Book Review: The Lost Symbol

You know how I’m always saying that I’m really lazy and that I tend to stay inside a lot now that the cold weather has come in? Well, I’m not lying – that’s all true. But I don’t just sit around, I actually do things. Like obsessively watching any and every season of Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives that I can get my hands on. And I go on Facebook. Maybe too much. And I blog. Not often enough but you’re happy. Right? Well… I also read. A lot. I’ve read a million and a half books since I got here, or so it seems anyway, and just recently I finished (kind of…) reading The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. My host-family are big fans of Dan Brown books and so I’ve read my fair share of Robert Langdon and non-Robert Langdon plots since I arrived here in June. I read Deception Point over the summer and I really liked that one – even if it was pretty much exactly the same type of story as all of the rest of Brown’s books.

Don’t get me wrong – I loved The DaVinci Code and Angels & Demons. They were great books. Especially the latter of the two. Historical page turners that I could hardly put down. They’re full of suspense and mystery and blah, blah. You get my point. But, needless to say, each book is fairly predictable. You know there’s going to be a good guy who is really a bad guy. And Langdon and his female-accomplice-of-the-moment are going to get out of every sticky situation they find themselves in… no matter what. Who cares if he gets locked inside of a fiberglass casket that is being filled with water? He’s going to die, right? Eh, probably not. And the giant 7 foot steroid beefed villain will definitely not be able to catch the 40-something female lab scientist even though they’re in an enclosed room surrounded by pitch black dark. It’s laughable at best but it doesn’t matter – you keep reading because it’s interesting. I knew what was going to happen halfway through the book and it turns out that I was right about 95% of it.

Like I did in the first two books, I found myself needing to Google most of the monuments and locations that Brown was writing about. Even though they’re in Washinton D.C. in this book, I had no idea what he was referencing. And getting up to Google something really throws off my reading vibes. So that was kind of annoying.

In the end, I finished the book… kind of. The villain was revealed as (surprise) someone important to almost all of the main characters and I found myself thinking, “Really, Dan Brown?” And of course, they all got off so easy and there wasn’t anything to clean up. As per Dan Brown usual. In fact, I didn’t really finish the book. I found out the villain's true identity and then read about 500 pages of boring blah-blah explanation before I thought, “I really don’t care what happens in the end. This is boring. The exciting part’s over, right?” And I suppose I’ll never be able to answer my own question if I don’t read those last twenty pages or so.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t recommend this book. It’s not Brown’s best. In fact, I like Deception Point the best and it’s not even part of his Langdon legacy. Sorry, Tom Hanks, but I hope this book doesn’t get to the box office. But if it does, I’ll probably go see it anyway. I’m a sucker for a book-to-movie adaptation. Plus, I’d love to see how they translate this story’s crazy freak of a villain to the big screen.