How did Dan Brown, the immensely popular and successful bad writer behind such hits as The Da Vinci Code and Hey, There's a Treasure Map Under This Painting!, get to be such an immensely popular and successful bad writer? He just loves "reading," meaning "listening to stuff."
From a Q&A with the New York Times book review:
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
The most pleasurable reading experience I’ve had recently was just last week — jogging on the beach with an audiobook of Malcolm Gladwell’s “What the Dog Saw.” I was so engrossed in his essay “The Ketchup Conundrum” that I ran an extra mile just to find out how it ended.
Dan Brown's favorite Da Vinci painting is Seeing The Mona Lisa in a Bugs Bunny Cartoon Once.
(To be fair, "Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics.")
[NYT. Photo: AP]