I’m going to come out and defend Dan Brown. I’m now a big fan of both film and literature cheese. Oddly, it’s all the fault of James Joyce and Finnegans Wake. It was an attempt to read that bought me to a short, sharp stop. I had read the classics, the greats, and even enjoyed the struggle through the jungles of more tortuous texts. After all, that sort of thing built character (or gave you malaria).
After all that, if you squished my head erudition would spill out of it like water from a sponge.
Until the big bump that was Finnegans Wake, which frankly is fertiliser for pseuds. At that point, well, the mind finally realised that it craved cheese. And not just any cheese, oh no: Cheese Food Product. That’s what my mind needed. That’s what all our minds need.
Now, Dan Brown. Yes, the books are stupid. I mean, really hit-on-head trauma ward stupid. But they are reassuringly so. His characters could be cut out of cardboard and glued to a skateboard and given a shove. The plots are like a blind man joining the dots. It’s so bad that it’s good. It’s transcended any real physical measure of awful. And to be fair, Dan Brown does understand pacing. Read it breathless, while trapped in an airport lounge waiting for a jet that is never going to arrive, and the joyous sensation when you finish is similar to sticking a Sherbet Fountain up each nostril and then banging your face into a desk. Your entire brain fizzes with stupidity. You try that after reading Calvino and you end up having to explain why you have liquorice stuck up both nostrils to an unamused ER nurse.
Truly awful of late? I think I mentioned
Transition by Iain Banks. It was just bad. And sad, because I think he could write a good book, but he seems to intent on trying to write a ‘clever’ book, which he’s already proved he can’t do.
Sci-fi books annoy me. I should like them. My idea of fun is spaceship fisticuffs with a variety of exotic weaponry. What could be better than that. OK, semi-naked space chicks with even bigger neutron cannons. So why must they spoil it with multivolume epics that span the intergalactic gulf between dull and really dull. There can be nothing more depressing than reading several hundred pages in which nothing much happens to find the following fateful words as a tailpiece: ‘so ends Book 1 of the NachoWacho Poly-Quadrilogy.’ You fucker, you just spent several hundred page reciting the names of the characters. Go read a Dan Brown book.
Twilight. I tried, for research purposes, as I have a pet vampire. In the end I wanted them all to be attacked by a giant Satanic, killer dildo. That might have been the ending. Please.
Occasionally I meet my match. When I first got my Kindle, I was about to whizz off on a business trip, but I wanted to try it. So I surfed Amazon and downloaded some freebies. One of which was
this. It's free, I dare you.
