Bill Marsh. “It’s All Connected: An Overview of the Euro Crisis.”
Perhaps you, like me, came across a delightfully elegant, delightfully lucid interactive chart of the European financial crisis in the online edition of The New York Times last fall. Clicking through its various cataclysmic scenarios, watching the arrows shift and the pastel circles grow pregnant with debt, I was able to comprehend, for the first time, the convoluted and potentially toxic lending relationships between Greece, Italy, and the rest of Schengen Europe as well as the implications of this toxicity for the wider world. The reduction of such messiness into such neatness filled me with a familiar, slightly nauseating feeling of delight, a feeling I have since dubbed the infogasm. This fleeting sense of the erotic occurs only when a graphic perfectly clarifies complex phenomena through the careful arrangement of its visual data sets. The infogasm is instantaneous, overwhelming, and usually transitory in nature, leaving you oddly exhausted. Plain old text does not function with quite the the same epiphanic climax; by comparison, the written word’s magic is elusive and lingering, often revealing its fruits much later, after the article has been finished and put away.
In 1976, neuroscientist Douglas Nelson definitively described the cognitive potency of the image as the pictorial superiority effect. He and others have shown that our brains are essentially hard-wired for visuals—the very architecture of our visual cortex allows graphics a unique mainline into our consciousness. According to Allan Pavio’s somewhat controversial dual-coding theory, imagery stimulates both verbal and visual representations, whereas language is primarily processed through only the verbal channel. While there has been considerable pushback to Pavio’s theory since its introduction in the 1970s, numerous experiments have shown that imagery activates multiple, powerful neural pathways of memory recall.
Detail from Ingrid Burrington, “The Center for Missed Connections.”
For instance, when we look at Ingrid Burrington’s hand drawn map of all the missed connections posted onto NYC’s Craigslist in May 2010, we react instantly to the familiar visual representation of Manhattan and Central Park, but we also extend our own mnemonic narratives around the graphic. We replay our own experiences of the cityspace, our own missed connections at these “hot spots” of loneliness. We remember the girl with red geek-glasses who stooped down to give us back our pen outside of the LensCrafters on 81st St. We place our own mental pin on the map alongside the others. But what color do we choose? Are there different categories of missed connections?
We turn to the key for answers. Of course:
We turn back to the map, reexamining the city with a new filter. What’s with the trio of W4Ms at 85th and 2nd? Were these all the same person, a missed encounter on repeat? And why so few W4Ws? Who was that W4W in front of the Museum of Natural History? Was she about to enter the museum, or was she already emerging—basking in the wondrous glow of science—when she spotted the other woman? (Maybe the museum never entered into it.) Hundreds of possible stories like these spin forth from Burrington’s map, and from the visible sum of these individual happenings a larger narrative of urban voyeurism emerges. In straddling the visual/verbal divide, infographics like this map first gain entrance by using the succinct allure of imagery, but then linger in our imagination by nurturing our hunger for cultural narration.
It is no surprise, then, that our media are now saturated with such infographics, both on-and off-line, as a host of publications such as The New York Times, Good, The Guardian, Wired, Time, The Economist, The Believer, and The Wall Street Journal all regularly depend on data visualizations to provide their readers with that on-the-spot, quasi-highbrow sociological analysis. As one might expect, the output is decidedly mixed. Faced with a glut of mediocre charts and diagrams, there is now a backlash among designers and journalists against the overuse of meaningless infographics.
Here, graphic designer Alberto Antoniazzi pokes fun at the media’s ongoing love affair with the snappy graph:
Alberto Antoniazzi’s “Most Popular Infographics You Can Find on The Web”
His point is certainly taken: just because something looks good, doesn’t mean it says anything of value. And yet, as someone obsessed with the methodologies of storytelling, I cannot help but wonder about the hidden narrative mechanics behind the infographic. Perhaps my infogasm is not as superficial or ephemeral as it might first appear.
A large part of the infographic’s intrinsic appeal seems to lie in its visual reductionism of complex information. Reductionism itself is not inherently bad—in fact, it’s an essential part of any kind of synthesis, be it mapmaking, journalism, particle physics, or statistical analysis. The problem arises when the act of reduction—in this case rendering data into an aesthetically elegant graphic—actually begins to unintentionally oversimplify, obscure, or warp the author’s intended narrative, instead of bringing it into focus.
Effectively pairing depth with breadth is not a new problem. In his sprawling history of information, James Gleick describes how the invention of the semaphore, telegraph, telephone, and the first digital computer all posed significant discursive dilemmas by offering a simultaneous increase in the ease of data delivery alongside a necessary contraction of the language around this data. “The bit” was invented in the 1950s by Claude Shannon to describe the most basic unit of information, essentially an on-off binary—the amount of information required to decide a coin flip. The more possibilities, the more uncertain the eventual outcome, the more bits are needed. As Gleick writes, “Information is uncertainty.” In this context, the last thirty years have been particularly revolutionary because of uncertainty’s unprecedented growth—we’ve been forced to radically adapt the ways we interact, exchange, and conceptualize our society’s information currency. The gigabyte—one trillion bytes of digital information—has now entered our everyday lexicon not just in reference to a computer’s storage capacity but as a metaphor (however inaccurate) for the memory in our own brains. Surrounded by a rising sea of uncertain bytes, our culture has become desperate for effective ways to visualize and synthesize all of this data, lest we become completely overwhelmed, brought to our knees by a state of total noise (to borrow David Foster Wallace’s term).
