The fact remains that if it had been crap & had no ‘value’ - artist or otherwise - no one would have bought it & read it

Not sure I agree with that statement, there’s plenty of crap that people consume

Elton John’s updated version of Candle in the Wind is dreadful and ruins the original which was marvellous yet it sold gazillions. Yes, it was raising money for charity and that was the ‘value’ but it was still shit and I’m willing to bet that no-one still listens to it.

Star Wars Episode One - awful, made $1 billion at the box office and dvd sales rental. I don’t know a single person who could find any redeeming qualities in it at all. The only value was that people were hoping it would be good.

The final Harry Potter book could be an utter bunch of tripe but it will still be the biggest selling book of the decade not because it’s good but because people will want to see how it ends and that’s the value, not the fact that it’s good.

I did read the Da Vinci Code and the other Dan Brown books, mainly because I couldn’t believe that they could all be that bad.

Turns out they were. Save yourself the bother and avoid them like the plague, I’d rather rub chillis into my eyes that read another Dan Brown ‘novel’.

are you conflating goodness and notional quality with simply ‘fashionable’?

I get annoyed when people attack books like this. It gave a lot of people a lot of pleasure. People who don’t normally read books managed to plow through a couple of hundred pages containing some reasonably grown up words and may have learnt /something/ factual amongst all the fiction.

I didn’t enjoy it myself, but then I can’t stand Tolkien, Chaucer or Barbara Cartland.

Skepticism would have you disregard all reviews, solipsism would tell you that they don’t exist outside of your mind and common sense would tell you that you probably wouldn’t enjoy the book.

I actually thought The DaVinci Code was alright. It wasn’t the best book I’ve ever read, not by a long shot, but it was a decent yarn. Angels and Demons was better, but only because it was more fantastical.

In neither case did I give the grammatical errors more attention than the story. Grammatical errors and poor conjugation don’t ruin a book, a bad story does. Dan Brown writes good stories, that much I know, from reading them. Whether or not he writes these good stories badly or not is up for debate.

I agree with almost every point in that “The Dan Brown Code” link, but at no point does the article attempt to make any critical analysis of Mr. Brown’s storytelling abilities, and it is there that the article falls on it’s ass.

All good authors do both. Some do one so well that the other doesn’t matter.

You’ve just made my argument for me.

As you and I both know, movie adaptations are rarely even close to being as good as the book they originated from. I doubt the Da Vinci Code is any different.

You say different standards, I say different opinions. I liked the story in The Da Vinci Code (the book). I haven’t seen the movie, so I can’t comment on the storytelling in it.

One of the reasons I value you as a friend (and by extension, why I like your blog), is there can be great debates with you at times. The only problem is that a lot of the time, you find it totally impossible to see anyone’s point of view apart from your own as being valid. I did, indeed think Otherland was stupendously brilliant. And you thought it was merely “Ok enough”. That doesn’t mean either of us is right, or wrong. I said as much in the post you link to (and the comments therein).

You say different standards, I say different opinions. Neither is right, and neither is wrong, neither is of a higher standard than the other. They are merely different.

Surely it’s obvious Ade, that you can’t really go around slagging Dan Brown or TDC off if you haven’t read the book? Simple common sense really.

The movie was pretty bad. The book was pretty gripping, actually. Read Angels and Demons rather anyway.

You do rather seem to give more weight to the reviews that support your prejudices than you do to the ones that don’t.

I think comparing music and films to novels is risky because when you experience music and films you are essentially passive, what you experience is more or less what the creator wants you to experience. Reading is interactive, what you experience is a melding of the words with your imagination- the author’s job is to write well enough to be able to spark off that melding successfully- which is seems Dan Brown has done (esp considering the dry subject matter) for a great many people.

I read The Da Vinci Code (I think it is now part of pop culture, I’d be remiss to simply ignore it- besides, it only takes a few hours to read), and yes it’s trashy and it’s essentially a series of scenes in which the characters run from one place to another, stopping to recite from ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ every now and then. But you know what? Like most trashy novels, it’s gripping. Every chapter is a cliffhanger. You want to put it down and go to sleep, but you find that you can’t. This is what trashy novels are for, this is why they’re good.

Now you’ve defended trashy movies to me countless times. You spent more money on Domino than it would cost to buy this book (and you hardly need to buy it, pretty much every house on the planet has a copy lying under the sofa). And yes, I think TDVC, as trashy as it is, has actually contributed more to popular culture and critical thinking about religion than Ice Age 2.

From a different angle then.

Do you (everyone, not just Adrian) pursue every idea, every thought, every potential project?

No. You don’t. You think about them, maybe do a little research (if the idea warrants it) and then decide whether, or not, to go ahead.

In business land you’d need to qualify your reasons (for either, sometimes) with a business case, stating why the idea should, or shouldn’t, go ahead.

At the weekend my wife and I discussed changes to the garden. We talked them over, did a little research and decided not to do it.

We can’t ALL try EVERYTHING, so there HAS to be a point where we put our trust in other people’s opinions. I think that’s what Adrian is saying here (roughly).

It’s not really about whether the book is, in YOUR opinion, good or bad. It’s about why someone people haven’t read it, but others have.

Me? Read it, liked it, preferred Angels & Demons. But then I read any old guff, so don’t go by what I said…

Episode 1:

I don’t know a single person who could find any redeeming qualities in it at all.

Angels & Demons, definitely better than TDVC. TDVC is badly written, unoriginal, overrated piece of crap with dull characters, tedious exposition and my copy was obviously missing the “keep you up at night” cliffhangers.

Why did it sell? My opinion is this: there’s a disclaimer at the beginning of the book that says “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate” which, through miscomprehension, got people to believe that the fictional conspiracy theories were also true. This is how I first heard about the book - people telling me about this new conspiracy theory about the church that was, allegedly, true.

Then there was the incessant marketing campaign and promotions including documentaries and “investigations” on Channel 4, Sky and others. It pervaded the public consciousness in such a ubiquitous fashion that people had heard about it and then went out and read it. Successful Marketing: 1 - Undiscerning Public: 0.

As far as any initiation of debate goes, it was nothing different to Scorsese’s highly controversial “Last Temptation of Christ”. Or, for that matter, Kevin Smith’s “Dogma”. TDVC was considerably more popular but nowhere near as good. Or worthwhile.