Weatherman posted:

My mother sent me a copy of Digital Fortress, also by Dan Brown, shortly after I moved to Japan and was yet to source some bedtime reading material. I appreciated the thought, but once I finished reading the book -- and I had to force myself to finish the final third or so just out of some kind of completion OCD -- I put it straight in the recycling. I've only read one worse book, and that was something I picked up from a "take a book, leave a book" tray in a caravan park somewhere in New South Wales.

Dan Brown is a bad writer. I've never read or watched any of his other works, but I'm comfortable making that generalisation. The characters were one-dimensional and each had a single purpose; upcoming plot points were telegraphed to the point of "I can skip the next chapter because he's already implied what's going to happen"; the entire book read more like a screenplay to a Michael Bay movie; and the descriptions of technology were excruciatingly, ball-twistingly awful. We're talking "hack the Gibson" levels of bullshittery. Dan Brown does not understand software, nor hardware, nor cryptography.

I guess I wasn't the target market after all. Perhaps instead of appealing to techies, he was aiming for the "use Excel to write a letter, print it out, scan it in as a PDF, then rotate it, print it out again and fax it to Grandma" crowd. 1/10 would not use to line my birdcage.