To start with, I really don’t like writing negative reviews. I just want to make that clear. You know, the old “if you don’t have something good to say…” The best thing I can say about the Lost Symbol by Dan Brown is that it has a great deal of interesting ideas about ancient themes. The worst thing I can say about it is that it’s horribly horribly written and edited. boring, repetitive and preachy.

Dan Brown has a lot in interesting insight and research tied up in these pages. But it’s hard to remember it with all the  plot dishonesty. He constantly plays unfair games with the reader, thinking it must be cute or cleaver to withhold information from the reader to build suspense. The way to build suspense is NOT to withhold information. You must tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth from the characters prospective. And no, I’m not talking about Malloc, I’m talking about Sato, who changes character half way through the book. Readers are willing to suspend judgment about whether something is possible, as long as the author is honest and tells the truth. If the author can’t tell the truth, he needs to rewrite the story so that he can. Example: Sato’s glowing briefcase, that we don’t know what it shows for hours. What a bunch of fertilizer.

Don’t even bother to read or listen to the last hour where Brown drones on about his obvious humanistic world view. It’s just a waste of time.

Again, the research is interesting. It’s hard to say how much I believe, since from what I do know he has gotten wrong. He refers to “Mormon baptisms of the dead.” What? Are you serious? Small error, big difference. That happens to be ‘baptisms for the dead’. BIG difference. Mormons don’t baptize dead people.

In fairness, Brown wasn’t making a negative comment about these baptisms, but it’s details like this that make all the research suspect.

In conclusion, I’m not saying that there aren’t worse written books out there, I’m sure there are. It’s just that I’ve never read one.