How did this become a best seller again?

[clo_again]

Reading The Da Vinci Code. I've read worse and I'm all for the occasional conspiracy theory (never landed on the moon! Someone else wrote 'Shakespeare's' plays! Dinosaur fossils are the gods' little joke! And so on) because it keeps life -- and arguments with random strangers -- entertaining, so it isn't the story that has me wondering how to justify wandering off to watch some Hustle instead. It's just his accursed habit of wandering off on a tangent for pages and pages which yes, is a nifty way of keeping the exposition slightly more interesting but slows the pace down something awful. I'm closing on page 200 and they haven't even left the bloody Louvre yet.

In other cheerful News of My Long Fiction Reading List, play.com just sent me an email to let me know my copy of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love has been dispatched and Aristotle's Poetics is glowering at me from the bookshelf.

...Yeah, I'm not going to survive this term's reading. Only an English student would be reading Ian McEwan and Dan Brown alongside Shakespeare.

Comments

[lillyv.livejournal.com]

While home for the holidays, my family was talking about TDVC, and I grimaced and admitted I couldn't read it and had met a lot of writing students that couldn't read it. When my family started talking about that being pretentious and we were "just jealous that Dan Brown is making money," I had to inform them that no, that's not why. It's because Dan Brown is making money WITH BAD WRITING. Good story, bad writing. And I get pissed anytime someone makes money with a good story and bad writing, because I got bitched at for four years that it was better to have a bad story and good writing because that's what the artistic soul is about.

All I want to do with my writing career is be wildly famous and marry a rock star. Is that so wrong?