How to read this blog

This is an experiment in form. Prof. Remensnyder suggested I try writing about blogging in the form of blogging itself. I decided to push it one step further and actually write this essay as a blog.

The first real post sums up my experiences with blogging about Dan Brown and my thoughts on the innovations of blogging and the internet more generally. If you're pressed for time, this post should suffice in capturing my main points.

The rest of the blog is, effectively, my evidence. It consists of a series of posts in reverse chronological order, the standard format of blogs. Each post is either a reworking of a blog post initially published on my real blog or a post that could have been written at the time. It might make for some disjointed reading, but I think it captures the flavor of blogging well.

You can print out the whole blog if you'd like, but I recommend reading it in situ. Links are a big part of what blogging is all about. To read the blog off-line would be to miss out on the hypertextuality and collaboration that suffuses so much of the internet these days.

All the posts are, so to speak, "live." Feel free to comment on any of them. It's part of what makes blogs so innovative.

Reflections on blogging and the internet

Three and a half years ago, I read The Da Vinci Code. I had just finished college and I wanted something light and easy to read after the stress of honors exams. I had no idea that reading one book would lead to a number of exciting developments. Through blogging about Dan Brown, I've received a (retroactive) offer to contribute to a book, been cited in print, and (hopefully) convinced at least some people that Dan Brown is worthless when it comes to getting the facts right.

I didn't expect much from Dan Brown. But I had seen so many people reading it on the train that I figured it had at least some redeeming qualities, if only as a good commuting book. I wasn't at all prepared for quite how bad it was or how emotional my response to it would be.

That emotional response led me to writing a long series of blog posts on Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, and Angels and Demons that culminated in a list of errors in Angels and Demons. That list is still receiving comments and additions, nearly three years after its initial publication. While working for the Harvard College Library last year, I came across a French book on Angels and Demons that, lo and behold, drew on and cited my blog.

To this day, any number of google searches on Dan Brown will return my blog as the top result: Dan Brown errors, Dan Brown mistakes, Angels and Demons errors, and Angels and Demons inaccuracies will all bring you straight to my blog post. I view this as my most significant accomplishment with respect to Dan Brown. If I've convinced anyone that Dan Brown is full of shit, I've succeeded. My biggest complaint about Dan Brown's books is how they present themselves as factual. People buy into Dan Brown's claims of solid research. They need to be disabused of that idea, and my blog has, I think, helped do that.

Everything else that's come as a result of my Dan Brown has been a bonus. I was shocked to receive e-mails from the authors of The Da Vinci Hoax and gratified to find them receptive to my critiques. I was flabbergasted by linguist Geoffrey Pullum's short but telling compliment. And I was beyond proud to stumble upon my first citation in print.

My surprise at all these developments came from the very novelty of internet communication in general and blogging in particular. A number of blogging's features made my series of posts on Dan Brown successful beyond my wildest hopes. Chief among these are quick dissemination of information to a huge audience, facilitated communication between author and audience, and continued stability and availability of posted material. Throw in the ease and speed of e-mail and you've got a communication system that flows much more quickly and smoothly than was ever possible in the pre-blogging era.

The potential audience of a blog post is practically limitless. According to the CIA World Factbook, over 1 billion people worldwide have internet access. Not all of them read English, of course, nor do all of them read blogs. But it not a stretch to say that an individual blog post could, in theory, be read by over 100 million people. This would far outstrip the 60 million copies of The Da Vinci Code that have been sold worldwide. Dan Brown's readership is, of course, significantly larger than mine. The number of people who read my list of errors in Angels and Demons runs in the thousands or, perhaps, the tens of thousands. But the fact remains that anyone in the world with internet access could read my work.

That leads to another one of blogging's key features. It costs you nothing to read a blog and almost nothing to publish one. Blogging is practically free, both for the reader and the author. Access is almost immediate; type in an address and the blog will appear in a matter of seconds. Getting access a book requires time and money (or, at least, library membership). Accessing a blog costs you nothing.