In 1983, Edward Tufte—considered by many to be the Godfather of information design—published his now-seminal The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which began to articulate an ethos for what was then still a relatively nascent discipline. Since then, much has changed in the field of data visualization, especially once the graphically flexible web page became the standard information carrier and the rise of Web 2.0 essentially allowed anyone—whether they were a professional or an amateur—to effectively present vast datasets. But as futurist George Dyson points out, while our access to raw information has grown exponentially, our time to process this information has declined rapidly, which has placed an unprecedented premium on the act of meaning-making. Since we no longer have the time (or at least we don’t grant ourselves the time) to generate our own analysis, sift through the evidence, or weigh competing narratives, we find ourselves inevitably looking for shortcuts. And given a) our brain’s preference for the visual and b) the current complexity of our world, we’ve learned that the very best shortcuts usually come in graphical form, preferably with lots of arrows, preferably with some kind of interactive element that makes us feel like we too are actively crunching the data. Consequently, we’ve given today’s visual storytellers considerable power: for better or worse, they are the new meaning-makers, the priests of shorthand synthesis. We’re dependent on these priests to scrutinize, bundle, and produce beautiful information for us so that we can have our little infogasm and then retweet the information to our friends.
Ever-present but often unexamined, the expanding discipline of information graphics has been in desperate need of a comprehensive survey, a checkpoint to measure the field’s varied progress. Luckily, Berlin-based Gestalten Books has provided us one in the brilliant Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language. Like most cool things in my life, I first heard about Visual Storytelling from Maria Popova’s masterfully curated Brain Pickings. Sometimes design compendiums can come off as uneven affairs, but Visual Storytelling is a thoughtful, curated tour de force—it effectively encapsulates a watershed moment in information design while still managing to hold up as a standalone volume.
The book presents over 100 designers from around the world (not surprisingly, much of the best design work comes for Europe), gracefully organized across five chapters: Seeing the News, Viewing Science and Technology, Looking at Travel and Geography, The Modern World, and Observing Sports (the active verbs are telling). Perhaps my favorite part of the book is a section entitled “The Visual Storyteller,” which features a series of interviews with leading designers (including Steve Duenes, head of the visual journalism section at The New York Times) about their techniques, influences, and concerns for the future of the discipline. Several of their sketches and drafts are also presented alongside their finished work and it was helpful for me to see their work in this kind of context. Pulling back the curtain on their process made the sometimes overly slick infographic feel like a very human creation. These practitioners, like us, are constantly struggling with how to represent the world around us. Such an ambitious pursuit will always remain a work-in-progress.
Densitydesign. Draft for How’s My Fishing? Greenpeace “Oceans” Campaign
Most of the graphics in Visual Storytelling are terrific. Some of them are beautiful. Some of them are completely confusing. Taken in its entirety, the book feels like an honest, wide-reaching portrait of the field. But be warned: this book is strong medicine. When faced with a cornucopia of such infographic pornography, the brain begins to shut down, so in order to avoid infogasm overload, I recommend getting your dual-coding fix in small, measured doses, and then putting the book down and slowly moving away from it.
Several of the more successful examples in Visual Storytelling showed me just how nuanced the infographic’s narrative alchemy can actually be. Indeed, looking through this volume, I came to realize that skillfully rendered visuals, like any effective medium, present the reader with a layered release of storylines. An initial narrative will shift and deepen under sustained scrutiny, raising a series of questions that build off one another.
A terrific example of this is the illustration of the country’s overall democratic shift in between the 2004 and 2008 elections (also from Steve Duenes’s team at the Times):
“For Much of the Country, a Sizable Shift.” The New York Times. (11/6/08)
More effective than any text-based narrative, this graphic quickly illuminates how and why Obama got elected. Here we can easily see how almost all of the West (save McCain’s Arizona) shifted considerably to the left. This does not mean all these states went Democrat—of the Mountain states only New Mexico and Colorado voted for Obama—but rather that the barometer of the average American voter changed significantly. The only regions that went remarkably right of 2004 were Appalachia and the so-called Bible Belt, both places which would later become fertile grounds for the Tea Party.
There are also many questions here: What happened along the Texas/Mexico border? What about eastern North Dakota? Did Massachusetts vote more conservative simply because John Kerry was not running? Or was there another factor at play? The whole narrative of the election is not encapsulated in this graphic, nor should it be—infographics are at their best when they help you visualize one particularly illuminating trend that could not be told in any other way. The most successful infographics operate with elegance and restraint, and it is this restraint—this withholding of other information so that you can see a point clearly—that forces you to ask the big questions. When firing on all cylinders, infographics are almost always the beginning of a conversation, not the end of it.
Other graphics in Visual Storytelling demonstrate the fraught collision point of art and data, a grey area that has caused a lot of tension among designers and statisticians alike. There is the startling 100 Years of World Cuisine, a powerful composition that uses various containers of blood arranged across a kitchen table to tell the history of bloodshed in the 20th century.
