Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol, came out last week. Over a million people bought it. I was one of them. It’s been interesting to see the sort of division the novel has caused in reviewers. Some seem to view it as the next progressive step in Dan Brown’s career as a writer of intellectual thrillers, while others seem to view it as the coming of the Anti-Christ. Even one trusted friend of mine seemed to think that I needed to give back my English degree if I was going to go anywhere near the novel, let alone read it.

Well, I read it. I’ve also read everything Dan Brown’s published. And I still have my English degree. So, I’m going to try to articulate here why I think Dan Brown is worth your time, and why he is not, in fact, a harbinger of the death of the American novel.

To draw comparisons to another titan of modern publishing, I want to say, unequivocally, that Dan Brown is a much better writer than Stephanie Meyer (the author of the Twilight series of novels). Both writers sell almost unfathomable amounts books and have, for better or worse, become two of the few rock stars of American letters. The largest and most important distinction between the two of these writers, however, is this: Dan Brown is a good writer; Stephanie Meyer is not.

Neither of them write particularly challenging books, and neither of them will ever be considered great stylists, each of them preferring simple sentences, often with painful attempts at variety. For example, Stephanie Meyer needs a thesaurus to rectify the fact that the world “perfect” appears in Twilight some forty times, and Dan Brown’s editor should have explained to him that using an ellipsis to establish tension in a singular sentence is clumsy and cheap. At a basic sentence level, neither author is going to blow your hair back. Some sentences may even make you cringe.

However, Dan Brown’s books do not actively seem to assume that their readers are dumb. What Brown lacks in lexical acumen he more than makes up for with his keen sense of narrative momentum, of giving the reader enough intriguing plot and enough fascinating historical information that he can’t help but continue reading. He builds tension and interest, so that the reader wants concurrently to know what is going to happen next and also to proceed to the next historical oddity that Brown has uncovered in his research. Conversely, Stephanie Meyer spent the first 400 pages of Twilight setting up a stunted, unsatisfying conclusion. Up until that point in Meyer’s book, not really happens. In Dan Brown, stuff is happening from the first page. In a genre piece, whether it’s a thriller or a vampire novel, or science fiction or a mystery, stuff needs to happen, and stuff needs to continue happening in a logical succession of events. Brown understands this basic plotting notion; Meyer appears to be simply winging it.

There is a craftsmanship apparent in Brown’s novels that is almost entirely absent from Meyer. Sure, Brown’s books are formulaic, but most genre fiction, to an extent, is. What matters is not that a reader may anticipate what will happen in a book, but rather how the author delivers to reader to those events. Spoiler alert, but, at the end of The Lost Symbol, Robert Langdon, the brilliant Harvard symbologist, saves the world. I know. I just blew your mind, right? That’s just the way these novels work. In that sense, before we even begin reading, we already know the ending. But it is the scaffolding of intrigue that Brown creates, how he propels readers from one event and twist to the next that marks him as a very capable practitioner of the thriller genre. Even though we know how it all ends, we want to see how Brown delivers us to that inevitable conclusion.

Brown’s not going to win a Pulitzer, but he’s totally not trying to. Casino Royale was an amazing spy movie, but it totally wasn’t trying to win the Best Picture Oscar. I don’t read Dan Brown for the same reason that I read someone like Michael Chabon or William Faulkner in just the same way that I don’t watch Clerks for the same reason I watch THe Godfather–but all of this stuff nonetheless trigger certain happy-making parts of my mind. I read Brown for an educated, intelligent thriller with interesting insights in art, history and science. I don’t read it for spiritual edification.

And, in that regard, The Lost Symbol is a terrific read. It doesn’t have the break-neck sense of urgency found in Angel & Demons, but I think it’s content about Noetic science, the founding of the United States, and the Masonic conception of God has the potential to be as every bit as controversial as the Christian history explored in The Da Vinci Code. It will be interesting to see if people have a reaction to the ideas presented in the novel’s final fifty pages.

There’s of course much more to be said here about reader expectations and about why people read what they read, and even about the conventions of genre fiction versus literary fiction. But for now I’m content to know that I had a really fun reading experience.

If the books you’re reading aren’t fun, then, seriously, why would you read them?

