You should avoid reading...

[Rycher]

Dan Brown. Sorry Dan, but you clearly don't know much about any of the subjects your books cover. The research on Digital Fortress for example, is painfully thin and shows glaringly through. Terminology is wrong, logic misapplied. The characters are usually unbelieveably stupid given their supposed status as genius cryptographers and the like. Or, as often happens in Da Vinci Code, the characters unrealistically crack the "impossible" code instantly, revealing the secret a paragraph later, leaving the reader no time to ponder it on their own, as if Brown delivers the punchline to a joke without a pause - the sign of an amateur. Really not feasable, predictable and trite. Good for grocery store shelf paperbacks.

Not going to go into a drawn-out argument, but these books are found in the fiction section for a reason. They're entertaining reads and exciting stories.

 

[Kenneth R.]

R. Scott Bakkar - Prince Of Nothing series. Great attempt at something akin to Gene Wolfe in scope, but falling far short in execution. The result is predictable, pulp fantasy with the occasionally interesting moment. Bakkar quotes Tolkien and Herbert as his influences, which clearly show, though he is not nearly as good as either of them. His references to these and other real world history are too transparant to be effective.

Rycher - Fiction or not, if you're going to present a "semi-true" story (which Dan asserts of all of his works) at least get the facts right. Some things, like a bloodline for Jesus Christ, are permissible as nobody really knows. However, aspects of history and technology should not be blundered upon if the author wants to (and he clearly wants to) maintain a level of realism. You can say "oh it's just a fiction, let it slide." But you're really allowing Dan Brown to get away with poor writing and research. I'll give an example. His supposed programmer genius character uses the term VSLI. Brown was cleary looking for VLSI, Very Large Scale Integrated Circuit. Having ACTUALLY majored in this field, I feel that even with a bachelor's degree, I would not have nearly the experience to be lead cryptographer for the NSA. Yet Brown's character (through Brown himself's failure) gets the acronym backwards. A typo perhaps, but further mistakes show that it's rather that Brown likely skimmed the 90s equivalent of wikipedia when writing his works.