Clara Kayser-Bril, Nicolas Kayser-Bril, Marion Kotlarski. 100 Years of World Cuisine.
By tackling such a complex subject as human bloodshed with the metaphor of food preparation, the graphic risks oversimplifying the historical and cultural forces at work in all of these conflicts. Indeed, when pressed, the metaphor begins to unravel, or at least raise unintended questions: who’s preparing this food? Why the creepy suspended ladles? Why are the Congo Wars about to get the KitchenAid mixer? Such quandaries highlight the sometimes thin veneer that can lie beneath a visual’s initial sensational impact. Then again, maybe this graphic is not asking for such close reading, nor does it claim to explain every piece of historical nuance. Its purpose is to be sensational and help you visualize what were previously murky statistics. What it does do well: show how relatively few people were killed in the Yugoslavian conflict (130,000) compared to the wars in Congo (3.9 million) or even the 1941 partition of India (500,000). Is this purpose enough to forgive the exploitative overtones of the piece? I’m not sure, but it certainly got me thinking about what infographics should and shouldn’t do.
Visual Storytelling also features a fine selection of work from Nicholas Felton, one of our more gifted manipulators of visual information. Feltron, as he is know professionally, is particularly adept at allowing an emotional resonance to rise from the coalition of what would otherwise be fairly stark data. His graphics and typography are pristinely rendered, with ample whitespace, but like all great storytellers, he knows that cultural (and personal) pathos arises from what data you leave off the page.
Nicholas Felton. “Rising and Receding.” McSweeney’s.
In “Rising and Receding,” Felton collects a surprising range of social indicators and measures their shift since the economic downturn. Aside from the 300% upturn in familicide, none of these markers are all that extraordinary on their own—people are buying more Kellogg cereals, donating more sperm, having safer sex. Pollution is down, sleep issues up. Yet this infographic succeeds because the collective collation and bare presentation of this data against the backdrop of a recession offers us a fleeting peek into intimate moments during hard times, albeit intimacy that is repeated across millions of households. Felton knows that to convey a trend most effectively, you must leave room for a dual narrative—the reader needs to process the information on both a public level (“Births are down?”) and private level (“Could we afford a child right now?”).
Felton has become well known in design circles for publishing his own annual report, in which he collects, graphs, and maps his personal life in numbers: miles walked, number of music tracks played, pages read, shoes purchased. He undermines our expectations of how a corporate annual report should function by co-opting the form to examine the banalities of the everyday: Social Stella consumption: 157, down 46% from last year. Occasionally he will throw in a category that is not so much a category but rather a story left untold: Burglars confronted: 1, at apartment window. These reports are so seductive because of their clinical composition and yet from this austerity, a kind of universal vulnerability emerges. We know it is much messier than these clean lines of data suggest. In his attempt to summarize a year of his existence entirely through statistics, Felton essentially points to the beautiful impossibility of this task.
Nicholas Felton, “2010 Annual Report.”
Visual Storytelling includes an excerpt of his 2010 annual report, in which he turns the lens of examination onto his recently deceased father. Many who have lost a parent are familiar with the task of sifting though a lifetime of mementos, receipts, and photographs, but Felton takes this process a step further by using all of his father’s detritus to fashion a comprehensive notitia memoriae—charting the life of a man who was born, who lived, who worked, who bore children, who loved, who died. We are more than sum of such evidence, but the evidence itself is at once heartbreaking and triumphant.
Beyond these data-driven graphics, Visual Storytelling contains an array of more abstract, artistic pieces that provide a nice counterpoint to all of the nerdy number-crunching that often dominates the field. These are not infographics per se, but they ask questions of our intense relationship to images by playing with familiar visual tropes. We have grown so comfortable with graphics in our lives that we often forget to maintain any kind of critical awareness about how infographics function, how they lure us in, how they tell their stories, how they can lie to us.
Toilet Paper magazine’s segmented fingernail feels sensual and subversive, yet utilizes a visual language of declension that we immediately recognize from our chart-heavy lives:
Maurizio Cattelan, Pierpaolo Ferrari, and Micol Talso. “Untitled.” Toilet Paper, Vol. 2
Yet there are no scales, no reference points, no key: what is growing smaller here? Is it us? Or are we the culmination of the graph? By leaving so much unspoken, the image implicitly asks us what happens when our bodies become the new pallets for information design. How will we mark out units? And what will the units be? Perhaps this process has already begun.
Maria Fischer’s Traumgedanken is a book on dreams that employs colored threads to connect and cross-reference ideas, calling into question the physical manifestation of the hyperlink:
Maria Fischer. Traumgedanken.
HTML linking is so familiar to us now that it has essentially become invisible: we rarely stop to think about the implications of these virtual threads on sourcing, intellectual property, clarity of thought. We think: there is a link, so it must be connected. But is this bit of code enough? Will association eventually replace all exposition?
This is not to say that everything contained in Visual Storytelling is a perfect culmination of the genre. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, the volume also contains several overburdened examples of information design, where the visual language of the graphic has completely obscured the meaning. Yet these failures were some of the most interesting images for me. We can learn a lot when the designer has lost the forest for the trees:
Francesco Muzzi. “La Fabbrica del Sapere.” Wired Italia.
