I read a lot of books; mostly ones that nobody else reads such as books about linguistics and English language usage, or poorly-written but highly entertaining autobiographies by billionaires named Ted Turner. Every year, there is one book that all women everywhere carry in their beach bag and on airplanes and sometimes read.  One year it was The Devil Wears Prada, a few years ago it was a book called Middlesex, which I think was about a transvestite, and a couple years after that, everyone, including men, were reading The DiVinci Code.

I never read The DiVinci Code because it looked very long, and because I have a rule against reading anything that might result in a Tom Hanks movie.  I never read anything else that Dan Brown wrote because one of the books had the word “digital” in the title which reminded me of my college computer science professor, and made me think I would sooner use it to set myself on fire than read a page.

Last week, on my honeymoon, I’d read every word I’d brought along and since all of the other words available to me were in French, I poached my wife’s copy of The Lost Symbol and in about 16 riveting hours, read all eight million pages. 

The Lost Symbol is a thrilling tale of events in the life of Brown’s favorite Harvard professor, Robert Langdon.  The story focuses on the Masons, who are best known for having a “temple” near my middle school where children gathered to have fist fights and are currently known for their series of advertisements which feature a guy pretending to be Benjamin Franklin attracting new members by using the nearly extinct (except in the aforementioned books that I and no one else reads) “time was, time is” construction.

Since the book is a classic cliffhanger, I won't spoil the plot, but will say that a reader can look forward to a mix of well-written accounts of gripping and plausible events as well as accounts of other, less plausible events, such as when Langdon and a companion have time to boil a large cauldron of water in the basement of the National Cathedral while being actively chased by the CIA.

At the risk of criticizing someone who has sold approximately as many books as have been sold all together by everyone else, I will say that Brown is a better storyteller than writer.  He is amazingly creative and has an uncanny ability to tell a story, but many of his 468 million chapters are pedantic detail-laden garbage in Langdon’s professor voice about the construction of the Washington Monument which include his “no way he’s ever met an 18 year old” dialog of students enthusiastically shouting class contributions from the back of Harvard lecture halls.  Also awkward were the vignettes containing wholly irrelevant scenes of the bad guy admiring his “massive sex organ” in the mirror.  But my favorite were the 100 or so chapters written in Hardy Boys quality dialog, in which Langdon decodes roughly 50 hidden messages and each time prefaces his epiphany with “of course, it’s been here all along! I can’t believe we didn’t see it!”

Aside from the lack of a consistent voice, my peeves were reduced to Brown’s laughable Thomas Friedmanesque product placements such as the “commandeered Lexus SUV” which chases Langdon, or the 5,000 or so references to the use of a Blackberry, and the contrast of Brown’s use of painful detail on certain subjects no one cares about or has any basis to refute, such as the precise weight of cornerstones of various D.C. landmarks, against his frequent mention of helicopters going into “auto hover mode” or flying at “silent altitude” which suggests a lack of familiarity with helicopters, or a failure to have a four second conversation with anyone who has ever taken a physics class, or seen a helicopter, or heard of a helicopter.  

Despite my misgivings about his inconsistent attention to detail, occasionally crappy writing, and frequently comical dialog, I was glued to all twelve thousand pages of this enthralling and brilliant tale and recommend it to anyone, even if they aren’t restricted to a French library.

When I was big into The Hardy Boys, my teacher told me that it was rumored that the author was a woman.  I’m not sure why it seemed totally implausible that a woman could write crappy pre-teen crime mysteries but it was such an important fact that my teacher thought to share it with me and I’ve carried it with me for life.  To this day I don't know if Franklin W. Dixon is a man, a woman, or merely a nom de plume used by various writers over the years, but I’m certain that nobody’s ever seen it and Dan Brown in the same place.