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.]