Francesco Muzzi’s illustration of the Italian education system is graphically busy, like a Terry Gilliam movie gone wrong, but it’s also trying to do way too many things: to cover daycare through graduate school, to chart dropout rates, hours at school, and numbers of teachers, to list teacher salary, student debt, and graduates searching for work abroad. The designer makes the mistake of thinking complex data needs complex presentation, when in fact the opposite is true. One sees this same kind of visual cacophony all over the media. Readers (myself included) are guilty of succumbing to such colorful temptations: we see lots of bells and whistles, and even if we don’t really understand what’s going on, we feel as if we are absorbing (via osmosis?) something potentially deep and prescient from all that data.
Ironically, Andrew Losowsky’s introduction to Visual Storytelling, the most text-heavy section of the book, is one of the few sections that is poorly executed, suffering from some of these same symptoms of over-design:
The introduction to Visual Storytelling: So much text, so little time.
Heavy quotations, unresolved and unexamined, slap you in the face as you try to follow the meandering text columns. The physical congestion of words on the page quickly overwhelms the actual content of the words themselves, as if the act of reading was a mere afterthought. It’s comforting to know that text still needs quiet order to function well, and particularly in this age of hyper-stylized form, there’s the constant risk of gilding the lily. I often feel this kind of pummeling when I’m trying to work my way through certain webpages with multiple, unrelated threads all vying for my attention.
Fittingly, in this same spatially fraught introduction, Losowsky touches upon the dangers of graphic imprecision when he points to the epidemic of errors in infographics that depicted Osama Bin Laden’s death. These widespread mistakes, picked up and repeated across a wide swath of publications, prompted graphic designer Antonio Giner to pen the Statement Against Fictional Infographics, subsequently signed by 107 designers from 27 countries. The six-point manifesto culminates in this demand:
6. Infographics are neither illustrations nor “art”. Infographics are visual journalism and must be governed by the same ethical standards that apply to other areas of the profession.
Whether this distinction can be made in practice remains to be seen. Visuals are a notoriously slippery medium. Thousands of minute decisions (or non-decisions) go into a graphic’s formulation—everything from color to scale to line thickness to use of symbols. Seemingly simple questions of graphical form can have powerful implications.
This was never more evident than during the health care debates in 2009, when Rep. John Boehner produced a maddening flow chart of the Democrats’s health care proposal at one of his press conferences, presumably in an attempt to underscore the plan’s inefficient bureaucracy:
Boehner’s mindfuck of a flow chart.
This deliberate obscuration of the issue by way of poorly assembled visuals rubbed many designers the wrong way. Boehner’s flow chart set off what data visualizer Alex Lundry called “Chart Wars,” in which tasteful redesigns of the same graphic demonstrated just how subjective and influential the visual presentation can be. This is always true, but with data visualization, the old adage is essential: the form is the content.
Beyond political fisticuffs, poor design decisions can have serious, even deadly, consequences. During the critical days prior to the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, while the damaged shuttle was still in orbit, a team from Boeing was asked to make a diagnostic Powerpoint presentation to senior NASA officials predicting the extent of damage to the wing and the risks of the shuttle reentering the earth’s atmosphere. Boeing’s presentation was incredibly convoluted, hampered in large part because of the inept visual delivery of its information. Edward Tufte, a longtime critic of Powerpoint’s bureaucratic clumsiness, painstakingly analyzes one of the Boeing slides:
From Edward Tufte’s “Powerpoint Does Rocket Science: Assessing the Quality and Credibility of Technical Reports.”
Tufte points to the elaborate, meaningless hierarchy built into the Powerpoint program that here manifests in six levels of information, denoted by a range of dashes, shrinking bullet points, and throwaway parentheticals. In fact, the executive summary at the top of the slide is slowly undermined by each successive point, though this is lost in the slide’s garbled techno-speak. “Significant” or “significantly”—a vague but promising word—is used five times, each time with slightly different meanings, none of them referring to “statistical significance.” The lack of clarity in this presentation eventually contributed to NASA’s conclusion that it was safe for the shuttle to return to earth, a decision that would end up proving fatal.
Despite the great pleasures of the infogasm, it is evident that now, more than ever, we must be cautious with our information design. Visuals are easy to make, but they are also easy to fake, and their allure can turn them into potentially dangerous pieces of evidence. Despite Giner’s manifesto for clear standards in visual journalism, infographics—guided by designer, journalist, statistician, and artist alike—will probably continue to operate in that grey area between fact and fiction, egged on by our insatiable hunger for their graphical eros. I don’t think such fuzziness is all bad—most new fields, particularly those with wide-ranging sociopolitical implications, need time to find their footing and carve out a particular disciplinal language. This does not mean such negotiation should be a passive process. We need more excellent surveys like Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language to help us celebrate quality, shun mediocrity, and articulate the criteria for how infographics can remain luminous and profound. Beyond just disposable feel-good fodder for the Twittersphere, data visualization is the emblematic medium of our times, and the natural evolution of its form might be the greatest predictor of what is to come.
I am on record, both in this magazine and in my local newspaper, as an enthusiastic defacer of books. Recently I had a new kind of marginal experience that I would like to share: the pleasure of joint, or (as they say in grad seminars) “dialogic” marginalia.
