Finished The Lost Symbol

I've been a zombie this week, particularly because I've been staying up way too late reading Dan Brown's Lost Symbol. Somehow it always turns out like this when I get into a new book, but since I probably only read about a half dozen or so of them a year the recovery ain't so bad.

What usually happens is I scan the list of Nebula and Hugo award winners (or someone gives me a shout out), choose a book that seems pretty great and then hammer it out in week or two...but sometimes I do it in a few days - I think that the only other books I've read faster than this one are Daemon 2/Freedom, Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow.

Anyway, this one's pretty good and what you would expect from Mr. Brown. I already own both Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code so I'm kind of familiar with Robert Langdon and his Mickey Mouse watch. What's fun about these books is looking up all the crazy references that the author makes as you go along. It's fun jumping onto Google and doing some "real research"...or something like that.

Let me tell you though, it gets pretty outrageous towards the end. I mean like really far off the deep end with things. Considering it doesn't involve any wizards or computer viruses, it turns some pretty weird corners. When you actually find out what the symbol is all about the whole denouement of the story and the way it wraps up seemed kind of unsatisfying. I'm not sure if it was because I was finishing it off at 4 am and my vision was going crazy but after the final bit of excitement the way that the author gave closure to everything that happened was...I don't know, go read it for yourself.

Now back to real life. Right...