Review - The Lost Symbol

I remembered I had the ebook when my Creative Writing teacher gave us this. He was trying to illustrate some seriously bad writing for us. He succeeded. I needn't tell you Dan Brown's writing is terrible -- go to that link and you'll find plenty of evidence -- but he certainly isn't improving. It's not just his adjective-laden writing, or the adverbs (they're like Tribbles, I think), but also the clichés, the info-dumps, the lack of subtlety, ...

Do I need to go on? I've rated previous books of his with three and four stars, and I'm not sure why, but I'll let it stand since that was my initial impression. This book does fall short of even those, anyway, with the pacing shot to hell and a general lack of urgency about the whole thing. Somehow the disaster everyone's racing to prevent doesn't seem so bad.

At least the formula is broken a little. The mentor figure doesn't betray them.

I'm not sure what he was trying to do at the end, either. Add a bit of philosophy to make people take his work more seriously? If you're trying to write thrillers, dude, skip that, or at least make us more emotionally invested in it. It didn't work.

I don't really recommend it. If you're curious about the hype surrounding Dan Brown, read Angels and Demons instead.

Review - The Long Walk

I didn't like Stephen King back when he was pretending he wasn't Richard Bachman, so I don't know if I'd have recognised his writing if I'd read this then, but I think I probably would've. There's something about it. The main difference is the theme -- it's horribly human, much less supernatural. He always has something of the human in his books, I've found, something true, something that'll make sense to your ordinary sceptical reader, no matter who they are -- something about family bonds, or just the familiarity of the creeping horror, or a fear that sort of floats around, like a flu pandemic or the death of a child...

This book is much closer, because it's all about humans. It's a cruel book. You know from the beginning that the end isn't going to be a release, because you start off with one hundred characters and it's going to narrow down to one. That's cruel. I felt bad, rooting for Garraty, 'cause weren't the others deserving, too? There isn't a real winner, in The Long Walk, I think. The ending is interesting -- I can see why people call it weak, but it fits with the rest, I think, and if you find it an anticlimax, well, consider: maybe you were supposed to.

For something in which so little happens -- one hundred boys walk through Maine, and if they go slower than four miles per hour they get shot, and the winner is the one left standing at the end -- this is oddly compelling.

And my feet feel just a little sympathetically sore right now.