For the last few years, I’ve been telling people that “Angels and Demons” is the trashiest book I’ve ever read (no small achievement). It’s nice to know that Brown has persisted with his style of banality, incredulity and ponderous literary/historical scavenging – without actually having to read his books!
Lousy writing is so much fun!
So instead of spending your time, money, and energy on, say, a terrific yet under-the-radar writer, you purchased Dan Brown’s latest book, read it, made “amusing” comments in the margins, and then wrote an article with the revolutionary premise that Dan Brown is a shitty writer. (If I had been able to write a snarky comment in this essay’s margins, it would have been: Thanks for this invaluable and thought-provoking cultural contribution!)
There is something terribly depressing in this image of the literary intelligentsia sitting on their thrones and ironically reading bad books. Come on, Sam and Dave, don’t give up on literature just yet!
I could likely do something very similar with DFW’s works as well.
While we’re on the subject of poor writing, please let me edit out the word “basically” from this margin note: “I basically haven’t been able to picture anything he’s described.” Thank you.
My friends and I did this in high school with some kind of series aimed at teen girls that revolved around cheerleaders. If you were fourth or fifth in line to read you would cry with laughter all the way through.
Every time I read the banal comments about my own writing, I look at reviews for Dan Brown. And I rage, “How did this man get published and all I get are rejections and criticism about my cliches and grammar errors. Of course, having a sane and dependable proof reader and an editor would help those things… but they also stop my books from being professionally published. How does Brown do It? And how can I convince his readers my stories are at least moderately better?
This article, while not revolutionary, serves a similar purpose as Brown’s novels. I was much more entertained by this than I was ‘Angels and Demons’ and ‘The DaVinci Code,’ particularly David’s “EAT SHIT” annotation.
For 20 years I worked at a publishing house that makes recorded books, and I learned more from about good writing from hearing books read out loud than I did getting a BA in English. And O! Does this piece remind me of those days! We had no choice but to read these things and margin-comments were our way of relieving the agony. What we figured out is that anybody could get anything published if they are persistent enough (and this was in the days before self-publishing on a massive scale.)
I think most people just scan and miss the silliness of so much writing and therefore don’t understand what we’re making a big deal about. I often feel like I’m speaking a different language when I discuss actual quality of writing, even with people who love reading, so I get comfort from stories like these!
And Shannon, it also comforts me to know that there are high school kids care too.
Our favorite person to pick on, btw, was Piers Anthony. There are some people in my city that very seriously wish he’d die so he won’t write more books.
@Zach. No you can’t. Just go and pick up Infinite Jest next time you’re in a book store and think about what you wrote.
First off, great read, I love this kind of MST3K approach to glossing works, hope to see more of it in the future.
Secondly, I thought I’d repost my comment from a reddit discussion going on about this very article. It took me much longer than I planned on investing in it, and I would hate to see all that effort potentially buried under what I can only expect to be a torrent of downvotes.
My response:
People have problems with Dan Brown’s writing because he so consistently and persistently ‘gets it wrong’. And people who do care about things like characterization, plausibility, and intelligent prose are going to have problems with his writing. Most just shrug and look the other way, but others are genuinely concerned that something with so many issues can achieve such unparalleled success.
I don’t personally think it’s a problem to read Dan Brown, and I take issue to people who say “Don’t read this book because it’s bad”, but the problem is when people start throwing all these nonsensical adjectives praising Dan Brown. I have a BA and an MA in English Lit, so I guess it’s fair to say I can easily be chucked in with the book snobs of this world, and though I will admit I’ve read all of Brown’s works for fun, I cannot concede that either his writing style or his books have any value beyond being an in-flight read. At very least his prose is terribly sloppy, to say nothing of his blatant disregard for coherent characterization. A sentence like “Atop a control tower in the distance, the Turkish flag fluttered proudly–a field of red emblazoned with the ancient symbols of the crescent and star–vestiges of the Ottoman Empire, still flying proudly in the modern world” shouldn’t have made it past the first draft stage, much less made it past the editor. As the article above points out, it’s a repetition for starters (we get that the flag is fluttering), but the big problem for a grammarian like me is this:
The antecedents of “vestiges” are “the ancient symbols of the crescent and star”, but since these two terms appear in the parenthetical phrase “a field of red…”, this means they don’t function as part of the grammar of the sentence. So what we really have written here is “Atop a control tower in the distance, the Turkish flag fluttered proudly, vestiges of the Ottoman Empire…” HUH? The ‘flag is vestiges’? Grammatically that’s nonsense. Ok, so the control tower with the flag are vestiges of the Ottoman Empire? That doesn’t make any logical sense, a control tower is not a vestige of the Ottoman Empire. So clearly he meant the ancient symbols are vestiges, but his awkward and broken syntax has rendered the statement illogical and grammatically incorrect.
Doing this once would be fine, but Dan Brown does this a lot, and then makes a lot of money for this kind of writing. But this is his profession. It’s his job (if not to get this right, then at least to try. It’s not like it’s his shtick to flaunt the flaunt the rules of grammar and syntax, if it was I would shut up). If a factory worker messed up like this, and did so consistently, we might not fire them, sure, but we certainly wouldn’t be giving them a massive raise and calling them one of the best workers in the field. Or, if we did, a lot of his fellow workers (and perhaps even a few laymen) might start to wonder just what the hell some people were thinking, and they might take to a forum (like the internet) to express those valid concerns. But again, that doesn’t mean Dan Brown shouldn’t be read, or even enjoyed; people can do whatever they want. But the problems with his prose are alone the reasons why his works will never be compared favorably to Moby Dick.
