Filter-blogging: Monday morning snarkiness edition

A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move."

On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn't speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. "Chillingly close" would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man's pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.

A linguist picks on all the stylistic blunders that Dan Brown committed in his You-Know-Which-One book. As if the writing itself wasnt egregious enough (here's another one to convince you, though its slightly more jargon ridden), you had to contend with the mediocre plot, with its steady stream of cheap twists. It would have been convenient if no one had read it; but no, the way things were sometime back, you had to suffer every fool telling his opinion about the book and asking you what you thought of it. In retrospect, I wish some crackpot group claiming to represent some fringe community had protested against the book in India, which would have led to the immediate banning of the book by our ever-sensitive government, and we would have been spared much agony.

[There. I am in a somewhat better position to handle my Monday now.]

[And ofcourse, no disrespect meant to anyone who liked the novel. We just have different priorities.]