Blogs' high level of accessibility would be worthless without some way of finding the material you're interested in. Search engines like google obviously play a crucial role in finding what you're looking for. The vast majority of the early readers of my post on the errors in Angels and Demons found it through google searches.

But as time passed, links from other blogs and websites became increasingly important sources of traffic to my blog. The first of these links came from the history blog Cliopatra. With a daily readership in the hundreds, Cliopatra can drive a lot of readers to your site. Links to my blog have appeared on dozens of other of blogs as well as in the Wikipedia article on Angels and Demons. The importance of hypertextuality to blogs and the internet in general cannot be overemphasized. Without links, the internet is just a morass of information. With them, trusted sources reinforce the credibility of each other and a network of respectable resources on a given topic organically develops over time. Without links from other blogs, my work on Dan Brown would never have gained the prominence that it has.

The interactive nature of blogging is best exemplified in one of the features that most clearly distinguish blogs from most other websites: commenting. Not all blogs allow comments, but the vast majority do. Comments set blogs apart from static websites. The quality of the commentariat can vary considerably from blog to blog. For most blogs, like mine, most posts don't even receive any comments. On most political blogs, many comments fall into variations on "You're brilliant!" and "You're stupid!" Commenters on academic blogs tend to adopt a slightly more elevated tone.

The comments on my post on the errors in Angels and Demons far outstrip every other blog post I've ever written. As of today, there have been 297 comments. Though some are critical of the project, most comments enthusiastically point out further errors in Dan Brown's work. Most of the errors I pointed out dealt with history and the art of Rome, two things I know a lot about. Commenters have brought to light a number of other major errors, a number of them scientific in nature. Just as Wikipedia combines the knowledge of millions of contributors, blog posts like mine on Angels and Demons can effectively aggregate and compile the expertise of a large community.

Blog posts, especially high-traffic ones, are works in progress. Already in December 2007 commenters have pointed out several more mistakes in Brown's descriptions of Rome. Blog posts have the ability to remain vital and vibrant even years after their initial publication. Unlike books and journal articles, blogs, by their very nature, keep the conversation going. And, as previously discussed, blogs remain easily accessible, right at the fingertips of anyone with an internet connection.

Compared to the collaborative achievement that is my blog post and its accompanying comments, a few e-mails from other authors who have written about Dan Brown feel rather anti-climactic. But they also represent how the internet has changed scholarly communication. Ten years ago, if I had a book like The Da Vinci Hoax, I would have simply swallowed my disagreements and continued on my way. But thanks to blogging, I had a forum to lay out those disagreements. Within days, I had heard from both authors of The Da Vinci Hoax, who thoughtfully responded to my critiques. After a few more e-mails back and forth, we all gained a more nuanced understanding of our respective positions. I came to recognize that Olson and Miesel had a more sophisticated understanding of history than I gave them credit for. And they came to see that Dan Brown wasn't quite the relativist they claimed him to be.

Discussions like these weren't impossible before e-mail, of course, but they were much more difficult. Before the internet, I would have had no easy way of contacting the authors of a book published by a small press. Even if I did have their real-world addresses, I doubt I would have taken the time to write out a letter. And if I had, I wouldn't have expected a response for weeks. Instead, the entire discussion took place in a matter of days. By lowering (and practically eliminating) the barriers to communication, e-mail makes conversations like the one I had with Olson and Miesel significantly easier. While some decry the atomizing influence of the internet ("Losers sitting in their pajamas staring at their computers for hours!"), the ease of e-mail has actually facilitated communication between people who would never come into contact before.

So there you have it. Blogging and e-mail have opened up all sorts of new ways of disseminating information and communicating with other scholars. Without my blog, I would have just railed angrily against Dan Brown to all my friends (which I still did plenty of). But with blogging, I had an opportunity to share my frustrations with a larger community and participate in what turned out to be a collaborative effort in debunking Angels and Demons. Between e-mail and blogging, scholarly communication and the dissemination of information will never be the same.

My first citation

In doing some acquisitions work today, I opened up a box of books from France. I always glance through the titles first to see whether any of the books look interesting. Anges et démons: Autopsie d'une mystification caught my eye, though I assumed it would just be a book about, you know, angels and demons. But it turns out that it was actually on my old albatross, Angels and Demons.

