Patrick O’Hannigan, over at The Paragraph Farmer, discusses an interesting post from Language Log on the (apparently inexhaustible) topic of what a really lousy writer Dan Brown is.

It occurs to me to wonder—why would so many people want to buy and read books written so amateurishly? Granted, the average reader can’t explain the differences between good style and bad, but (within certain limits) every reader can tell a well-written book from a badly written one, because badly written books are—by definition—hard to read. That’s really the heart of good writing—putting down words that convey the author’s exact thoughts in the most efficient, evocative way. If Brown is as bad as they say (I’ve never read any of his books myself), I assume he must be rather heavy going. And yet millions of readers soldier on to the ends of his works.

Could it be that millions of readers worldwide are so eager to see Christianity disproven that they’ll forgive any amount of confusion and reading road bumps, in order to enjoy the pleasure of having someone assure them that all those old moral rules are based on a confidence game?

I had lunch on Sunday with my friend Chip, at one of our favorite places. In a nearby booth, I noticed an elderly couple. I marveled, because they looked like a perfect embodiment of the old folk belief that married couples grow to look like one another. These two were both dead ringers for William S. Hart. They could have been sister and brother.

OK, it’s possible they were sister and brother. But they didn’t look like it (n the behavioral, rather than the visual, sense). You know how it is—when siblings get together, they generally talk. When you see a man and a woman who don’t talk, but also don’t look angry at each other, you assume they’re married.

I might be wrong. They might be a brother and sister, both widowed, who make it a custom to have Sunday lunch together every week, and no longer feel the need or obligation to fill the time with chatter.

But I like to think they’re married people who once, around 1950, looked no more similar than Laurel and Hardy, but have been merging every since.



Spent the weekend going over the galley proofs. The read-through is done. Tonight, my task is to compile a memo listing the changes that seem advisable to me. Mostly it’s a matter of adding commas (I was going through a comma-austerity phase when I wrote the thing), but there are a few more serious (though small) changes. In any case, I need to get on it.