Don't make fun of renowned author Dan Brown (2013)

I dimly remember a time in the 90s when I thought technology was supposed to free us from the tyranny of "judging a book by its cover" and "following the crowd", when you could carry around a personalized algorithm to help you identify things you would like even if they were obscure or un-marketed.

It feels like that didn't happen, and we're still stuck with the same issue of promotions and gatekeepers and tastemakers, because those who control the algorithms (centralized, proprietary, remotely hosted) find it more profitable that way.

This is kind of how The Locked Tomb series got around - "lesbian necromancers in space" has a sort of hook to it. :)

The fame of the book is strong correlated to the marketing spend behind it and little else.

The success of major bestsellers depends entirely on how they trigger the fantasies and wish fulfilments specific demographics.

The Da Vinci Code hit the religious/occult conspiracy theory market, which was huge at the time, and added feminist overtones about the "divine feminine" which appealed to most female New Agers and a good few male ones.

His other books didn't have those ingredients, and they were less successful.

More recently we've had Fifty Shades and Romantasy. Working out the demographics and the reader appeal is left as an (easy) exercise for the reader.

Harry Potter and Young Adult classics like The Hunger Games are a little harder to analyse, but not much.

Someone like Stephen King is less obvious. (For most of the books "horror" is the hook, but American small town relatability is at least as important.)

Writing quality isn't quite incidental. But it only needs to be above a certain minimal level of competence, nowhere near what's usually called "good writing."

Books which have "good writing" but don't trigger a large demographic of readers with specific fears and/or fantasies - of any kind - do not do well.

> What I've realized is that the fame of the book is closely related to how interesting and unique the "elevator pitch” of the book. Which makes sense when you think about it; It's the elevator pitch that's spreading by word of mouth, not the book.

They call this "high concept"

Agree. For example, Dragon's Egg by Forward is not a well written book by most of those metrics, and yet I very much enjoyed the novel due to the creative story.

> What I've realized is that the fame of the book is closely related to how interesting and unique the "elevator pitch” of the book.

Really? I don't find that at all. It certainly helps, but books that have enduring appeal are, usually, ones that are good, within their niche at least. Especially books that are actual bestsellers, not books people are "forced to read" in school or something (they can also be great books, but they continue to be "popular" for reasons other than "people chose to read them").

Few works of art are great across all the metrics. A book (or a movie) can have a great overall premise and structure, but have lacking dialog, flow or other issues. Is it good? Perhaps for me, but not for you.

I just watched Lost Highway in the theaters. I had never had a chance to watch it on the big screen before, and I brought my SO. I love the movie since there's no clear cut interpretation, yet it also feels accessible. My SO hadn't seen it before, and while she thought it was fine overall, she really disliked that there isn't a canonical "this is what happened and this is what the things mean" explanation. The very thing that made me love the movie.

Hugo voters are members of the World Science Fiction Society (who are mostly Worldcon attendees). Which is to say, voters for that are chosen for enthusiasm for the genre, not taste.

Not to be the one to point out the pink elephant, but the Hugo Awards became somewhat politicized a decade or so ago and identity politics started to feature heavily into selections. If your criteria doesn't include that then the awards are now probably meaningless. But go back to the past, and there's a reason they used to have such prestige associated with them. For instance in the 60s some winners were Starship Troopers, Man in the High Castle, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress!

Come to think of it not sure if that says more about the 60s or the award though. Cripes there was something in the water back then.

Hugo awards are by popular vote of fans attending conventions, and SF mostly prided itself on being about ideas, so you'll get what caught most people's fancy at the time.

I have come to accept that most books are good at something, and maybe even a few things, but not so great at many things. I embarked on a similar "read the Hugos" adventure and much of it is great in a sci-fi premise - understandable - but the characters or pacing or unfolding story is meh.

Example, The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber [0] is a great exposition of gravitational effects when a planet-sized object appears in the sky nearby earth. Characters and unfolding story are meh. I pictured it as a C-grade 60's movie with stilted acting. But the way the earth was reacting and the moon coming apart was a great fictional invention and the way it was done was novel at the time!

In similar vein, Conan stories are great fantasy adventures with well described fights, battles, scenes. I've never found a better author to describe a fight - or a battle between armies - with enough detail to make it interesting and exciting and yet in relatively few words. I've also never read stories as sexist and racist... but I don't go out of my way to look for that I guess. I accepted it was written in the day it was and had to sort the wheat from the chaff.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21808426

I've noticed the same thing, especially with Hugo awards.