As I flipped through the book, it quickly became apparent that Anges et démons was basically a book-length version of my blog post. Lots of new material, but also a fair amount that could have been taken directly from my blog and translated into French. The material on how bad Brown's geography of Rome is sounded particularly familiar.

At this point I was pretty certain that Jean-Michel Oullion, the author of the book, had seen my blog. "Is this plagiarism?" I've never even thought of the possibility of anyone plagiarizing my work... let's try to get people to read it first, Danny.

So you can imagine my relief when I came across the final item in the bibliography:

Sur le blog de Danny Loss, nos lecteurs anglophones trouveront également un mini-forum de discussion sur les erreurs d'Anges et Démons.

I still think Oullion could have made clearer the extent to which he relied on my work. But for the time being, I'm pleased as punch.

More author contact!

At Waterstone's yesterday I cam across Secrets of Angels & Demons. Like Secrets of the Code, it examines the historical and theological underpinnings of Dan Brown's work. Unlike a lot of the books that have come out critiquing Dan Brown's work, the Secrets series isn't part of a project of rehabilitating the Catholic Church in the face of Dan Brown's challenge, which makes it resonate particularly well with me. I'm not really concerned about Dan Brown making the Church look bad. That bothers me only insofar as it's part of Dan Brown's unshakable habit of getting facts wrong. On that front, Secrets of the Code is right on target.

It also includes an essay by Geoffrey K. Pullum on Dan Brown's literary stylings. The essay mostly expands on the excellent series of posts that Pullum has written on Language Log about the damage that Dan Brown has done to the English language (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

I loved Pullum's essay so much that I e-mailed him to tell him as much. I also passed along my contribution to the dethroning of Dan Brown. Much to my surprise, Pullum e-mailed me back in just a few hours. I suppose I should stop being so surprised by these things... surely I'm not the only one who spends hours on the computer everyday and checks his e-mail more or less constantly.

In addition to expressing his thanks, Pullum also wrote, "I wish you had told me about your list of factual errors sooner. I would have passed along your name to Dan Burstein as a possible contributor to the book."

Whoa.

More Angels and Demons errors

Be sure to check out the still-growing list of errors in Angels and Demons. Readers have continued to post new mistakes in the comment section. Like Wikipedia has shown so well, with even a small percentage of internet users working together, you can compile a whole lot of knowledge. Everyone brings their piece to table. Keep them coming!

Dan Brown is a fraud: A list of errors in Angels and Demons

Enough of simply telling you how bad Dan Brown is. It's time to show you.

Dan Brown makes a big deal of the accuracy of his books and the time he spends researching them. On his webpage, Brown explains that "Because my novels are so research-intensive, they take a couple of years to write." The first page of both The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons has the heading "FACT". The following page in Angels and Demons claims that "References to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual (as are their exact locations). They can still be seen today. The brotherhood of the Illuminati is also factual."

Since Brown highlights his concern with getting the facts right, he opens himself up to criticism of the "facts" that he presents throughout his novels. And it turns out that Dan Brown, much of the time, is full of shit. What follows is a list of errors found in Angels and Demons. It is not meant to be exhaustive or complete. There are plenty of inaccuracies that I'm sure I've missed. Nor does it catalog the innumerable instances of infelicitous prose and implausible scenarios. Dan Brown is an awful writer - his language is pedestrian at best, his characters flat, his plots formulaic. But that's not my concern. My main problem with Dan Brown's books is that people buy into his claims that they're factually accurate. Call me a pedant, but facts matter, especially when you claim that you get the facts right.

My goal here is convince people that you shouldn't believe any of Dan Brown's factual assertions. He gets some stuff right, but he's wrong just as often as he's right. Go ahead and read his novels for fun. But don't trust a single word he's saying without doing further reading. Brown's either incompetent or careless. In either case, he insults his readers by getting so much wrong. It's amateurish, and he should be castigated for it.

