haven't read Bourne Identity so I can't compare...

• me? controversy??? O:-)

  i'm glad you left a comment! (and a good one, at that.)

  now i shall proceed to vigorously disagree with everything you've said. ;)

  just kidding... in fact, i do see your point--after all, i concede that the book was very engaging. i really couldn't put it down, and really did stay up til 5am one night to finish it. it was indeed fast-paced... and hey, who can resist codes? (though i'm being generous by agreeing to call the Fibonacci sequence a "code." neal stephenson uses codes. dan brown used 5th-grade math.)

  but... i'd hesitate to compare dan brown to stephen king. come to think of it, though, the comparison does elucidate what i hated most about TDC: its lack of originality. i haven't read much stephen king, but the two king stories i have read (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and Apt Pupil) have been wonderful--largely because they're original. not just the premises--but also the plots and storylines.

  the trouble with dan brown's plot was that, at nearly every turn of events, i thought, "ah, he got that straight out of [insert James Bond movie title here]." there was almost nothing novel in the novel.

  i'll forgive crappy character development. i'll [sometimes] forgive flowery prose. i'll even forgive appealing to the masses by dumbing certain things down (e.g., codes). but an author has got to give me something new.

  hope this explains my reaction better. i know my original posting was a little short on detail.

  p.s., i've chosen to ignore your use of "Iliad" and "Dan Brown" in the same paragraph. ;)

  p.p.s., B, i'm curious--have you read The Bourne Identity? i read that (after TDC) and thought it was everything TDC was trying to be--but done well.

• I really like your “leftbraned” blog. Tho’ I disagree about DaVinci code. I looked in your entry for why you didn’t like it (fast-paced, intelligent subject, use of codes, etc. ) but didn’t see any. Maybe I can see past what critics call ‘bad writing’ for a fun plot (like any books by Steven King, for instance). I don’t read those books all that often, but I do *enjoy* reading them.

  Maybe you're just trying to incite controversy here - it wouldn't be the first time ;)

  Any particular reason you didn't like it? Not everything can be "great writing" like The Iliad (how many people read that nowadays?). There is a place in this world for "popular fiction" and Dan Brown is at the height of it.

  Inquiring minds want to know...