The Lost Symbol – Dan Brown

matt — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:08:22 +0000

With The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown supplants James Patterson (*) as king of what I call the “popcorn books” — books that work best when read straight through in as few sittings as possible, with no reflection on what’s come before as you plow ahead. Whether you’ll like the book or not depends on how willing you are to do that, I guess.

(*) – Well, Brown supplants Patterson on a “quality of book” basis. With Brown’s extended hiatus and Patterson’s co-author book factory pumping out 6 books a year, he’ll never catch him in quantity.

If you’ve read The DaVinci Code or Angels And Demons, then you can guess the outline of the plot — Robert Langdon is called to a famous landmark, something bad happens, and he’s forced into a race against time to solve ancient riddles, accompanied by a love interest. The setting is Washington D.C. this time, and in a happy-enough change of pace, his love interest is actually age-appropriate.

As I said before, this book works best if you plow straight on through without reflection. Brown makes this easy to do, with his style of ending every single chapter on some sort of cliffhanger. In a way it’s like you are in your own thriller — don’t slow down, don’t look back, or the glaring plot holes will catch up with you and dampen your enjoyment of the whole thing.

Having said that, I have a few things about the book to get off my chest. I’ll put a spoiler-barrier on it for you, so you can skip it if you don’t want to know (and I’ll try to be a little vague, at least)…

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Around page 100 there’s a sequence where two computer types, one supposedly a sophisticated “hacker,” are trying to find the origin of an IP address (the numeric “address” of a device on the Internet). Just suffice to say — some of the stuff they say is just made up, and some of the things they are boggled by are very simple, routine safety measures. You might not notice if you aren’t an Internet professional, but trust me that none of it is realistic at all.

Of course, you don’t need to be an Internet professional to guess that the highly protected CIA database in question wouldn’t have magically given them the document that spurred their interest to begin with. And you just need to have a positive number for your IQ to know that if the CIA had the name/address of someone who was trying to break in to one of their computers, they would most certainly not call him up on the phone and ask him why he’s doing it. I mean, c’mon, did Brown’s teenage nephew ghostwrite this passage?

Other things that really bugged me: for such a smart guy, Langdon sure does fall for the same damn trick by the same damn person pretty easily the second time. Also, after spending the whole book establishing you need two parts of the sacred artifact to decode its secret, there’s a long time when none of the protagonists seem to realize that their “solution” only utilizes one of the parts.

Hmm, outside of the spoiler tags, lemme just say — when the action stops at the end, if you get bored with the exposition that goes on for 30-50 more pages, you can stop at any time. You won’t miss any big revelations.

Anyway, for all my ranting above, I do think this is a decent book, albeit #3 in the Robert Langdon series both chronologically and in quality. If you are a fan of the first two books, then I think you’ll like this one just fine. If you read and didn’t like either of those, well — why are you even reading this review? If you’re that one person left who is completely new to the series, then I recommend you start with Angels And Demons and continue on if you like that.

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Matt Reviews Things » Popcorn Books

The Lost Symbol – Dan Brown