Dan Brown

I excitedly went to the library on Tuesday to pick up my copy of The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's latest. Didn't know if it would be closer to DaVinci Code and I would stay up all night to read it or Angels and Demons and would have to wait for the movie after trying half a dozen times to finish it.

It seems that 'Symbol' is somewhere in between the two. Despite the fact that I did indeed stay up all night (in the hospital ER with torn ligaments in my knee, waiting for some pain relief) I can't really get into Symbol. It's all about the Masons. Now my grandfathers and my dad are/were all Masons and NONE of them were as creepy/disturbing/downright disgusting as some of the Masons Mr. Brown uses as the hero???villains??? of 'symbol'. Nope never saw my dad drinking wine from a human skull or saw tattoos on his fingertips. (He is living with us and believe me I checked, no tattoos).

So the jury is still out on Mr. Brown's new book. We live near Washington DC and lived in DC for several years so I am very familiar with his setting and sure don't think there is some mysterious portal to the place where the answers for the mysteries of the world anywhere in DC but I'm willing to be open-minded about that.

If only he didn't have to be sooo wordy. I understand Robert Langdon is bright beyond belief but does he have to keep reminding the reader about his eidetic memory? I'm only 182 pages into the book and have no real interest in finishing but I keep thinking that it has to get better. But so far, I don't really care about the kidnap victim, the weird CIA Security Chief was just irritating not threatening and the symbology explanations just seem silly not intriguing. At this point I'm not even sure that Ron Howard/Tom Hanks/et al can save this one! I think maybe Mr. Brown has too much crazy stuff in this one. A mysterious scientist and his sister with a hidden neotic science lab in the Smithsonian storage facility, a tattooed Masonic fanatic masquerading as the scientist's psychiatrist, the strange reluctance and withholding of information on the part of Langdon.....and the never ending wordiness of Dan Brown. This may just combine to be too much for most readers.

I will persevere however. Maybe I'll just ask my dad first if he has a skull hidden in his closet that he now uses to drink his diet coke from. Or maybe he does know where the hidden portal is and will share with me and I won't have to read the next 300 plus pages of 'Symbol'!