The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Not bad to start with, but gets incredibly waffly as it goes. Brown’s characters’ dialogue is better than some previous novels, but still stilted and unnatural in places.
The pace is great up until around half way when the chapters suddenly double in length and all the excitement seems to leave the story. Quick action gives way to long, boring philosophical arguments and the final “reveal” of the secret being searched for is incredibly underwhelming.
Also – page 578 – a progress bar and a task bar are different things. You’d think a guy who wrote a novel about the computer systems being used within the NSA would know this. Actually, remembering how poor that book was, perhaps not.
It still surprised me that Dan Brown is given so much credit for this genre of novel when he wasn’t the first to write one, and when his are certainly not amongst the best. I guess he has a good publicity department.
Related articles
- The Lost Symbol [book review] (ericglover.wordpress.com)
- The Lost symbol (eastbird.wordpress.com)
- Lost in The Lost Symbol (allbymyshelf.wordpress.com)
Ah, Dan brown – I love his books more for the nit-pickability and hilariously ubermenschy characters than anything else. They’re the only books I read with a pencil in hand to scrawl corrections in the margins 😀 (Assuming I own the book, that is).
I consider them more like puzzle-books, where the fun is finding the massive factual errors that even a YTS trainee fact-checker should have caught. The story itself is secondary. I mean, please: was ANYONE caught out by Newton’s “rosy sphere” or the backwards writing in The Da Vinci Code?
I seem to recall TDC going on about those words that read upside down were incredibly rare and unusual, or that there was only one or something. There’s a fecking generator online that takes any two words and turns them into a tattoo design.