Just finished reading an old Dan Brown novel, Digital Fortress: A Thriller. For those who don’t know, Dan Brown is the author of The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons which spawned theĀ  movies of the same names.

Some months back I had read another of his earlier books (of which “Digital Fortress” is another, lest you rush out hoping it’s a new Dan Brown novel) all of which have found renewed interest and reprinting as a result of the big ones and the movies. What became more and more obvious to me is that he is a writer of plots, without a lot of character development or straight ahead writing ability. If you read “The Da Vinci Code” you get a sense of this, but it really becomes obvious when you take a step back and read some of his earlier books.

I don’t know whether he got better as a writer by the time he wrote “The Da Vinci Code”, or he just got a better editor who improved his books more as time went on. In any event, I sped through “Digital Fortress” by reading only the first line of each paragraph, and later on by only reading the first lines of the first two paragraphs in each chapter.

Nice plot, not particularly well written, not particularly interesting characters.

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