In 2003, I was a newspaper subscriber and each Saturday I flipped to a certain section to verify what seemed to be happening. Weeks after weeks, to my growing concern, one name seemed to holler at me personally from the page. Taunting me from the bestselling book list where he had become a permanent resident.

You might know Dan Brown from such stories as The Da Vinci Code. This rose epically past “bestseller” and it is this book I watched murder all other literary competition. In its first week it burned to the top of the NY Times’ list. Two long years and seven long months later, The Da Vinci Code finally exited that hallowed bestsellers list. That is a long time to deal with my obsession.

I read this book, provided lovingly by my friends on my birthday, in a week or so. It wasn’t a boring tale. How could it be when every eight pages (a chapter) the reader is left dangling from a cliff? Then, in the first two paragraphs of the subsequent chapter, Robert Langdon somehow decodes an ancient puzzle so complex it eluded even the greatest minds for millennia. Our hero Bob keeps the story moving by guessing the answers and escaping certain doom in about four sentences.

I have neither written a book nor had that book published. Yet my compulsive attention to Brown’s express trip to the millionaire club made me wonder why I tried to write well. Clearly one needs not do such a thing to be successful. Grab an idea, spill it into Word, buffer it with clichés, maybe touch on some religious groups, generate suspense by placing the protagonist in fatally impossible situations, sprinkle in some “But then…”s and “Suddenly…”s and create a phenomenon. Me, the chump, scrutinizes every line, frets over punctuation, splits open a first draft and dissects it endlessly…. why such labor? Millionaires don’t do that!

That’s what drove my mania from 2003-2005, a period during which I watched Brown’s name appear several times – every week in the same bestseller list. Nobody cared about Angels & Demons and Deception Point in 2000 and 2001 when they came out. But by golly, they sure did now. And by “they” I mean everybody who entered a bookstore or signed into Amazon. Dan Brown, three times a week, in the list, every Saturday. I had come to get drunker on Fridays in weary anticipation.

That “Code” of his has now vaulted well past 81 million books sold. It pains me to research further. Bob Langdon surfaced in a movie as well. Getting Tom Hanks in your first book-movie isn’t too raw a deal. And then doing it again for a book previously ignored also doesn’t bruise.

I write short stories read by between three and a dozen people. I am not one to judge Dan Brown-esque success. But I can be bitter about it. In my humblest of opinions, he types a story rather than writes one. We can all enjoy it, revel in the phenomenon, be part of something bigger, look for answers inside paint strokes and pretend to be as nifty as Bob Langdon. 

But are we just getting spun like spools of thread? Does a book have to be skillfully written in order to be good? How jealous am I?

In 2009, Brown’s Lost Symbol opened to a one-day sales record for English-language adult fiction. At the time I was not a newspaper subscriber. I didn’t follow whatever happened next.