Dan Brown Plot Generator

The big day has come and gone. What day you ask? Publication day for Dan Brown's long awaited thriller The Lost Symbol, a follow-up to the Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.

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These three novels have a number of similarities-- an intrepid and intelligent hero meets up with an alluring heroine in a major city; the pair then deal with a conspiracy involving secret codes and gruesome villains. Also, the author uses an over-the-top writing style to unravel the plots at break-neck speed.

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Though Janet Maslin gave The Lost Symbol a good review in the New York Times, Brown's style has drawn some satiric comment, such as an article in the British newspaper the Telegraph about Dan Brown's worst sentences. My favorite among these sites though is the Dan Brown Plot Generator, which allows one to choose a city and an organization, press enter, and bingo-bango a plot appears.

I'm not sure Dan Brown is worrying too much about these sites, however, as The Lost Symbol sold a million copies the day it came out.

Trouble with Reading

The August 9 issue of the Los Angeles Times contains an article called “The Lost Art of Reading” by the paper’s books editor, David L. Ulin. He writes that “Sometime late last year -- I don't remember when, exactly -- I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read.” He notes that with his particular job this is a problem.

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After giving some of his own background of being a voracious reader since he was a teenager, he asks “So what happened? It isn't a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else's world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine…. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page."

Toward the end of the article Ulin says “How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?” The last line of the article sounds both mournful and heroic, “It's harder than it used to be, but still, I read.”

Interestingly, about a year ago Nicholas Carr had an article in The Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that spoke about the same problem. We may have spotted a trend. I hate to say it, but maybe we need to turn off our computers and sit down with a book.

Book Blogs

For those of you who have read every post in the 10 Books Blog, but still crave more blogs about books, I've gathered some sites I hope you like. All have published posts in the last month. If you have a book blog you'd like to recommend, I'd love to hear about it.

Bookey Wookey

Bloggin’ about Books

Book Lust

A Common Reader

Ex Libris

Farm Lane Book Blog

A Girl Walks into a Bookstore

HPL Book Hunt

HPL Great Books Reading and Discussion Group

Incurable Logophilia

Inside Books

A Life in Books

Mysteries in Paradise

Paper Cuts

Reading Matters

Problems with Google Books Database

As someone who has had some success in using Google Books to locate the full text of certain books online and in finding which book contained a particular quote, I was surprised to see an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars.” In the piece, Geoffrey Nunberg chronicles a series of mistakes that appear when one searches in Google Books. These include having the wrong date of publication, completely inappropriate subject headings, and typos in titles.

I suppose it is not surprising that a project as huge as Google Books, which is being worked on at a rapid speed, is bound to have a few glitches, but this article suggests that mistakes go way beyond the “few glitches” stage.

Google Books is a valuable tool with great potential for making the information found in major libraries available to people around the world. Let’s hope that Google can locate and repair the errors in this database.

WSJ Article Says "Good Books Don't Have to be Hard"

I was happy to read a Wall Street Journal article by Lev Grossman entitled “Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard.”

Grossman says that most literary novels from the first half of the Twentieth Century-- by authors such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Henry James—fall into a category literary scholars call Modernist. These authors thought that earlier novels were too neat, with all the loose ends tied up ends, and didn’t reflect how life really was. The Modernists wrote stories that sometimes didn’t have plots one could describe easily, and which sometimes seemed to end abruptly with no real conclusion. Some of their novels contained extensive inner monologues called stream of consciousness. Sometimes it was difficult to follow which character had said a particular line of dialog. Often these authors took pride in the fact that their books were difficult to read. They would not pander to the common reader. They tried to appeal to readers who didn’t mind doing some work.

The automobile, telephone, radio and psychoanalysis had revolutionized the way people of the Twentieth Century traveled, communicated and even how they thought. Modernist authors thought that these changes should be reflected in literature. Just as Modernist artists no longer felt compelled to paint “pretty pictures,” Modernist writers did not feel they needed to entertain.

Grossman writes that times have again changed, and good readable novels are back. He cites such authors as Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, and Richard Price as contemporary authors who use literary language to relate riveting stories in various fiction genres. He notes that Cormac ­McCarthy, who Grossman says for years “appeared to be the oldest living Modernist in captivity,” has more recent writings that include a serial-killer novel and a work of apocalyptic science fiction..

Take a look at the article, and check some of the other authors Grossman mentions, and then check out their books at the Merrick Library.