<p>We just had our mandatory Dan Brown dinner where our class eats dinner and then Dan Brown comes to talk to us. Let me just say that I had heard before that he was a total d-bag but I didn't know he was this crazy. He kept teling us about his new belief that science and religion are intertwined and then he told us how they did an experiment where they had a group of people looking at water freezing that thought positive thoughts and then they had the same group of people looking at frezing water thinking negative thoughts and the one with positive thoughts made the ice look prettier. And then he proceeds to tell us that our soul weighs 18 ounces. He went on and on about things like that for a while somehow making questions that were completely unrelated have something to do with his new religion/science.</p>
<p>Who is this person? I’ve never heard of him…</p>
<p>^ Book Writer.
Writes stuff like Da Vinci Code.
[Dan</a> Brown - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Brown]Dan”>Dan Brown - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>O wow! Thanks for the link!:></p>
<p>sounds creepy as hell :/</p>
<p>too bad, i liked the davinci code : P</p>
<p>I know I liked his books too but he’s weird as hell.</p>
<p>He’s a terrible author.</p>
<p>Well sometimes you have to be a bit loony to write a great book. Makes a bit of sense, actually.</p>
<p>Wasn’t most of his book plagiarized?</p>
<p>If you have a decent taste in literature, or if you know basic cryptography, you will hate Digital Fortress.</p>
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<p>^Before you asked that - did you consider that if it was, it wouldn’t still be on sale?</p>
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<p>Oh, dear God, yes. If you want to read a cryptography-related fiction book, you’re much better off with Cryptonomicon, which, though it has its flaws, is certainly better researched.</p>
<p>Aside from that, Dan Brown’s just a horrible writer. All of his books have similar plots and similar characters. That said, almost there, are you sure he wasn’t just joking at this talk? Because that’s rather . . . well, strange.</p>
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<p>Not necessarily. There are degrees of plagiarism. The hardest part of writing a book (the part that typically requires craziness) is coming up with the premise. Brown’s premise wasn’t new. Doesn’t mean his book is similar enough to be pulled</p>
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<p>I’ll quibble with you here. The hardest part of writing a book is finishing the book. Just ask GRRM. Premises, OTOH, are a dime a dozen; you can sell a book on anything so long as you’re a.) a good writer or b.) aware of what will sell (e.g. Meyer).</p>
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<p>You said most of the book was plagiarised, implying that it was serious enough to be pulled.</p>
<p>And no, the hardest part of writing a book is not coming up with the premise (where did you get that idea?). Using someone else’s premise =/= plagiarism. You might as well accuse any book that takes place in a fantasy setting to be plagiarizing off Tolkien.</p>
<p>Brown’s “borrowing” of the premise was much more specific than just a fantasy setting.</p>
<p>Plagiarism’s a sticky ground. If it were up to me, Eragon’d be taken off the shelves this very instant. But, hey, what can you do? Sometimes similar ideas really are just matters of coincidence, sometimes they aren’t; it’s difficult to prove anything one way or the other unless there’s a solid author-to-author connection (e.g. Brown was a fan of [insert author, film maker, what have you here].)</p>
<p>There were similar accusations leveled against Rowling, I remember. It seems a pretty good chunk of famous authors get lawsuits thrown at them every so often just because they get lucky enough to hit it big.</p>
<p>Speaking of Dan Brown, I have yet to read his latest book. The Lost Symbol.</p>
<p>OMG, what you described in the OP sounds exactly like this movie we had to watch in a stupid class. It was called “What the bleep do we know?” (Yes, it was actually “bleep,” bot an expletive.) My teacher 100% believed it as well. Things like, the Native Americans couldn’t see Columbus’ ships because they couldn’t fathom them, and thinking happy thoughts makes pretty water molecules, and if you really believed in it, you could walk on water.</p>
<p>My Art History teacher brought up Dan Brown once. His main character Robert Langdon (I think that’s his name) calls himself a Symbolist, doesn’t he? My teacher was all “No! Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau are symbolists! Anyone in that profession would call themselves a semiotician or an iconographer.”</p>
<p>“That said, almost there, are you sure he wasn’t just joking at this talk? Because that’s rather . . . well, strange.”</p>
<p>That was the thing. You could tell he was being completely serious so we were all just like what the hell. He was like "I’m sure that this new religion/science (he had a name for it like noedic something for it) is going to be changing the face of the world in the next 15 years. And he managed to make it sound like a lot of it was his idea and he was a genious for figuring it out. Oh and about the cryptology thing he decided he had to explain what it was and how his character is a genious symboligist to us. And he was just a general ******. You knew he was the type of person who could talk for ours about a how great he was. And the worst part was you could tell he could go on for hours about how great he was.</p>