The Dan Brown Enigma Read Online Free PDF Page A

“You’re a storyteller. I can tell. There will come a day when you know what you want to write about, and then you will write a novel.” I sort of said, “OK, sure, nice to meet you… crazy old man.” And went home.’ [17]
    Brown had not yet entirely given up music. Since his return to New Hampshire in 1993 he had been working on the second CD but this time he had none of the professional people who had been part of his debut album to help him. He was, essentially, on his own.
    The new CD, Angels & Demons, was in stark contrast to his debut. It was almost entirely Brown himself, using synthesisers with friends backing him up on a variety of different instruments to fill out the sound. The only musical credit was Brown himself as writer, producer and arranger. Acknowledgements went to John Langdon, Macintosh Computers and a software company called Digidesign that produces ProTools, an advanced music sequencing software. Blythe, who added backing vocals, got a double acknowledgement.
    On the first album the majority of songs had been love songs. On Angels & Demons the love songs were gone. Instead, the darker feel to the album reflected his disillusionment with Hollywood and the music industry.
    Religious imagery runs through many of the songs on the album, as on ‘All I Believe’. The title track, especially, shows the struggle Brown had been having with religion and science and which would surface in his books. The lyrics reflect his difficulties reconciling these two disciplines, as well as good and evil, because in the song he is unable to tell the difference between angels and demons.
    The liner notes also again credited his wife for her involvement. But perhaps more of note is the album’s artwork, an ambigram by artist John Langdon, which he later used for the novel Angels & Demons . Ambigrams are words that, written in a certain graphic way, can be read upside down or right way up. Langdon’s gothic style had caught Brown’s attention so he decided to use it for the cover.
    The new CD was released in 1995. It was to be his last. Its sales were not as high as Brown had hoped, but Lisa Rogak states in her book that Brown maintains one of the tracks from this was performed at the 1996 Olympics. Although the track, called ‘Peace in Our Time’, doesn’t appear anywhere on the official Olympic collection of songs, there were many that were performed at Olympics events and ceremonies that were never officially recorded, so there is no reason to assume that Brown was not telling the truth. It may well be that his track was performed at a smaller event or two away from the cameras and crowds.
    But whichever way it was considered, Dan Brown’s music career was over. As he continued teaching, he turned his efforts now solely to writing.

CHAPTER SEVEN
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DIGITAL FORTRESS
    Initially I had been indignant that the NSA was reading emails. But subsequently I realised their work constituted a fascinating moral grey area.
    D AN B ROWN
    D igital Fortress was the first of Dan Brown’s novels and was the only one he wrote on spec. ‘The thrill of being a published author ( 187 Men To Avoid ), combined with George Wieser’s words of encouragement, my newfound fascination with NSA, and the vacation reading of Sidney Sheldon’s The Doomsday Conspiracy , all had begun to give me confidence that I could indeed write a novel,’ he said. ‘I quite literally woke up one morning and decided to write a thriller that delved into NSA. That’s when I started writing Digital Fortress .’ [54]
    Like all of Brown’s books, the core of the story is built around a puzzle that the protagonist must solve in a short space of time. Brown builds the pace of the book deftly, taking the reader from Spain to Washington and back again many times. He uses flashbacks to build background information then brings the reader back into the present to push the story forward. So how does Digital Fortress stack up against the Curzon Group’s five