I came to Steven Hall’s 2007 novel The Raw Shark Texts by way of a Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and while the books share a few conceptual similarities, I enjoyed Hall’s novel quite a bit more. It upheld a personal tenant that Danielewski’s novel broke: that a novel, above all else, should be fun. And fun is of course a subjective thing–a friend of mine had a ton of fun with House of Leave, annotating it obsessively. But after 600 pages, I was done.

The Raw Shark Texts is narrated by Eric Sanderson, who wakes up on the first page in a home he doesn’t recognize, with no memory of who he is, where he is, what’s he’s done. Through notes left to him by “The First Eric Sanderson,” he finds his way to Dr. Randle, a psychiatrist, who informs Eric that he has a rare psychological disorder that causes him to lose his memories in unpredictable, untreatable waves. She tells that this is the eleventh time that he’s woken up and come to her.

Eric is also being hunted. Hunted by a purely conceptual shark called a Ludovician, an enormous conceptual fish that eats memory. Eric must attempt to hide himself from the shark, which swims in the streams of communication between human beings, by surrounding himself with a constant white-noise of nonsense, hiding important items in boxes full of mail, all the while attempting to decode the cryptic and arcane correspondence left to him by his alleged former self. It’s a totally bizarre and out-there concept, and it’s awesome. The novel deals with a complex network of themes–from the fabric of memory, to loss, to the very nature of language and narrative and it’s effect on human life. It’s intelligent without being obtuse, and dense without being impenetrable, and the narrative is told with such authority, wit and confidence that I was always anxious to continue.

I’ll read whatever Hall comes out with next.

Life is settling down into a rhythm. But it’s a strange rhythm of nothing, with each day bringing a whole lot of not much. No new news on the job hunting front. I have one job that I really want and think that I would be good at, and I’m into the second round interviews for it, so, I hope I hope.

I’ve had a lot of stuff that I’ve wanted to do, and I’ve ended up doing very little of it. My buddy J got back from school and plowed through two excellent full runs of television shows, several books, and totally annihilated Plants vs. Zombies, and I’ve done comparably nothing. Part of it, I think, is that I still feel in limbo. When I was at school, that was it, I knew what I was doing. Now, being out, I’m here, I’m home, but there’s nothing that I’m doing. My entire days are free time, and because of that, I don’t really want to do anything. It’s strange, doesn’t really make sense, and it irritates me because I have the Beacon story sitting there half-finished, waiting for some love, and another story that practically fell into my lap the other day when K and I were scouring the woods behind her house for a missing Beagle named Lucy. It’s just been hard to work up the desire to make that jump from zero to one.

I’m also writing a video game. I’m getting together with a college friend and his software developer buddies to work on a game, with the goal being to put in on the newly renamed Xbox Live Indie Games. It requires a drastically different narrative-building strategy than I’ve ever tried before, and I’m really excited about the potential of it. I’ve been drawing up story concepts and character ideas, along with brainstorming potential themes. It’s a fun process, but I’m worried that I may end up slowing the group down. But I also think that it has the potential to turn into something really cool. Yet another medium in which to write stories. I’ve written a couple novels, a couple short plays, one short screenplay. And now I’m writing a video game. I’m apparently just making my way to the various narrative buffets and finding what I want to put on my plate.

Writing is so weird because it’s what I love most, but most days I’d rather do something else. It’s sick, really.

Been reading some really good stuff, too. The last week or so was spent with Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, which I came to by way of a link from House of Leaves‘ Amazon page. I’ll try to get a microreview up later this week, but I’ll say that I had much more fun with it than I did with House of Leaves. The Raw Shark Texts was a novel that remembered that it was, in fact, a novel and not some obtuse piece of film criticism. Great fun, with shades of Neil Gaiman and China Mieville sprinkled in there. Is it just me, or do the British seem to do fantastic literature better than Americans?

Next on the list are Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You and Stephen King’s The Green Mile (I know, a little late to the party on both).

Currently watching HBO’s 1998 miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, and it reminds me once again how much I love the story of the Apollo program. Apollo 13 was my favorite movie as a kid, and this is like a 12 hour version that covers everything from the early Mercury missions all the way to Apollo 17. Very cool, very well done, with an obscene amount of noteworthy actors.

What else?

Played through inFAMOUS on the Playstation 3 and thought that, while it was fun, the narrative was pretty weak and poorly executed. I also realized that I’m totally done with dichtomous notions of good and evil in video games.

