Da Vinci Code¶
299 words on Books
There’s been a lot of press about the author Dan Brown and his ‘Da Vinci Code’ book, which for some reason or another is called ‘Sakrileg’ in its German translation. And with the recent press coverage of some plagiarism trial or so, sales seem to be going even better than they used to. In fact, amazon don’t even need advertise the book as being good or interesting anymore, they just need to say it’s a ‘Megaseller’. Oh, and there seems to be a film as well, present at Cannes, with an expensive pyramid to advertise it and getting reviews that are lukewarm at best.
What I find very disturbing, though, was that I had the opportunity to hear a bit of the book’s German audiobook version. And it’s bad. Well, not just bad but utterly bad. Insultingly bad. Possibly the worst I’ve heard so far. It seems to be assembled from little pieces with there just being another obscure and completely ‘surprising’ (i.e. random) fact coming up at the end of each of them which leads to the next one.
It just seems cheap and ridiculous. Mixing the supposedly educated with the mysterious, mixing the rich with conspiracies, mixing a few different countries and myths. And giving something completely ridiculous. It may just have been a bad translation and a bad audio book. But even the bad translators aren’t that bad. Heck, this makes John Grisham look all fancy and sophisticated. And I used to consider him the worst author before…
And now for something completely different: Does anybody else have severe problems when importing CDs to the AAC format recently (since the QuickTime 7.1 upgrade, I’d guess)? I just did some importing and the results are so insultingly bad that I really hope this isn’t a common problem.