On the other hand my favorite SF author, Gene Wolfe, has also won many other awards, like the Nebula and Locus awards. So you can find good stuff by using the awards as a starting point.

Huh, that's interesting. I read a lot of Hugo winning stuff and always found them well written even if not massively engaging.

When awarding bodies grow in popularity, their roles switch from populist to elitist, as their membership becomes more elite.

This hit the Hugo awards extra hard, because their voting method is especially vulnerable to lobbying, and warring factions have been lobbying to sway the body of voters one way or another.

There are many 'overwatch' type jobs, a number that carry heavy responsibility, that mostly only require "light regular attention" and the skill level to be on the ball and top of your game in bursts.

Versions I've had:

* Control room operator in an industrial plant (watch, make sure things are routine (listen to music | audio book), deal with "exceptions" (tradespeople locking machines out, bringing them back online, co-ordinating)).

* Maintaining throughput on data processing pipelines (eg: geophysical data processing, tape | drive | archive loading, initiating various steps, looking for "oddities" .. letting the machines run (listen to audiobook, watch console)).

* Several other variations I could list (but time is short ATM).

Physical labor. A friend of mine has a job like this, in their parents' egg wholesaler business. It's a hard job, but has two major benefits: keeps him in good physical shape, and lets him listen to audiobooks pretty much the whole time. I sometimes find myself envying him that.

For one, I thought I read way too much sci-fi in my life, but it turns out he's listened to every single book I did, every one I have on my "to read" list (except maybe Greg Egan stuff), and then a couple dozen ones I never heard of.

Not the same premise (I don't listen to audiobooks), but what helps me get through my reading list was buying an ereader and put my whole library on it. It goes with me everywhere, and every time I have an urge to take my phone, I open it instead. Can go through a normal book in a couple of days.

Mostly remodeling my house, by myself.

I really should hire someone to do it, and spend my time with electrical engineering. Even then, about half of the time I'm designing a product, I can listen to audio books. Component selection is the most mentally taxing part, followed by early stages of schematic capture. Once I have everything operationally figured out, the more mundane schematic work isn't at all taxing, and I'll do it while listening to audio books. Circuit board layout I almost can't do without listening to something. It's very similar to playing puzzle games.

Yeah that is quite the accomplishment. A few hundred? Most audio books are like six to ten hours of continuous audio!

Fun read. Minor typo:

  s/the the/the/g;

Good lord I could practically write an equally-long response post to this linguist dissecting his "takedown" (if it could be called that) of what amounts to a single sentence of the entire book, and bases his opinion on that it seems.

I have so many of his books; there was a time in my life when I was traveling a lot, under a lot of stress from various projects, and on the plane all I wanted to do was to turn my brain off. Those books fit the bill.

Thanks for the recommendation. The libraries near me only have the text version. Sometimes this happens if the audio book is an Audible exclusive. Audible can pay out as little as 25% of sales to authors, for audiobooks that aren't exclusive.

Indeed it is.

I agree; I read them a little later in life than you and GP did (early/mid 20s), but I enjoyed them just the same. "Page-turner" is a good descriptor. I found the stories themselves to be fun and engaging, even if the writing and plots weren't the best.

Sometimes you know you’re in for a bad time and you don’t care - or even enjoy it, as long as it is distracting. Escapism and books mix very well.

Have you read Snow Crash?

I actually do buy your argument.

Yes, people have multiple goals for reading a book and pleasure is only one of them. And there are finite hours in your life, so you have to choose.

But I'm mostly arguing against having an absolute, objective scale for "good book" other than popularity. If a book grants new insight, but it's so boring that few read it, then maybe it's not a very good book.

Too many cookies are bad, and it's easier to eat too many cookies than to eat too much broccoli.

Maybe there's more to quality that status, but I don't know what it could be.

One argument is that people who read a lot of books know quality. But I don't buy it: maybe people who read a lot of books have different tastes. And in any case, that just reinforces my definition: quality is what a certain (elite) group of people say it is.

Another argument is that complex books are better than simple ones. But that just means elite taste-makers like complex books, maybe because they've read so many books that straightforward ones are boring to them. But there's value in books that are easily understood--that's the whole point of writing: to communicate. One shouldn't value opaque books just because they're opaque.

Yet another argument is that smart people like good books and dumb people like popular books. Smart people are able to appreciate good books that are beyond most people. The convenient thing about this is that you can show how smart you are by liking certain books, which is way easier than winning a Fields Medal or Nobel Prize. Snark aside, this is just defining "good books" as "books smart people like", which is (in my view) morally equivalent to "books high-status people like".

