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The Lost Symbol

By Dan Brown

Ahh, Dan Brown, the author every­one loves to hate. Sure his books aren’t so much nov­els as they are Indi­ana Jones ripoffs, but I’ve got to admit they sure are fun. This book as in his oth­ers take place in a ridicu­lously short amount of time, yet pack so much in. The Lost Sym­bol is prob­a­bly the most intense/time-sucking book I’ve read in a long time. It’s pace is that of an action film where so much hap­pens, yet so lit­tle is explained. We take Robert Lang­don to be one of those peo­ple who can fig­ure some­thing out mirac­u­lously with­out need­ing to actu­ally take time to think, yet in other parts of the novel he appears just like you and I (dumb­founded and con­fused in the face of danger/action). I like that Dan Brown does this in the way that he doesn’t make Robert Lang­don out to be some­one who should always be called on for such tasks as solv­ing ancient mys­ter­ies of national secu­rity, yet he always is, thus we’re kind of always ask­ing our­selves “why doesn’t he just say no if some­one mys­te­ri­ous calls him up and wants him to fly some­where across the world”. This is one of those books that I couldn’t put down until I was done, yet after 500 or so pages, I looked back and won­dered how so much story could hap­pen in the scope of that many pages. I can def­i­nitely see how this will trans­late to film, but if there’s pop­corn cin­ema, why shouldn’t there be pop­corn novels?