I've restricted this list just to instances where Brown is flat-out wrong. There are plenty of misleading and dubious passages in Angels and Demons that I've left out due to the difficulty in verifying all of his errors. So this list is representative of the kinds of factual mistakes that Dan Brown makes. As you'll see, Brown has some knowledge on the topics he writes about; it's just that his knowledge is superficial and incomplete.

If you know of further errors in Angels and Demons or if you spot any mistakes in this list, please feel free to pass them on. And the next time you hear someone talk about how smart Dan Brown is, send them this way.

[For the list of factual errors in Angels and Demons, see the original version of this post.]

Final thoughts on The Da Vinci Hoax, relativism and revisionism

Last week I wrote a critique of The Da Vinci Hoax, by Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel. That critique prompted responses from both Olson and Miesel. Those replies have caused me to reevaluate my opinion of Olson and Miesel. I originally believed that their grasp on how history was rather naive and unsophisticated. It's now clear that they both have a firm grasp on the various problems historians face. However, I stand by my critique of The Da Vinci Hoax as a misreading of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

My purpose was to illustrate how Olson and Miesel misread and misinterpreted Brown's work and broadly tarred him with charges of relativism and revisionism, charges that are, respectively, unfounded and intellectually lazy.

Revisionism
Regarding Brown's alleged postmodernism and relativism, Olson and Miesel have made the following statements:

This [statement by Dan Brown] may strike some as thoughtful commentary, but it is simple sophistry, based on a mixture of popularized post-modernism and deconstructionism. (DVH, p. 27).

The offending statement by Brown, as far as I can tell, is this question: "How historically accurate is history itself?" I fail to see how asking this question is in any way "postmodern." To be sure, postmodernism is a notoriously difficult concept to define precisely, but is it really postmodern to question the accuracy of written history?

One of the great dangers of a popular, entertaining work such as The Da Vinci Code is that it reinforces the relativistic attitudes that are already prevalent in Western culture and offers additional reasons for readers to embrace such attitudes. [...] This idea [of relativism] is evident in remarks made by the character Robert Langdon, who talks about "faith" as being built upon "fabrication" and beliefs that cannot be proven in any way (DVH, p. 37).

Olson and Miesel's insistence that Langdon (and therefore Brown) is a relativist would be far more compelling if he weren't simultaneously obsessed with discovering the truth of the Holy Grail. At its heart, The Da Vinci Code is a detective story. Sure, there are bits of romance thrown in, but the central action of the novel is concerned with discovering the nature and location of the Holy Grail. And by the end, Robert Langdon has found the answer. This last bit bears repeating: Robert Langdon has found the answer.

Put as simply as possible, The Da Vinci Code is deeply anti-relativist in its basic assumption that the Truth is out there. The protagonist, Robert Langdon, makes one potentially relativist statement in the whole of the novel (at least as substantiated by Olson and Miesel). And it is this relativism that Olson and Miesel so thoroughly decry as a dangerous element of Brown's work.

Revisionism
On the question of revisionism, Olson and Miesel are entirely correct. Dan Brown's version of the past is revisionist and explicitly challenges long-held beliefs.

But there is absolutely nothing wrong with revisionism in of itself. All good history is revisionist, for it changes our understanding of the past.

Calling someone a revisionist is a lazy and almost meaningless attack. Anyone who suggests an analysis or interpretation that in any way differs from the current consensus is a revisionist. To be sure, some historians write more extreme versions of revisionist history. But this is not a bad thing. Only when revisionist views are based on shoddy research and interpretation are they bad, just as "traditional" views are disproved in light of new evidence and more enlightening analyses.

Olson and Miesel are tilting at windmills: the problem with DVC is not its revisionism but its inability to present the facts accurately.

Da Vinci Hoax authors respond

In the past few days I've received e-mails from both Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel, the authors of The Da Vinci Hoax, a rather successful debunking of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. They've done real yeoman's work in slogging through Brown's book to show how often Brown's ideas are completely wrong-headed. But they also seem to have some rather old-fashioned ideas about history, as I wrote about last week. In the interest of fairness and promoting further discussion, I'm posting the key points of Olson and Miesel's e-mails.

