I can’t decide – Sarah Palin or Dan Brown? Help me to.

Every year, publishers are swamped with thousands of what they term “unsolicited” manuscripts. Some of them must be good stories that rot and die for want of any number of reasons. But to think that Dan Brown rode on his past popularity, and hit a million books with ‘The Lost Symbol’ is just plain criminal. This book has been such a disappointment, that I was actually thinking unsavory thoughts of the gall of marketing a work as frivolous as Lost Symbol.

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/103075-the-lost-symbol-exceeds-one-million-sales.html

It looks to me like Dan Brown was lost, and was looking for something to write – his mortgage was up for renewal, and folks had lost interest in Da Vinci Code. He looked skyward for inspiration and said – “Oh please give me something that I can spin a yarn with. I am lost – all I have is a Symbology professor!”

Lost Symbol was born.

I can’t tell you the number of times Robert Langdon “reeled”, and “had no idea what that meant” in the book. A 150 page book would have done better justice to Noetic Science & Free Masons than the 650 pages he doled out.

Then, just when you have to restore your faith in the world by cramming in a few good books, along comes this excuse for an author: Sarah Palin. Here is a link to a speech she once gave: her resignation to be precise, which has been corrected for our benefit.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/07/palin-speech-edit-200907

One has to question the system that displays her books prominently in book shops. Yet, I would not be surprised to see the book on the best selling lists soon. After all, literature, humour and plot don’t sell half as well as controversy and marketing do.