by Dan Brown, audible edition read by Paul Michael, 2009, Random House Audio, New York

This novel is a sad effort in comparison to The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.  Rather than providing the reader with cliff-hanging suspense and fast action, The Lost Symbol devolves into a treatise on the symbolism of the ancients and noetic science.  Mr. Brown somehow feels that the ancients understood the innermost workings of the mind but this knowledge was somehow lost.  Modern science is only now rediscovering it.

Brown seems to pick the worst times to launch into his boring lectures on the knowledge of the ancients.  His hero, Robert Langdon, also seems a pale shade of the character he once was in the previous two books.

If this book had attempted to focus only on the theories of the ancients, it would have been a bad book.  Trying to combine this stuff with a suspense thriller made it a really terrible book.  In fact, the best line in the novel occurred about three quarters of the way through:  The villian said to Langdon as he was torturing him, “It’s almost over, Dr. Langdon.”  I wish it had been true because I felt as if I were being tortured as I went through the rest of this garbage to get to the end.