I've read all the Harry Potter books. Didn't like them up until the 3rd book, I mean who wants to read about 12 year old kids...
Speaking of which, just started reading Lolita. A podcast came up in my feed, where the presenter will be going through Lolita and its affect on the world. I knew nothing about Lolita, other than there being an old man and a young girl. So I googled for a precis. Probably the most disturbing plot I've come across, especially for a book that so many people seem to really enjoy. So got the annotated version, and will be working my way through it, and listening to the podcast. Just reading the introduction had me reaching for the dictionary one page in: Recondite. Pretty sure I have never seen that word before.
Re Dan Brown. After choosing the works of Dan Brown as one of my Mastermind specialist subjects, I think that in the summer of 2016 I was perhaps the foremost Dan Brown novel expert in the country (when I tried to think who would have committed so much Dan Brown trivia to memory, I was confident that no other sane person in the country would have). When I travelled up to the recording, I met another semi finalist (and at the time the reigning Only Connect champion), and it turns out that my choice of the novels of Dan Brown, had blocked his proposed specialist subject of the Robert Langdon novels of Dan Brown.
Dan Brown set out to write successful novels, and he created a formula. They're effectively tourist guidebooks with a ludicrous plot tacked on. Angels & Demons is a list of tourist attractions in Rome. Da Vinci code is Paris and London. Lost symbol is Washington, and Inferno is Florence, Venice and Istanbul (Digital Fortress, Barcelona). You won't realise it at the time, but it seeps in. You laugh at the plots when you read them, but a few months or years later, you have a hankering to visit one of the locations and then you realise it's because of a Dan Brown novel, and then you'll just fall to your knees and cry, because you realise that Dan Brown has bested you.