Needed to take a blog breather after the Twilight project, but I plan to update more regularly from now on.

Well internet friends, I’m about to embark on a strange and terrifying ordeal. It’s the end of the semester, things are busy, but even the Toni Morrison research paper and The Beacon story cannot fill all of the hours of my day. I find myself in need of something to read. K and N have both read Twilight, and both had mostly negative and even alarming things to say about it and its apparently not-so-subterranean anti-feminist ideology. I’ve avoided the book thus far, but at this point the two-front attraction of pop-culture affluence and the need to see just how bad it is have merged. Tonight, I’m going to start reading it, and, if I survive, I will be blogging about it as I go along.

It’s clear to me even before starting that I’m so not part of Stephenie Meyer’s authorial audience, being over the age of fourteen and in possession of functional male genitals (which should not imply that men with non-functioning genitals are part of the novel’s audience), so I hope that the following posts will offer something of an interesting perspective. But we’ll see. My expectation is that it will be painful, alarming, but hopefully not altogether unenjoyable, if only in a MST 3000 sort of way. Can a bajllion pubescent girls be wrong? We’ll see. Check back soon for updates as I work my way through the pop-culture touchstone.

As Dr. Jones Sr. said, “We are pilgrims in an unholy land.”

Something that I often find myself thinking about is latency in entertainment. There have been several times that I’ve been reading a book/playing a game/watching a movie/listening to an album, and I have thought that, even though to me this is cutting edge, state of the art stuff, this book/movie/game existed in the minds of its creators perhaps years before I’d even heard of it.  It’s like an old factoid I heard awhile back that the aviation technology of the military is always something like ten years ahead of what is public knowledge. We only get to experience it when it’s done, but it’s been created over the span of years.

It’s because of this idea of latency that I like to follow creator blogs. David Jaffe is doing this now. He has periodic updates on his blog about an as of yet unannounced game his company is working on for Sony, and it’s fostered some interesting posts about his game design philosophy and the things he’s doing with this title. Of course he never references the game directly, but having that unique window into the creative process is something I really enjoy. I can almost see the wheels turning in his head.

Neil Gaiman has done this several times on his blog (which was actually started to track his writing of American Gods). When The Graveyard Book, hit earlier this year, I actually felt more attached to it as a text because I had been following Neil’s progress, all the way from handwritting the first draft to selecting Dave McKean’s amazing cover art.

Watching the process, even when the product is only referenced obliquely, is something I enjoy as someone who makes things. It makes me wonder what others things are out there right now being created that we have no idea even exist yet.

Even in the age of the internet, it took my three days to find out that one of my absolute favorite authors, Donald E. Westlake, has died.  He died at the age of 75, after an apparent heart attack on New Year’s Eve.

I never read one of numerous books Westlake wrote under his real name, but the books he wrote as Richard Stark have been a vital part of my book diet ever since a trusted friend recommended them to me several years ago.  As I type this, ten of Stark’s “Parker” novels sit on my shelf, and I feel a distinct twinge of sadness that there will likely be no more.

The Parker books focus on a criminal named Parker–no last name given or needed– and his career as a professional thief.  While the books do have a recognizable formula, none of them ever feels predictable or formulaic.  They are very much reader’s books, and there were many times that I would complete one of the novels and actually feel smarter; the situations and the solutions presented in the plot were really that good, bordering pretty closely on genius.

One of the things I like the least about getting older is watching people I admire pass on.  Obscenely prolific, it seems that Westlake spent the bulk of his life doing exactly what he loved, pounding out book after book on his old manual typewriter, and, really, it’s that sort of life that I think everyone would want; a chance to do what we love to do for as long as our bodies will allow us to do it.

Though the publication started before his death, it seems a fitting memorial that the University of Chicago Press is republishing the notoriously hard-to-find Parker novels, starting with the first three, The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face, and The Outfit. You may already be familiar with the story of The Hunter; it was the basis of the 1999 film Payback.

I’ll likely try to work out a longer article about Westlake’s books for MEGATOKik.com, but for now, I would recommend that anyone reading this blog with an ounce of interesting in crime fiction checkout the newly minted copies of Stark’s books.  I love them.

