Reasons not to read Dan Brown

Making Light and their commenters put the boot in to the awful hack thrillers of Dan Brown.

I've managed to avoid them myself, even though half my work colleagues seem to be reading him, even when I tell them they ought to be reading Neal Stephenson instead. One of them is even amused when a Google search on "Illuminati" brought back this page of mine.

Why do his books sell so well if they're so terrible? There are a number of theories, such as the ones suggested by SF author John M Ford:

[Ursula] LeGuin noted some time back that people will buy bestsellers (and go to hit movies) because they can participate, through the Law of Contagion, in the money involved. Film is the most expensive art form we have, which is one reason it's taken so seriously.

And there's also the Book Everybody is Reading factor, which is like the Movie (or, if you live in New York, Broadway Show) Everybody is Seeing. It's easy to get left out of the conversation if you don't get the references. (Note that there's at least one book annotating the references, so you can both not read the novel and pretend you know more about it than people who have. Which leaves you both about even.)

Or maybe it's because Dan Brown's cliché-ridden pabulum is sold in supermarkets, so is readily available to the types that don't darken the doors of a proper bookshop, filled with a such a bewildering array of titles that it means they have to make actual decisions about what to read.

The same thing happens with music. As in this quote from a review of the new album by The Darkness:

This album does not come close to the quality release of the last Journey album, Generations.

It almost unfair to compare this CD to bast array of recent good hard rock releases that come through my door. For an album that many people can find in their local supermarket, this is no doubt one of the best rock releases of the year.

So I think people should be reading Neal Stephenson and Gene Wolfe rather than Dan Brown, and be listening to Opeth and Porcupine Tree rather than Franz Ferdinand or Coldplay. Does this make me a snob? Or just someone who ignores media hype?