The Lost Symbol and What's in a Name?

So I don't usually do book reviews but I'm a feelin' another one comin' on. lol.

Also: I need a name to call the readers of my blog. Aunt Becky has the Pranksters, The Queen of Everything has her Queefs (yes, yes we know...), Toy With Me has the Toy with Me'ers. It all works. My blog name does not lend itself to anything obvious.

And so while I mull over different ideas, I open my plea up to you, oh ye readers of this blog - what will ye be called?

But so, back to the book. I just finished Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol". That man is a shameless pattern writer. I mean seriously. I haven't  seen one this bad since I discovered Mary Higgins Clark in high school. The underlying plot for all of his Robert Langdon books is practically identical.

And *SPOILER ALERT* really you can't pretend to kill your protagonist. The  dramatic tension there is SO contrived. I mean really. Shakespeare yes, he kills everybody off if its a tragedy. But dude, you've done three books in the exact same patterns so even though it really looks like you killed our valiant hero, you've still got a couple hundred pages of book left and well, it's a Robert Langdon book. I know you're not REALLY going to kill Robert Langdon.

So that was obnoxious and contrived and would have been completely dumb if I hadn't been a wee bit interested in the science of how you pulled it off. Cool but I'm still annoyed.

I would have chunked the book at the wall in disgust and refused to finish it except for one thing - the man does fantastic research. It makes my little nerd heart happy the way he goes into deep historical research, theory, etc. And while he might get creative with the current science parts, all of his historical crap is accurate and fascinating.

Particularly this time because I know very little about the Masons. I know more than most people but thats not really saying much. So that was interesting.

But what really got my attention was his stuff on the history, and span of Apotheosis. I had no idea it was such a common and repeated belief/theme through out history. Kinda seriously cool if you have any idea why I think this is cool (why exactly I think this is cool would take several novel length posts so we're going to be vague for now). But I loved it. The man is like right there. He's ALMOST got THE BIG picture. Its one of the closest examples I've yet seen to somebody having ALMOST all the puzzle pieces. He's not quite there, but he's got almost all the edges and a few big chunks in the middle. Doesn't have the whole picture though and so it throws off what he thinks its going to look like when its done.

But it's cool. And so, contrived story aside, I loved the intellectual stuff.

If you like pattern stories and you liked the last two Robert Langdon book then go for it, but if he writes another one and I decide to read it, it will be for the intellectual crap and not the story.