Dan Brown Revisited

Well, folks, apropos of nothing other than my hyperactive and attention-deficit brain having too many ideas and no time management skills, I’ve decided to break up my breakdown of Fifty Shades with another series of recaps that I’ve been wanting to do for years now, ever since I was still semi-active on my now-defunct book blog: Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon books. AKA, The Da Vinci Code and the other ones with the same guy from The Da Vinci Code. And readers, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I actually used to really love these books.

 I will say this for Brown; he’s fairly decent at the craft of writing itself–except for when he can’t help but grind the story to a halt to give a bad history lecture, or his tendency to write faux-empowered women with a strict limit of one per book, or his villainous caricatures with evil plans that don’t make sense, or the persistent undercurrent of racism and ableism. What I do suspect will makes these recaps slow-going is pausing to do all the fact-checking that Dan Brown couldn’t be bothered with when he was actually writing these damn things. And yes, I do understand that this is a work of fiction I’m dealing with, but as an author who has been carefully researching the real historical figures and time periods featured in my fantasy WIP and is probably way more afraid than I should be of getting called out on the tiniest unintentional inaccuracy in my writing, I can’t help but find this Falsely Advertised Accuracy (the trope that used to be called “Dan Browned”) and lack of care a bit insulting.

Just keep in mind that I’m not a historian myself; I’m just a nerd with a habit of going down Wikipedia rabbit holes that eventually lead me to getting a bunch of emails saying “are you the L. [insert real last name] cited in this paper?” because I signed up for an academic paper site to download stuff for my writing research and it turns out I share a surname with a semi-famous Hungarian scientist.

Angels & Demons