Angels & Demons
mystery-thriller novel written by American author Dan Brown and published by Pocket Books and then by Corgi Books. The novel introduces the character Robert Langdon, who recurs as the protagonist of Brown's subsequent novels. Angels & Demons shares many stylistic literary elements with its sequels, such as conspiracies of secret societies, a single-day time frame, and the Catholic Church. Ancient history, architecture, and symbology are also heavily referenced throughout the book.
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2recommend
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2011–2025years
29% recommend43% neutral29% critical
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What Hacker News says
- Great answer!
You can read books by master story tellers too. Those will never be boring and will be full with twisted facts and interesting relationships. You can start with Crime thrillers, Murder mysteries.
Adding to the above list:
Jeffery Archer and Dan Brown present some very interesting books in the form of "Kane and Abel" and "Angels and Demons".
Another good book that you might find interesting is "Flatland - a romance of many dimensions" by Edwin Abbott.
- I made the mistake of reading Digital Fortress at some point. The entire plot is predicated on the existence of a computer at the NSA that can defeat any encryption through brute force without even knowing the underlying encryption scheme. You give it ciphertext it outputs plaintext. Not satisfied with how ludicrous that is, as in it can be proven impossible by anyone with even a passing familiarity with what encryption is, he also goes into all these actual numbers like it can break 2k long keys in under a second so even using much larger keys it's only a few minutes. Completely ignoring the fact that key spaces grow exponentially with key size and instead assuming it's linear... This is all in the first couple chapters so I'm not even spoiling anything
Researched his books are not... At least that one wasn't, because if he'd consulted even a first year CS student they could've told him it's all wrong.
That whole experience turned me off of Dan Brown books (even though I had previously read Angels and Demons and enjoyed it, knowing his research was so shit in areas I'm knowledgeable in makes it harder to read books about things I'm not because I know I will be coming away with wrong ideas stuck in my head)
- On the "Angels and Demons" ambigrams...
The artist made such an impression to the book author, Dan Brown, that he (Brown) decided to name the protagonist after him.
Here's John Langdon, artist: https://www.johnlangdon.net/
Having met John (I showed him the second largest Escher collection), I can confirm he's a wonderful person.
- Oh yea. A good detective novel gives the reader all the necessary information to know the answer. Many lousier novels just keep some essential information hidden until the monologue, because they haven’t got a tricky enough mystery, and really shitty ones just accidentally reveal it, often by over-using tropes or having silly patterns like “it’s always the dark and brooding guy”. Ever read any Dan Brown? In Angels and Demons he gives it away on the first page with an anagram.
- If you read more than two Dan Brown books, honestly it's hard to not see this structure. I read The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, which were OK, but then reading Deception Point I could guess all the plot twists several chapters in advance. He's just very formulaic.
- (Spoilers ahead)
Digital Fortress is probably the book with the most bullshit representation of computers and cryptography ever. Dan Brown goes out of his way to do as little research as possible on subjects he's talking about. In Angels and Demons, the Illuminati want to blow up Vatican using jars with antimatter they stole from CERN. Jesus Christ. The Da Vinci Code is similarly flawed.
It baffles me how he manages to be so full of shit as to say that the descriptions, historical events and whatnot are accurate in his novels. In Digital Fortress he describes how the Spanish healthcare system is subpar and hospitals are filthy, when in reality it's ranked way above the US by some satisfaction index or whatever. Not to mention the NSA's supercomputer ("made by soldering together millions of processors over 10 years") which gets fed some ciphertext and a virus infects it... BECAUSE IT WAS ACTUALLY NOT A CIPHERTEXT BUT MALICIOUS CODE!!!11!1
I hate Dan Brown, dammit
