Books I don’t Intend to Read: The Da Vinci Code

#1 in another occasional series.

Sometimes, you get a bad feeling about books – particularly those that confront you in great piles as you walk into a bookshop. Just because a book is a bestseller is no guarantee that it’s actually any good. Barbara Cartland, for instance, sold shedloads of trashy romantic novels. Now that her dear pinkness has gone to the great remainder department in the sky, her mantle of bad writing would seem to have been inherited by Dan Brown. I mean, even the title of the book is nonsensical: "The Da Vinci Code". Da Vinci  literally means of, or from, Vinci, and it’s a prepositional phrase that needs to be attached to Leonardo  for it to make any sense.

And so it was that I was pleased to read Geoffrey K. Pullum’s piece on the book on Language Log. A small sample: "Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad". 

That’s a good enough reason for me not to want to read this book.

Sometimes I do consciously search out trash, on the basis that "it’s so bad, it’s good". Plan 9 from Outer Space, for example. But it’s not something that I can do for long periods of time.

I find it hard to imagine myself reading a whole book filled with mangled language like: "Five months ago, the kaleidoscope of power had been shaken, and Aringarosa was still reeling from the blow." As Pullum’s son said: What the fuck does that even mean? Perhaps Brown meant something like: "The kaleidoscope of power had been shaken and the orange-green pattern of courage had been consumed by the yellow-red jumble of fear"?