From Olson:

I'm not convinced that Brown does think we can know the truth about the past, nor am I sure that he could articulate, as you have, the difference between interpreting recorded history and figuring out what actually did happen. There is, it seems to me, a very fine line to be walked here, and I don't think Dan Brown is much for fine lines. I am firmly convinced that one reason his novel has done so well is that he relies on a relativistic notion of truth, while also claiming to have The Truth. Again, having it both ways.

[...]

In other words, Brown does make (as Sandra indicates and you well know) a myriad of factual errors. This is quite serious in its own right, of course, but here are other problems, namely his coy, slitherly remarks about history and it being "written by the winners" and so forth. This attitude, however poorly expressed by Brown, owes quite a bit to postmodern and deconstructionist thought, as I attempted to explain in our book.

[...]

Both Sandra and I understand the difference between the historical record and how history has sometimes been written; I'll also acknowledge that we don't make that entirely evident in our book, and so you make a valid and helpful point. But we can, I am convinced, know truth about the past, even while we might revise our understanding of particular events, people, etc. I have a serious problem with the statement, "We can't know THE truth about the past," since it begs a number of serious questions: Is that a true statement? Can we know the truth about the present? Can we know the truth about truth? Can we know TRUTH, period?

[...]

I don't think that Brown really takes history seriously at all; in reacting against his irresponsible and insulting approach, I may have overreacted a bit in the other direction. But I think it's unfair to say that our view of history is "awfully outdated," when our view is simply that there are many historical facts that we can and do know, and that these need to be taken seriously and address soberly. And we also know that there are many things that we do not know about the past and many judgments that historians will disagree about to one degree or another.

And from Miesel:

I was indeed a history major, specializing in the religious and social history of the Middle Ages. MA, University of Illinois; abd Indiana University. My old professor, the distinguished Reformation scholar Gerald Strauss, who taught me historiography, could assure you that I am aware of the impossibility of fully recovering the past. But the kinds of errors that Dan Brown makes require no lofty analyses of "discourse." He inverts and invents on matters over which there's not the least disagreement. (ie, who arrested the Templars; the significance of Templar architecture) He attempts to exalt silly, worthless sources at the expense of consensus academic authorities. And no, not all history is "written by the winners." Such revisionism and relativism were our targets. You have not demonstrated that we failed to demolish Brown's claims.

I'll post my response tomorrow.

Dan Brown's not alone in his historical naivete

My parents know me well. In their latest care package they included The Da Vinci Hoax by Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel. It's part of the slew of books that have come out recently that set out to debunk The Da Vinci Code. You know my feelings on Dan Brown. So I think Olson and Miesel have done valuable and important work in showing the many ways in which Dan Brown is wrong. I don't share their concern about the anti-Catholic implications of The Da Vinci Code (their book is published by Ignatius Press, a Catholic publisher), so I could quibble with some of the things they choose to emphasize. But on the whole the substance of their debunking is spot-on.

That said, I do think Olson and Miesel get some things wrong.

For starters, they give Brown far too much credit. They view The Da Vinci Code as a systematic effort on the part of Brown to discredit traditional Christianity (and Catholicism in particular) and replace it with a relativistic belief in the "sacred feminine." But it seems to me that Dan Brown is simply not smart enough to be as insidious as Olson and Miesel suggest he is. The problem with Dan Brown is not that he's anti-Catholic (though he may very well be); the problem with Dan Brown is that he just doesn't know enough to say anything informed or intelligent about religion at all.

Olson and Miesel go off the deep end when they start railing against the relativism and postmodernism of Dan Brown's writing. Again, I simply do not believe that Brown is smart enough to be either a principled relativist or postmodernist. Brown is not concerned with questioning the nature of knowledge or morality. He firmly believes that the Truth is out there. All he's doing is challenging the received wisdom.Put simply, Brown believes in a definitive answer regarding the nature of Jesus and Christianity, a position that relativists and postmodernists would never support.

