An open letter to Dan Brown

Hi Dan. I was wondering if I could take you away for a few minutes from your searching through the back alleys of Wikipedia for ideas for your next book, in the hopes that we could discuss your recent one.

Yes, I read The Lost Symbol. I’m not really sure why I read it, to be honest; I think I have a penchant for reading schlocky books. Anyway, it was more or less the same book as your previous one, save for some rearranging of characters and locations. You basically wrote an alternate novelization of National Treasure – which is okay, because those movies are awesome. And I can deal with the way you draw really tenuous lines between everything; the front of the book says “a novel”, and anyone who takes any of it at face value is gullible. I’ll even give you credit for pointing out Christianity’s links to pagan rituals, since most of your readers probably either have no idea about most of that, or choose to ignore it.

The main reason I’m writing to you is to ask you this: why did you choose to put in a Twitter joke at the end of the book?

Seriously. What function does it serve at all to have your main character say that he doesn’t know how to make a “twitter”, only to then have the female lead tell him that it’s called a “tweet”? Were you trying to be clever? Show that you have a finger on the pulse of Internet trends? I can’t figure it out at all, and I actually rolled my eyes after I finished the paragraph.

Anyway, it’s late, and I should probably get some sleep. You probably need to get back to playing six degrees of separation on Wikipedia, so… go do that. For added fun, try the Random article link on the left side of the page – it’ll be so interesting!!!!!