Okay, so one of the things I always look forward to on school breaks is reading–reading where my incination takes me.  Reading for myself.  I’m the kind of person who, if I know that I’m taking a long trip sometime in the near future, will obsessively think about the books that I want to take with me.  Clothes get thrown in at the last minutes, but when deciding what books to pack, oh, that takes time.

I’ve been making mental lists of the stuff I would like to read over break–

• Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors
• Michael Perry, Population: 485
• Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Stephen King, Just After Sunset

Definitely a slant toward creative nonfiction and memoir–Burroughs and Eggers are two I’ve been wanting to read for awhile, and Perry was something I picked up recently–read all about that here.  Kundera because a reading group I’m in is going to be looking at that novel, and King because, well, I loves him.  Apparently after he edited Best American Short Stories last year, he got more interested in going back to his own short fiction, so I’m stoked to see what he’s come up with.  Early reviews I’ve glanced at seem to be generally positive.

Also fiending for some video games.  I can’t wait to check out Fallout 3 and LittleBigPlanet.  My friend PK told me that Fallout 3 is likely his game of the year, and I generally trust his judgement.  And LittleBigPlanet because, even after only playing an hour of it at NG’s house, I fell madly in love.  That little SackBoy stole my heart.

As far as TV and movies go, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dexter are all on the list.  Also, the return of Battlestar Galactica on January 16 cannot come soon enough.  After that midseason cliffhanger, man, I just want to eat it with a spoon.

I am charged with geek.

So, turns out that the Bike Hero video I posted last time was actually part of Activision’s viral marketing campaign for Guitar Hero World Tour.  I’ll admit, there was a part of me and was thinking This is too good, while I was watching the video, but it’s still a great concept, and it’s generating interest in the game when their sales numbers haven’t been as good as they had hoped.

In other news, Sophisticated Dorkiness posted earlier this week about Stephen King’s recent Entertainment Weekly article.  Her post is here.  King’s article, titled “Who Says Real Men Don’t Read?” is here.  Basically, the gist of the article is King speculating that it’s not actually true that men aren’t reading, but rather that those who are are mostly reading a very specific genre of literature, what he calls manfiction.  Manfiction is of course the obverse of chicklit and is full of hard men, soft women, guns, wars and flamethrowers.  This whole phenomena–and the various comments I’ve read about the article–underscore for me that crisis that literature is in right now.  It’s clear that, in most literary circles, words like “manfiction” and “chicklit” are pejoratives, in much the same way that “fantasy” and “sci-fi” still are.  Some of the arguments seem to be suggesting that “manfiction” is not good literature for men or anyone to read.  It’s branded as escapist and light, in comparison to “good literature” which has the influence of historical popularity trends and academic merit behind them, and is thought of as better for you, in the way that broccoli is better for you than fudge.

My perspective is that this entire rigid dichotomy is what’s really the problem.  There is, frankly, a pretty elitist mentality that would place some books as universally beneficial over other books which get classified as merely slush, brain Cheetos.  My counter argument to that is this: Who says?  Who gets to decide for the whole of the human reading population what qualifies something as worth reading or not?  The entire notion is just absurd to me.

Reading as always been a very personal experience for me, and I’ve tried to read where my inclination has led me.  Sure, I’ve read a lot of “great literature” in my life; it comes with the territory of being an English major.  And I’ve absolutely loved some of it–I can’t imagine not having read Faulkner when I did.  And that’s in part my point, the reason that I loved Faulkner so much is that, at that moment in my life, it spoke to me.  That sounds corny, but bear with me.  This is the entire reason that I read what I do, because every so often I find books that hook into me and don’t let go, books that become a part of my life experience.  For that reason, I try to read omnivorously; I try to give everything a chance to hook into me.  But the truth of life is that, not everything does.  I hated Wuthering Heights with a passion in high school because it didn’t do it for me.  Today, it might.  I’ll have to pick it up again sometime and see how we like each other, see how it tastes.

The point is, people, just ditch these classifications, your literatures and your literary fictions and your manfictions, or at least don’t read based on what category a book falls into.  Sure, you may not like Lee Child, but the bare facts that he’s selling books signals to me that someone does.  And for anyone to impress any system of thinking that would bar someone from the books and the stories that hook into them, that, friends, is the scariest thing I can imagine as a book lover.  Because where does that stop?  If we judge a book by how it falls into an arbitrary and exclusive category that we would not deign to ever dip into, what’s to stop someone from judging another on the basis of the books that they read?  Those who read “easy” books become then “easy” people.

