The Lost Symbol

Title: The Lost Symbol

Author: Dan Brown

Pages: 511

Genre: Thriller

Grade: B+

Synopsis: Robert Langdon has been summoned to Washington to fill in as a guest lecturer for his close friend, who is the Secretary of the Smithsonian. While there, he is drawn into a plot to uncover a secret that the Mason's have been protecting and guarding for centuries.

My Review: I quite enjoyed this book, just as I have enjoyed all of Dan Brown's other novels. I am really looking forward to reading the illustrated edition when it comes out. If there is one thing that I have learned from Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, it is that the illustrated editions really make the story come alive. Instead of reading Brown's descriptions of paintings, buildings and symbols, you can see them for yourself. The book was a little more wordy/descriptive than the previous novels that Langdon stars in and many people have complained about this, but I found the extra descriptions quite interesting. Dan Brown's novels never fail to make me think.

From the Book: "(p. 65) Despite Langdon’s six-foot frame and athletic build, Anderson saw none of the cold, hardened edge he expected from a man famous for surviving an explosion at the Vatican and a manhunt in Paris. This guy eluded the French police…in loafers? He looked more like someone Anderson would expect to find hearthside in some Ivy League library reading Dostoyevsky.”

“(p. 228) The coyly nicknamed explosive Key4 had been developed by Special Forces specifically for opening locked doors with minimal collateral damage. Consisting primarily of cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine with a diethylhexyl plasticizer, it was essentially a piece of C-4 rolled into paper-thin sheets for insertion into doorjambs. In the case of the library’s reading room, the explosive had worked perfectly.”