The Dan Brown Paradox

Dan Brown has a new book out, Origin, which means it’s time for The Dan Brown Paradox (DBP) once again. You know the DBP, that part of the Olympic Read-a-thon (he seems to publish once every four years or so) calendar to debate whether you will join in the chorus of groans and sighs, or whether you’ll remain a casual observer off to the side, knowing deep down you want to read it because it’s a win-win situation: if it completely stinks, you have much to gossip about at your next book club meeting (after revealing you didn’t read the club’s book o’ the month ’cause you were too “crazy super busy”); if you do like it, you get to trash it and feel somehow more cultured than the rest of society because you found the clues Langdon missed, and you can dissecting the grammer, Spelling and lexical diction of his writing gooder than any any other hacker.

I’ve read two of his “opi,” The Da Vinci Code and Inferno, and have to admit that he knows how to pen a page-turner. The history is questionable at times, the characters are coarsely wooden to the point of being full-time stiffies, and the dialogues are, umm…Surreptitious? Clandestine? Furtive? Sexy yet mild?

Still – and for reasons nobody can really explain – we want more, more, and more! of Mr. Brown’s trunk-filled junk. (Plus, in all the interviews I’ve seen of him, he seems like a genuinely nice guy, so whoever the hell said nice guys finish last can go and suck it because his net worth is now somewhere around $200 million.)

Whatever the case, I’m still an ardent believer that if someone can get you to read, there is, at the very least, value in that.

But there’s also value in poking fun at the super-rich guy because he’s, well, uber rich. That got me to thinking of what others were writing online about Mr. Browndon, and here are the three best reviews of Mr. Langrown I came across:

“Renowned author Dan Brown gazed admiringly at the pulchritudinous brunette’s blonde tresses, flowing from her head like a stream but made from hair instead of water and without any fish in them.”

“It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket. The voice at the other end of the line gave a sigh, like a mighty oak toppling into a great river, or something else that didn’t sound like a sigh if you gave it a moment’s thought.”

“The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. However, they added, it was also repetitive in some places, yet repetitive in others.”