The Lost Symbol

You guessed it. This is the third book in Dan Brown's trilogy, following Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code. I finished this book most recently.

I remember when this book hit the library shelves because I was in my advanced reporting class in the fall of 2009. For the first couple of weeks in the semester, I had a student in the beginning reporting class, Adam, shadow me to get the hang of shooting, editing, and writing a package. The story we looked into together was the higher influx of peeps heading to the library to avoid the costs of renting/buying movies (and books, but movies were mostly relevant because that's when Blockbuster started to close like a billion stores). Adam looked into The Lost Symbol on the library's system and found that it had more than 80 people who had placed a hold request on it.

Robert Langdon is slightly older, but still an intellectual giant in the world of symbology. There are a couple over-arching things about the third book that I liked a lot. First, the whole thing takes place in Washington, D.C., so for once it was my turn to enjoy the places mentioned and be able to picture them from the fam's east coast vacation in 1994. Secondly, the historical aspects of this book tie into Freemasonry. I still don't know a ton about the Free Masons, but a) I know Joseph Smith was a Mason, and b) National Treasure, one of my favorite movies, has a lot of ties to masonry, too. Overall, it's a group that intrigues me, if nothing else.

While Whitney and I agree that this book wasn't quite as satisfying as the first two because the whole clue-filled quest didn't seem to serve as much of an overall purpose, it was still a good read with some intense moments. In fact, I told Whitney not to read it right before going to bed because she often has nightmares, and there's at least one scene in particular that could be kind of scary. It is not, however, a scary book; it's just that the villain is quite a creeper.