Dan Brown

I've often wondered if I am the only person in the entire English-speaking world who thinks Dan Brown writes tedious, stilted and ultimately unsatisfying tales. The media seem to love him, his books sell by the trunkload and everything he does is a best-seller. On the other hand I read The Da Vinci Code with some difficulty, not that it was a hard book, quite the opposite, but because I was struggling to hang in there long after I'd lost interest. I can't really say much for Angels And Demons, because I got about three pages in, and thought that was probably two pages too far.

Imagine my surprise and pleasure to read that Oxfam, a worldwide hunger charity based in England which has many high street charity stores ("thrift", for the US audience) has today declared Dan Brown the "most unwanted author" because more of his books have been donated than any other writer and nobody is very keen on buying them back, even at Oxfam prices.

Of course there could be many reasons for this; it could be a clue that there is a vast but mysterious anti-Dan Brown conspiracy out there, bent on discouraging people from reading his books because they contain dangerously subversive information that could lead to the overthrow of society as we know it. Or not. Who knows. I'm just happy not to be the only one, any more.

Oh, yes. Sorry. This is the guy's official website, anyway. It's all in Flash with no standard HTML alternative that I could see, and although it looked like it was going to be stylish, as Flash often is, I hung around for a while and then gave up on it loading. I was on a public wi-fi network using a notebook running at netbook speed, and I found that the whole thing was taking so long to get anywhere, that I lost interest. Oddly, the books had the same effect. Sorry, Dan, but you don't do it for me.

The upside of this, though, is that if you're one of the few people in England that didn't buy or borrow the Da Vinci Code or get it given to you for Christmas, you now know where to find a cheap copy, should you want to see what you missed.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/*******/Dan-Brown-most-unwanted-author-says-Oxfam.html