In the end, it’s all about subjectivity to me.  Are certain books better than others?  Of course I think so.  Does that mean I think I have some authority to instruct others in One True Faith of Literature?  Of course not.  To do so would be damaging to the entire reason that I read.  I read because I like what I read, and I try very hard to not look down on someone because they’re reading something that I personally loath–though admittedly that’s often hard.  This is not a complete chucking-out of classification, but rather gaining some ironic distance from them.  I’m not saying that everything is alright, because of course I don’t think it is.  I think some books flat out suck.  But that’s just me.  That’s just where my inclination leads me.  Rejecting the pejorative, books for me are essentially escapism, they are essentially entertainment; that’s the whole point for me.

If I love a book, I will tell you why it’s awesome.  And in return you have my promise that I will always listen to you tell me why Wuthering Heights is the greatest thing in the history of recorded human language.  And maybe what you say will allow me to look at the text anew, see it from a different angle, see why it digs into you, and maybe it won’t.  Ultimately, it doesn’t matter either way.

What matters is that we keep reading.  Whatever it is we choose to read.

Today in fiction class we were working on beginnings and endings.  Since the story I’m working on right now, a novella called “All Our Imaginary Friends Are Dead,” is nowhere close to having an ending, I brought in a story I wrote six months ago called “Nothing’s Faster Than Light.”  I showed it to my instructor, and he ended up reading it to the whole class.  We’ve done workshops before, but today was the first time I ever felt like I was a primary source.  My story was a friggin’ example about how to begin and end a story.  He called it “textbook,” whatever that means.  I took it as a compliment.  He asked me about my revision strategies, and if I would transcribe the first draft so he could compare it with the current draft.  And, here’s the crazy part, he wants to potentially use it as an example of revision in future classes.

All of this got me thinking about submission again.  I’ve submitted stories to a few journals: the literary magazine of my first college, and, ambitiously, Hayden’s Ferry Review.  They sent me a form rejection letter and a nice bookmark.  Oh, and Weird Tales rejected me as well.  But I keep hearing about how part of breaking into this profession of writing is piling up rejection letters, and I’ve been able to more or less insulate myself from that idea by simply saying that my stories aren’t done.  And they aren’t.  I have a huge stack of first drafts.  “Nothing’s Faster Than Light” was fun to revise because it was short, only a page and a half single-spaced, but it became apparent after looking back at the first draft that the second draft really was a lot better.  It makes me think then of that pile of first drafts: four novels, two novellas, a short story collection–that could be made so much better, but I just have to sit down and do it.

I’m at a point in the semester now where there’s two major research projects to take care of, a novella that needs to be finished sometime soon, and all of the regular homework, social, and job responsibilities need doing.  Last night I had a minor mental breakdown when I realized that the eleven pages of notes that I had did not constitute the draft of a research paper about creative nonfiction that I need this afternoon.  But I got the draft, and in doing the draft I now know what needs to happen for this paper to get finished.  Spent the night tonight not worrying about that project and instead worrying about my other project, which, as of right now, will be an essay looking at the dynamics of power in relationships and marriage as well as the Christian origins of sexual perversion in Richard Wright’s novel The Outsider and the film Angry Harvest.

Making that transition into research projects is hard because you don’t know what you’re doing when you start.  In high school and early college, you had an idea, then you went out and found sources that backed up what you were trying to say.  But when you get into this kind of research, you had to find out what others have said, what ideas are floating around out there, then the idea is to enter into the conversation with your own interpretations and ideas.  It takes a ton more work, and it a ton more stressful because you’re drawing the map as your paddle up the nameless river.

There is a famous quote about writing from E.L. Doctorow: “It’s like driving a car at night.  You can never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”  And I think that particular sentiment applies just as well to life as it does to writing.  We may have a general idea about where we’re headed, but none of us can really see further than our headlights.  And the minute you take your eye off the road is the moment you miss a turn.  So that’s the point I’m at in the semester right now–driving in the dark, squinting over the dashboard, watching for rustlings in the ditch, and thinking of what’s waiting at the end.