TL;DR English major tries to explain a potential reason why people take issue with Dan Brown’s writings.
Frankly, the writer sounds like a little bitch, but maybe that’s just me. Like Brown’s writing or not, there has to be better things to do with one’s time.
@T: there has to be better things to do with one’s time
Like calling a stranger a “little bitch”?
@Sly
Infinite Jest is unimpeachable in its totality (and one of the few books I love with no reservation), but Broom of the System has room in the margins for no little snark. It’s the kind of freshman work that should have stayed in a drawer–not because it’s so bad, but because it’s the clearly underdeveloped work of someone whose later talent renders it disappointing in retrospect. Plus there is some real boring shit in it.
Anyway. Writing about Dan Brown on the Millions is like showing a latter-day Adam Sandler vacation home movie at Cannes. Yes, he is a writer of books, and this is a website about books, and there ends the common ground.
What if I wanted to read Dan Brown’s book to learn about history in a fun setting? All the facts in his books are verifiable (especially in the day and age of all mighty Google) so what’s wrong with that?
Please do a similar one on Paul Auster!
DB’s writing is dumb and boring and he doesn’t develop any interesting ideas that are clearly his own. The only thing that makes him of interest to me is that he raises the question of what publishers are looking for and why. Once in a while no-talent hacks rise to fame and fortune for no good reason, they just happened to know somebody and show up on the right day.
@Rastaman426
Reading Dan Brown to learn about history is like those people who read sparknotes on classics so they appear to be well-read. Besides, that’s what Dan Brown does. He skims the surface of history looking for little anecdotes he can adapt into a story or simply boring filler to boost his word count. There are some entertaining history and autobiographical texts by real historians or influential people. You’re better off learning and being entertained by first-handers and people who actually know what they’re talking about. Perfect example: Guns, Germs, and Steel.
And yet, Dan Brown has made way more $ than the author of this article. Oh, and people have heard of Dan Brown’s name whereas nobody knows who ‘Sam Anderson’ is. Lol.
We have three dogs named (from left to right) Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, and The Hardy Boys. Thanks for giving them a shout out on the DEATH MASK page. They’re great dogs and they are not fans of Dan Brown either.
some seriously dickish comments here. i liked brown as a child, but recently listened to Inferno on a long road trip. rolled my eyes so much it was a driving hazard.
Deliciously funny. It reminded me of Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html
Danikova sounds an awful lot like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.
Thank you for so humorously capturing the ridiculousness of this book! Will you please do The Lost Symbol, too? There are so many great moments in that one, from the breathless students in his Harvard lectures to the female character that he uses every synonym for “fat” to describe any time she appears.
I feel so validated. For my community college Creative Writing final, I used to make my freshmen and sophomores read the first chapter of the DaVinci Code and tell me why it was crap. Now I do it with Stefani Meyer’s Twilight. Thank you for writing this.
“And yet, Dan Brown has made way more $ than the author of this article. Oh, and people have heard of Dan Brown’s name whereas nobody knows who ‘Sam Anderson’ is. Lol.”
Well, that settles it then. Brown’s books have made him very rich. He must be right and Anderson must be wrong, because we all know that money is the final determination of literary quality.
Move along people.
Nothing else to see here.
For being an artisanal pencil sharpener, David’s red pencil doesn’t seep all that sharp…
Both hilarious and sad. The latter, because there are so many writers out there who can write much better than this but do not get to make even a small percent of Brown’s millions. It makes you sad for what this means for our culture, our humanity….. (ellipsis intended).
Anyone read the 50 Shades of Grey books? They are *worse* than Dan Brown
@weasel soup:
I haven’t read 50 Shades, but, in 2012, I did come across this hilarious blog where the blogger did a close reading of them, chapter by chapter, and blogged her thoughts. I found her posts very entertaining and wonder if they might sell more if made into a book. But, that’s not likely to happen, sadly.
http://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.com/2012/05/announcing-bad-idea.html
You’ll have to browse through using her labels / categories as it’s not easy to find the posts chronologically.
Apparently, there have been similar deconstructions of the Twilight books online too, though I haven’ read those.
@Ryan Ries
So instead of spending your time, money, and energy on, say, a terrific yet under-the-radar writer, you purchased Dan Brown’s latest book, read it, made “amusing” comments in the margins, and then wrote an article with the revolutionary premise that Dan Brown is a shitty writer. (If I had been able to write a snarky comment in this essay’s margins, it would have been: Thanks for this invaluable and thought-provoking cultural contribution!)
There is something terribly depressing in this image of the literary intelligentsia sitting on their thrones and ironically reading bad books. Come on, Sam and Dave, don’t give up on literature just yet!
LITERATURE!!! ;__;
Yeah, you guys! Why do you have to be so negative? Can’t you be more positive? Okay, so you don’t enjoy Mr. Brown’s writing. Well, lots and lots of people DO enjoy it! They can’t all be wrong, can they? So why don’t you guys write about a book that you DO love instead of one that you DON’T love. Then SHARE that love with all of US, so that we can all enjoy that love, TOGETHER!