Olson and Miesel's own vision of history is awfully outdated; no historian that I know of shares their opinion. Criticizing Brown, they write that "He openly questions whether we can even know the truth about the past" (27). Well, yes. Any historian who doesn't question the limitations of historical knowledge isn't being terribly responsible. We can't know *the* truth about the past, and to think otherwise is to display a remarkable lack of knowledge about just how history is produced.

This belief is based, as far as I can tell, on Olson and Miesel's conflation of history as it happened and history as the record of what happened. These are two very different things, and historians have been distinguishing them for a long, long time. Yet they claim that Brown's comment "'How historically accurate is history itself?' is nonsensensical since it rests on the premise that 'accuracy' is in the eyes of the beholder and therefore cannot ever be objectively gauged" (28). In this case, Olson and Miesel are simply wrong. It's perfectly sensible to examine whether history (as it is written) is historically (as it happened) accurate. Indeed, evaluating and improving upon older conceptions of history is exactly what historians do.

(Can I say how bizarre it feels to be defending Dan Brown's position on historical thought?)

The idea that our interpretations of the past change over time is hardly novel. G.M. Trevelyan, born all the way back in 1876, once wrote:

It is still too early to form a final judgment on the French Revolution, and opinion about it (my opinion certainly) is constantly oscillating. On such great and complex issues there can never be a final ‘verdict of history.’

The history found in books is not necessarily right, it's just the best guess of the historian. It should be reexamined and challenged. That's the only way our understanding of the past improves. On this question (and probably no others!), Dan Brown is right and Olson and Miesel are wrong.

I can't wait to start grad school

Onto the home stretch before I head off to England! In the meantime I'm just marking time around here. I went up to the high school last night for a football game... my sister's a cheerleader. She's tiny, so she's the one they toss up in the air. Impressive stuff, if nerve-wracking for my mom.

I ran into an old gym teacher at the game. After I filled him in on my plans, he asked what I wanted to do after that. I gave him the spiel... "Grad school in history these days is basically good for going into academia and not much more." He commiserated and suggested teaching high school instead (something I've considered). Then he came up with another suggestion: "You could be the next Dan Brown!"

Urgh. "Yeah, I guess. His history actually isn't all that good. If you look at the things he says carefully he makes a lot of mistakes."

"No, he says it's all true. I've seen him on TV. He's done all sorts of research into this stuff. Where there's smoke there's fire, right?"

Awkward silence.

So there you have it. People actually do buy into Dan Brown's BS. I'm not really sure how to counteract it. Is it even worth the effort? For my own sanity I need to do something. If the general public sees Dan Brown as a reputable historical authority there's something seriously wrong here.

Initial thoughts on Angels and Demons

A bunch of people have told me that Angels and Demons is better than The Da Vinci Code. And since I'm done work for the summer, I have all sorts of free time. There's a limit to how many hours of the Olympics I can watch each day. So back to Dan Brown I go. This time with my eyes wide open.

It's more of the same. More infelicitous writing, more factual errors, more bold assertions that just don't make sense. And I can't help shake the feeling that this was just a test run for The Da Vinci Code. Robert Langdon woken by a late-night phone call? Check. Nubile young woman? Check. Murder of adoptive father of said young woman? Check. Let me guess... the real villain is the guy who seemed to be helping all along! Wake me up when there's something new.

I suspect the fact that I know Rome much better than Paris is going to make this even more painful.

Dan Brown doesn't know history

Apparently I'm a glutton for punishment, because I just spent the last hour poking through Dan Brown's website. Don't ask me why. Perhaps I'm still just so astonished by The Da Vinci Code's popularity that I'm trying to figure out the man, myth, and legend that is Dan Brown.

The more I read of Brown, the less I think of him. Beyond the countless and inexcusable factual errors, Brown has an incredibly naive conception of how history is produced and how historians think. Take this quote from his FAQ page:

Since the beginning of recorded time, history has been written by the "winners" (those societies and belief systems that conquered and survived). Despite an obvious bias in this accounting method, we still measure the "historical accuracy" of a given concept by examining how well it concurs with our existing historical record. Many historians now believe (as do I) that in gauging the historical accuracy of a given concept, we should first ask ourselves a far deeper question: How historically accurate is history itself?

