Da Vinci ____
Not only is The DaVinci Code not very good, it's being accused of extensive plagarism. But oops, Dan Brown sued first. (Brown's previous book also sounds like a real winner: the NSA are the good guys, and the EFF are trying to hax0r them with w0rms! painful summary, longer review.)
Tags: books, firstperson, reviews
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7 Responses:
And both are just re-hashes of "Morning of the Magicians" and "Holy Blood/Holy Grail". Back when I was going through my Deryni phase, I read a lot of that stuff. Interesting. Christianity would be a much more interesting and friendly place if they had allowed those concepts tobe incorperated into their dogma.
I personally don't have any dogmas, being an Erisian, I only keep catmas.
The Holy Blood, Holy Grail book and its cousins though are presented as being factual. The Da Vinci Code is just an inept attempt at presenting them in a fictional form, scrambling some of the 'facts' at the same time.
Even if it isn't a plagiarism on a grand scale, it is one of the worst books I've read for a very long time. The caricaturing of the police, French and British is straight out of Edgar Wallace, and perhaps this earlier book is also similarly inept.
Hadn't heard about the lawsuit or the plagiarism claims in either direction, but I have a copy of Perdue's _The DaVinci Legacy_ that I read when it came out. When everyone last year insisted Brown's book was original and creative I just started throwing either _Holy Blood Holy Grail_ or _The DaVinci Legacy_ at people until they went away.
I am reminded of Green v. Lindsey, 885 F. Supp. 469, in which a midlist SF writer sued a best-selling romance writer for stealing her plot. She lost. (In the opinion, which doesn't seem to be available online for free, the judge remarked: "The claims made in this case require a more detailed examination of these works than their literary merit would either warrant or induce.")
When I read The DaVinci Code, any last vestige of suspended disbelief crashed to the floor when I came to the author's assertion that DaVinci had invented public-key cryptography. You see, DaVinci had invented this scroll case with a combination lock that destroyed the contents if you dialed the wrong combination; this, as far as Brown is concerned, is "public-key cryptography". If I worked for the NSA, I'd feel insulted that a nudnik like this was on my side.
I DON'T LIKE CHILDREN'S BOOKS.
His books are god awful.
I had never read them, but with all of the buzz, I thought I would pick one up just to see what people were talking about. I was at a used book sale and bought Digital Fortress for $0.25.
I got home, read about 5 pages of it and then got up and threw it out - waste of time and money right there.
I was intrigued at first because I saw that Brown went to Amherst College which is the major rival of where I went to school. I figured he was likely smart and it might make for a good read - apparently not.
Not sure if the guy is actually retarded, or if he and his editors dumb things down so that it can be a bestseller.
But now when people talk to me about how much I should read the DaVinci Code, I just kick them in the genitals and then proceed to tell them they are stupid - you know, class act sort of stuff.
I saw "Digital fortress" the other day at my local megabookstore, and after what I had read here, I just had to take a look at it. In addition to what has already been said, there's a part of the book where a character is in Seville doing some sleuthing work, and as part of it has to call several "escort agencies". The names of these agencies are just priceless: "Mujeres España", "Escortes Belen" (yes, "escortes"!)...; basically, the kind of names that an american hack with just the most superficial idea of Spain would come up with.
(Not to mention the part where a virus is suspected of infecting NSA's codebreaking supercomputer, or the part where the main character is a complete Mary Sue, or...)