If you did that, it would be a really beautiful thing.
Chemondelay
Yes, don’t give up on literature, as in, don’t waste your time on lazy, lowest-hanging-fruit essays like this and instead challenge yourself to find and celebrate a real piece of art.
@ Jenny Bhatt
Thanks for the link! I can in turn recommend the recaps at http://jennytrout.wordpress.com/jenny-reads-50-shades-of-grey/ and http://www.snarksquad.com/category/books-2/fifty-shades too (that’s a lot of recaps, but they’re both great takedowns as well.
I guess I like the schadenfreude of reading about why bad writing is bad…
Seriously, this hit Broadway musical idea of yours sounds amazingly spectacular and I highly encourage you to do it.
LOL Good work The Millions! Spoiler Alert: Dan Brown’s next book is a “Choose Your Own Ending” (remember those) published by Scholastic and sold to unsuspecting middle schoolers….
Sam and Dave.
Love it.
Now I want “Sam and Dave Go To The Opera”
Having gotten over my initial mirth, I am now wondering, rather glumly, about the publishers and editors who allowed so many glaring issues to see the light of day. I mean, really, didn’t someone at Doubleday say, sure, it’s bestselling Dan Brown, but, you know, let’s have someone read the thing before it goes to print. Or, did they just decide that there would be plenty of readers who wouldn’t care for decent writing, so, why bother? Either way, shouldn’t these careless publishers and editors be held just as responsible as the writer for inflicting this stuff on the reading public?
Someone should get a Doubleday rep on the phone/email/Twitter, present them with this marginalia and at least pose the question.
@haints
“They can’t all be wrong, can they?”
YES. They can. They are. They will be. Just because one knows how to read, doesn’t mean one need be thoughtful or even smart. Reading well, however, reading with even a smidgen of critical input, reading with the responsibility to complete the circle of the story that the writer has started—doing this takes more than scanning words with the same attention one gives to a Sharper Image catalog or a copy of Varmint Hunter.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long while. And reading humorous takedowns of prose we know is bad often does more good for me as a writer than reading a good story. I know, it shouldn’t be this way, but by the end of the piece I was thinking that a great craft book could be entitled ‘Just Don’t(…)” – then it could be filled with DB excerpts (and zillions of other authors) and the red and black marginalia from this wonderful duo. Over many years of reading accepted good writing, arguably passable writing, and certain bad writing, I often revisit my own work most effectively and with more confidence (less vitriolic self-criticism?) after reading first-draft-unedited-but-shockingly-published stinky garbage like Dan Brown.
To know you might have a chance of penning a better than average story, a story that might have some legs, a story that proves you have more talent than Dan Brown or your other favorite ham-handed typer, you only have to read his line, ‘Apparently a background in drama could be a versatile weapon.’ If you read that with your mouth full and you don’t choke on your food with a gut laugh and think ‘Holy shitballs, my cat writes better than that when she runs across the keyboard,’ then you haven’t a chance on earth.
Thanks, guys. This was a gas.
PS – @Ryan Ries – I’m pretty darn sure Sam and David didn’t make “amusing” comments. They made amusing comments.
But, there is such a thing as paroxysmal positional vertigo. I have no idea what the book is about…..is it still dumb even though this is a real condition? Not defending the book in any way.
Keep it up. This is funny and righteous. I also recommend: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10049454/Dont-make-fun-of-renowned-Dan-Brown.html
Would have enjoyed The Da Vinci Code SO much more if I’d taken this approach. Instead I just cursed all the way through.
What an indulgent prat Dan Brown has proved to be – I just finished reading – no sorry, skimming, this ridiculous book and I wanted to post a reflection of my anger and sheer frustration that this nonsense could actually be published – shame on the publishers, shame on the editors – you have sold your souls for a few unworthy shekels. Shame on you.
DB sounds like the literary equivalent to Thomas Kincade.
Ah, Mark, my comment was intended as a satire. I liked this piece and was making fun of the “why can’t you just say something positive?” people.
However we have been able to create a fantastic tour of Florence based on the Dan Brown’s novel :-)
I don’t find it ironic that the majority of those who trash Dan Browns novels online are the same people who spend most of their time facebooking, blogging and twittering strangers online also.
They spend so much time twittering about themselves, they cringe at the prospect of celebrating someone else.
Celebrating someone who’s genuinely successful.
To enjoy Dan Brown, you need to have a reasonable attention span and at least an above average grip of the English written word.
In medical school we had a saying “those who can, do, those who can’t, teach”. I guess in this case it should be “those who can, write books that sell, those who can’t, make fun of those who can”
“In medical school we had a saying “those who can, do, those who can’t, teach”. I guess in this case it should be “those who can, write books that sell, those who can’t, make fun of those who can””
Right, because the only way to truly judge the quality of a work is by how much it sells. That’s is why Van Gogh sucked while he was alive, and then suddenly got really great after he died …
Yet another example that a medical degree is no guarantee of intelligence …
Sir!