First, the well-rehearsed notion of history being written by the winners. Once upon a time, perhaps. But not anymore. Historians (at least the good ones) aren't concerned with presenting a past that reinforces the status quo. Historians try to understand what happened, not telling the story of the winners. History from below, anyone?

This isn't exactly a revolutionary idea. I learned that "history is written by the winners" back in elementary school. It's not a very profound insight. Yet Brown seems to think that he's revealing an important truth to his readers. Bland, obvious, uncontested fact is more like it.

Second, Brown expresses concern about measuring "the 'historical accuracy' of a given concept by examining how well it concurs with our existing historical record." I'm curious. What's the alternative? As I've written about before, historians are bound by the evidence available. Does that mean historians are incapable of capturing the totality of the past? Well, yes. But that doesn't mean that historians can make stuff up. If Brown wants to present an alternative history, fine. But if you're going to treat it as history, provide some evidence. Please.

It might be possible to just ignore these problems. Dan Brown, after all, is a novelist, not an academic. But Brown presents himself as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about history. He casts himself in the company of historians by pointing out that he, like many historians, think it's important to consider the accuracy of history itself. The implication, of course, is that there are historians who don't share this belief. If you listened to Brown, you'd think that there are plenty of historians out there who accept, without question, the findings of all previous historians.

This could not be further from the truth. Historians are trained to examine sources with a critical eye. That goes for scholarly history books just as much as primary sources like diaries and letters. Historians are willing and eager to reformulate previous conceptions of the past. For Brown to suggest otherwise is either ignorant or self-promoting.

Dear God is Dan Brown a hack

I finished reading The Da Vinci Code a few days ago. I never threw it across the room, but I did throw it down on the table in disbelief. A lot. I'm not even sure what annoyed me the most, so I'll start by saying something positive about the book. Yes, it's a page-turner and easy to get through. It's perfect reading for a commute... short chapters mean you have plenty of easy stopping points and it's easy to get right back into the action.

Aside from that, it's a trainwreck. The writing sucks. The history is laughable. The vague theological musing about the sacred feminine read like a '70s New Age tract. Worst (?) of all, it's all just a rip-off of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Geoff Pullum has a great post on Brown's stylistic atrocities. The opening sentence of the book ("Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery.") reads like a newspaper article, not an action novel. A bit later Brown has Saunière simultaneously freeze and turn his head. Then we have a silhouette staring! Silhouettes can't stare! Pullum has it exactly right: "Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad."

All that before you even start thinking about the factual inaccuracies. As bad as Brown screws up French geography, it's to believe he's ever looked at a map of France, to say nothing of actually going there (as he's apparently done). Versailles is *not* northwest of Paris. There's absolutely no reason why someone arrested in France would be sent to prison in Andorra. The Priory of Sion a 20th-century hoax, not an ancient secret society.

Beyond the obvious factual errors, there's also a ton of things that just don't make sense. You're telling me that Robert Langdon, famous Harvard symbologist, doesn't know French? There's stuff like that throughout the book. Not necessarily "wrong," but endlessly grating. Dan Brown just doesn't know much about what the world is actually like. It's like he exists in some parallel universe where buildings exist in slightly different locations, dubious archives are completely trustworthy, and art historians don't know French.

Now you could very easily argue that that parallel universe is the world of fiction. Fine. But Brown makes a big to-do about how much research he does for his books, how everything is accurate. Hell, the first page of the book is entitled "FACT." And people seem to believe him. And that's the real problem. If everyone just took this crappy book as fiction, I'd have no complaints. Or at least I'd shut up about them. But when people buy into Brown's pseudohistorical tripe, there's a problem.

My first book after college

Against my better judgment, I've just started reading Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. People keep telling me how much I'll like it... "It's full of history!" But I'm not terribly optimistic. This Language Log post alerted me to the oddities of Brown's writing. And I have to say, even just a few dozen pages, the writing is painfully bad. More than once I've wanted to throw the book across the room.

All that said, it's nice to have time to read fiction again, even if it's trashy airport fiction.