As for "discouraging people from talking about things," I'm not yet arrogant enough to think that my post on Hacker News(!) is going to influence anyone. But if I did, I would tell people to stop worrying what other people think. Stop worrying about whether others think you're a snob or a mid. Like what you like and talk about it as much as you want.

> "How do you have a problem with this, but Marvel or Star Wars is fine"

Marvel and Star Wars aren't fine--the writing is execrable whenever they aren't outright plagiarizing something else.

Star Wars was schlock meant to sell toys that just happened to become huge. Marvel is pretty much just straight up garbage across the board (some characters are interesting--the stories and world though are pretty uniformly trope-ridden crap).

Modern movies also have the problem that a lot of their revenue comes from overseas--China in particular. They can't risk having writing that is either too subtle for a foreign audience or cover themes that might get them banned by the government.

Thus we get Michael Bay syndrome--spectacle after spectacle and the minimum writing necessary to connect them.

(To be honest--this is nothing new to Hollywood--Michael Bay can trace his roots the whole way back through "Towering Inferno" to "Noah's Ark", etc.)

I read Wuxia (chinese cultivation novels) which can go on for over thousand chapters. And often the plot is repetitive and thin, but I like it over cheap dramatisation that can be solved if the two parties decided to talk to each other (when there's no other reason that prevent them other than not wanting to). I'd take talking and not agreeing or being powerless over not talking and creating misunderstanding every day. Especially when the plot is all about not creating the chance to talk.

And yet, when we look around the world around us…it seems…prescient.

Excellent book that still delivers 3 decades after it came out.

I’m convinced Dan Brown read Foucault’s Pendulum and thought “cool idea, I’ll write two dozen sequels where the Plan is real and nobody is punished for their epistemological sins. Also what the hell is a semiotician? My hero will be a Symbologist!”

I've read most of the first two books. They're difficult because there's often no real structure to them. It's like written acid. Everything just jams together and you'll read all of the words, but somewhere along the line you'll notice you've started with a cop investigating a crime and now you're in the submarine of a crazy rich person.

It's an interesting book, and it does engage, but it is also quite the trip.

Seconding this. Rare to see almost exactly the same vibe layed out like this by 3 different authors like they were doing exactly the same thing but optimizing for different levels of reader sophistication / paranoia / drug usage.

This is sometimes called conspiracy fiction, and one cool thing about it is that the form as such doesn’t strictly imply or require a specific genre, so it works just as well with any or all of sci-fi / noir / historical fiction. Apparently renowned author Dan brown can easily understand that mixing with actual treasure hunt instead of some kind of forbidden knowledge is part of the formula for giving it the most popular appeal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_fiction

While we’re at it as the op of the post I’d also suggest people give ‘murderbot diaries’ a read. Lighthearted fun books is my jam and these are right up that alley.

The super bike is later in the book and temporary. When delivering pizzas he has a car so cool and intimidating it makes other drivers get out of the way so he can deliver pizza faster. But he actually wrecks it and looses the delivery job near the start of the book. For most of the story he doesn't have any iconic means of transportation.

YT: "Stupid name."

Hiro: "But you'll never forget it."

And then YT makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Stephenson's follow-up book, "The Diamond Age."

YT's skateboard introduces the telescopic contact smartwheels pretty early on as a Courier essential.

I don't recall Hiro's motorcycle being much a part of the story, it might also have had the smartwheels but isn't discussed until later...

It is kind of gross, but so are many things in many books, including in that one (eg all of the disembowelings)

For me it is less problematic than it could have been, because: YT is shown to be naive, reckless and impulsive, and Raven (is that his name? I think so) is an awful person just in general. The author is in no way implying that sex for those two is a good idea, in any way. It's just a thing that happened in the book.

It's also not a sexy scene, so it's not written to be titilating (IMO), and it's short and it does ~something for the plot.

Stephenson at the time Snow Crash was published could write brilliant sentences, so he took ten thousand of them and strung them together into a novel. He matured a lot after that, although I think it took writing the Baroque Cycle to work through his syntax obsessions.

Apparently he's written several - which one are you talking about? The most recent?

It's a been a really long time since I read "Foucault's Pendulum" and having never read "The Da Vinci Code" the similarities may have been projected onto them by me at the time.

I probably wasn't as open minded back then either. Well, at least I hope I'm more open minded know.