Per my recent Tweetage, https://twitter.com/MamurphyMaureen/status/498867059980525569 I am Outraged and full of Umbrage that the great name of Mr. Dan Brown has been so sorely maligned by you and that Malignant Sharpener of Pencils.
What next, an attack on the Modern Prophetess of Human Improvement, Amy Chua? My Faithful Biographer Moe Murph will be regularly reporting back to me on the Outrageous Stream of Verbiage and the Attendant Most Impertinent Comments.
Sir, were I but yet Corporeal and not a being afloat on the Etheric Twitter Cloud, I would thrash you both soundly.
Harrrrumphhh!
Senator Kefuaver F. Tutwiller, IV (1823-1913)
Etheric Twitter Cloud
Book? Inferno isn’t a book, it’s an infomercial cobbled together by the makers of tweed jackets and gin.
I just finished reading the book and I found the story enjoyable. I guess I read for an enjoyable story rather than a literary orgasm. I also don’t have a B.A. in English so I don’t pick apart his writing. After seeing your margin notes though I can completely understand where you are coming from. Especially the bit about how you had trouble imagining whatever he was trying to explain. At times I’d just Google the damn thing. Other than that, the flaws went right over my head.
I figure it is a lot like painting. When I see a painting it is either ugly or beautiful, but to an artist they see every brush stroke, colour, technique, etc. and then make their judgement.
A lot of his success did come from how “controversial” his second book was. Since then everyone will pick up whatever he writes now and he doesn’t even have to try.
Since Dan Brown is forever ruined for me and I am amongst literary scholars, enlighten me to a well written thriller with a good story. :) I’d appreciate it!
I just love the pompous BS you hear form the “intellectual” elite. If you were so perfect and incredible a writer, I would assume it would be you and your friend who were making millions of dollars “entertaining” the masses.
You are entitled to your opinions of course, as such perfect writers you both are in your own minds. However, I don’t think many people really care what your opinion is at all. I know I certainly do not (chuckle, chuckle “…”).
Well, well. look at my typo in my previous response. Guess I’ll get ton of crap about that. Oh well.
How did I miss this? O joy! LOVE
TO WES – RE: “Since Dan Brown is forever ruined for me and I am amongst literary scholars, enlighten me to a well written thriller with a good story. :) I’d appreciate it!”
Hi Wes, just noticed this. Sir, you have a wry and funny natural writing voice and I would vouchsafe that many of the “literary scholars” are not as sly and witty as you, so please do not undersell yourself! Given the damage that has been done by our silly comments, may I offer some suggestions below:
a.) The Manchurian Candidate – Richard Condon
b.) The Spy Who Came In From The Cold – John le Carre (accent missing)
c.) The World At Night – Alan Furst (Note: Mid-90’s — I am not that familiar with author but many good words from other readers)
d.) The Third Man and other Stories – Graham Green (The Master — God, what a writer)
e.) Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith (Wonderful, best of the “Renko” series)
f.) Lee Child – “The Killing Floor” (Lee Child, Lee Child, unstoppable force, who has addicted every member of the Murphy family. I am ashamed to say I haven’t read him yet and at Thanksgiving, the entire family shook their heads and sighed)
Hope you enjoy!
Moe Murph
Only really, really stupid people–and by that I mean people like you Thomas–equate popularity with quality.
This article made me chuckle. I have never tried to read Brown’s more famous works – I’ve only read ~1/3 the way through Deception Point, at which time my incredulity at the “science” he proposed (I am a professional researcher in the geosciences and get to work a lot with aerospace engineers) in his book, and prefaced it with something to the effect of “all of the technology in this book is possible and real”, caused me to put the damn thing down and never pick it up again. Zero desire. It was just so goddamn bogus. It remains one of three fiction books I have never finished reading, nor do I plan to.
It just wasn’t enjoyable, because it wasn’t believable. This coming from a guy who loves fantasy and sci-fi; for whom suspension of disbelief comes easily. I think maybe you can have a shitty plot, but good writing, or a good plot, and shitty writing, but not both. Maybe the success of bad literature lies in the combination of mediocre plot + shitty writing (+/- controversy?). Perhaps that’s the sweet spot.
I have read all but the latest of Dan Brown’s books and must admit that I enjoyed most of them. Like it or not, he writes books that people read. Recently, I stopped reading a “well-written” book less than half-way through because it bored the hell out of me. I just finished Brown’s first book, Digital Fortress–a complete mess. The mystery here is how this one got published at all. Bad books by established authors are nothing new, but this was his first novel. Who did he have to blow to get it on the market? I want his name and number, because I have a book that’s nearly as bad and going nowhere.
Clark – now there’s a positive approach to discovering bad popular literature. :-)
and DB sells a lot of books !
the obvious seems to have escaped everyone including the publisher of the book and the producer of the movie, maybe even Dan Brown himself, that in the end there really is no book or movie here at all other than the usual travelogue of historical places in Italy. Because if the villain wanted to release this on the world he simply would have done it and THEN announced it if he needed his hubris satisfied. It’s not like he’s Blofeld holding the world for ransom. The book is maybe a bit less pitiful, because it turns out the villain released it a week before he said it would, and it was “only” to sterilize a third of the world’s population. Either way it strains credulity to anyone who even thinks once (much less twice) about the plot.