Book 3: The Lost Symbol

The Lost Symbol

By Dan Brown

OK, confession. I don’t have the book I was reading for this week finished yet. What I am reading is ‘Surely you’re Joking, Mr. Feynman’ which is a pretty fantastic book. However, it is also considerably long, which is why I am only halfway through. Oh, and not only long, but full of some fairly hefty topics regarding physics and the atomic bomb. Soooo, this is going to be a book review on the last book I read before starting this blog. Dan Brown’s, ‘The Lost Symbol’. 

Yeah, yeah, mainstream book, yadda yadda, Dan Brown, yadda yadda. Stop it. I like the guy. I like the guy for the same reason I like Clive Cussler, Stephanie Myer, and James Patterson. Sometimes, all you want to do is shut your mind off and enjoy a story. The Lost Symbol is precisely such a book, however, rather than tell you all about the storyline, which you can quickly pull from your neighbor, I’ll tell you what I really liked about the book. It  is exactly what I really liked about Michael Crichton books (though, nod to Crichton, his books are way better). It was interspersed with all sorts of interesting factoids. Really fantastic factoids actually. 

For example, one of the unsolved codes in the world is called Kryptos, located at the CIA headquarters IN DC. Who knew? Oh, and what about the experiments around the turn of the century that demonstrated that the SOUL may actually have WEIGHT? Wow. What about a whole branch of science that deals with ‘fringe’ issues such as an afterlife, called Noetic Sciences?  This is great stuff. It unlocked a whole REALM of Google-searching on my phone into the wee hours of the morning. 

I can really appreciate a book that is well-researched, and then read that research squished together to make a pretty coherent storyline. Granted, in some places it felt like there was too much research packed into the story, but really, I can’t blame Dan. If I had done all that investigation, I’d want to cram as much in the book as I possibly  could. 

The storyline is great too. There’s a lot of action, mystery, suspense, plenty of daddy issues, and some interesting stuff regarding death and sensory deprivation chambers. All this is somewhat wildly interconnected. I have to really appreciate Dan’s ability to make completely unbelievable bad-guys with the worst issues imaginable highly believable. Then, what actually turned out the BE the lost symbol at the end of the book? Pretty fantastic!

It’s definitely worth a read. Is it as great as ‘The Da Vinci Code’? Probably not, but it doesn’t matter. It’s still worth borrowing from your library or friend and running through it. Especially after you’ve had some sort of a week where you need a bit of escape. 

Sorry for posting on an old topic. Next week, it’s the Feynman  book, promise.