My first encounter with Dan Brown's crispy, engaging writing was through his first novel which broke the records of all controversies ahead of its time.
No use pretending, it was probably the controversy of the book that caused my disgust for the sensitive topic to succumb.
In fact, it is not just me.
The book's controversy was the first cause of attraction for many earlier unenthusiastic readers.
As a firm, devout Christian, I reacted on the hype about the content of the book on several social media web sources.
However the uneasy questions about Jesus by some of the curious non-Christian friends probed me to read it.
Thus very shortly I found myself flipping through its pages, woven out of historical facts distorted and twisted to fit the needs of fiction.
The organized thought process, careful dip into the beliefs of the secret societies and calculated (although some quite unfounded and untrue ideas of the so-called religious bodies, denied over the centuries by The Church for their negative and unfounded propaganda), accounted for a winning book of all times.
Controversy sells! A golden thumb rule! And it worked perfectly for the said work.
But this is not the only reason, that the book met such success.
It is Brown's uncanny ability to penetrate one each at a time into the depths of his subject that is a stark contrast to the works of the hurried writers who hammer it down in one go.
Brown goes with the plot, absorbs himself into his characters, and researches heavily to enlarge picture and validate his points, without trying to impose them on his readers.
Sometimes he would stretch a certain conversation and spend a specific time for addressing the doubts and yet again, there are spaces left to make up your own mind about the given data.
Symbols, physics, literature and most essentially religion in comparison with science, are some of his core interests.
There is a 'little something' for everybody with taste of subtle philosophy running parallel.
He carefully masks his own opinions from becoming part of his stories.
You can barely guess who Dan Brown is and what his sequence of thoughts is.
Da Vinci Code was not the end, it was the beginning.
'The Lost Symbol' - a thriller based on Freemasonry following the events of Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons (based on stretched conspiracies of secret societies and the Catholic Church's resistance, bringing in view the flip-scripts, rotational or mirror words that can be read the same way from left or right), Deception Point (the discovery of a meteorite which serves as a proof of extraterrestrial existence but which is found a hoax in the end) are all masterpieces.
In the World of fantasy/fiction writers with flavors from supernatural to sci-fi, Dan Brown stands out in the list with his unique subtlety and writing style.
I may choose to disagree with the themes of his stories but I prefer reading them in order to disagree with him and that's where his success lies.
His books celebrate the maxim, 'If you can't convince them, confuse them.
' Wisdom follows the questioning mind but for that, there has to be a platform where that inquisitive mind feeds on enough curiosity and doubts.
Doubts yield a conviction that never existed before.
As he himself mentions in Angel and Demons that in the universe everything has its opposites, light and dark, heaven and earth, matter and antimatter to be in perfect symmetry, in perfect balance.
I conclude that without the fear of doubt, there shall be no power of conviction and definitely no search either.
No use pretending, it was probably the controversy of the book that caused my disgust for the sensitive topic to succumb.
In fact, it is not just me.
The book's controversy was the first cause of attraction for many earlier unenthusiastic readers.
As a firm, devout Christian, I reacted on the hype about the content of the book on several social media web sources.
However the uneasy questions about Jesus by some of the curious non-Christian friends probed me to read it.
Thus very shortly I found myself flipping through its pages, woven out of historical facts distorted and twisted to fit the needs of fiction.
The organized thought process, careful dip into the beliefs of the secret societies and calculated (although some quite unfounded and untrue ideas of the so-called religious bodies, denied over the centuries by The Church for their negative and unfounded propaganda), accounted for a winning book of all times.
Controversy sells! A golden thumb rule! And it worked perfectly for the said work.
But this is not the only reason, that the book met such success.
It is Brown's uncanny ability to penetrate one each at a time into the depths of his subject that is a stark contrast to the works of the hurried writers who hammer it down in one go.
Brown goes with the plot, absorbs himself into his characters, and researches heavily to enlarge picture and validate his points, without trying to impose them on his readers.
Sometimes he would stretch a certain conversation and spend a specific time for addressing the doubts and yet again, there are spaces left to make up your own mind about the given data.
Symbols, physics, literature and most essentially religion in comparison with science, are some of his core interests.
There is a 'little something' for everybody with taste of subtle philosophy running parallel.
He carefully masks his own opinions from becoming part of his stories.
You can barely guess who Dan Brown is and what his sequence of thoughts is.
Da Vinci Code was not the end, it was the beginning.
'The Lost Symbol' - a thriller based on Freemasonry following the events of Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons (based on stretched conspiracies of secret societies and the Catholic Church's resistance, bringing in view the flip-scripts, rotational or mirror words that can be read the same way from left or right), Deception Point (the discovery of a meteorite which serves as a proof of extraterrestrial existence but which is found a hoax in the end) are all masterpieces.
In the World of fantasy/fiction writers with flavors from supernatural to sci-fi, Dan Brown stands out in the list with his unique subtlety and writing style.
I may choose to disagree with the themes of his stories but I prefer reading them in order to disagree with him and that's where his success lies.
His books celebrate the maxim, 'If you can't convince them, confuse them.
' Wisdom follows the questioning mind but for that, there has to be a platform where that inquisitive mind feeds on enough curiosity and doubts.
Doubts yield a conviction that never existed before.
As he himself mentions in Angel and Demons that in the universe everything has its opposites, light and dark, heaven and earth, matter and antimatter to be in perfect symmetry, in perfect balance.
I conclude that without the fear of doubt, there shall be no power of conviction and definitely no search either.