Book Review: The Lost Symbol

They lost me in the Da Vinci Code when they started blabbing all their top secret info in a taxi cab (who have radios don't they?) when they knew that they were wanted by Interpol, FBI etc... really. duh?

And then when a cryptologist, an expert on languages and an expert on Da Vinci didn't, like myself, simply read the backwards English and were arguing for several pages what ancient language it could be? Hard to stomach after having simply read the text in question as easily as all the other text. I was surprised Dan Brown didn't have a Renaissance paintings lecturer, an art museum curator and an expert on Da Vinci arguing whether the Mona Lisa was perhaps an ancient cave painting or something found in an Egyptian pyramid. At least if he had made the taxi driver or the janitor not know what the writing was, and be enlightened by said experts, he would have kept the reader's credulity in his characters and their wisdom.

(Wikipedia in "Mirror-writing" entry says: "Leonardo da Vinci is famous for having written most of his personal notes in mirror..... He may also have wanted to protect his ideas from theft or hide them from the Roman Catholic Church (with whom his scientific findings sometimes collided). However, the latter idea, popular among conspiracy theorists, is highly unlikely: it is (and was even at the time) clear, even to a child, that the text in question could be easily read "backwards" (either directly or through its reflection, such as in a mirror)." Exactly, clear even to a child)

Sorry, as someone who used to write her diary backwards in grade 10, DID take art history (and saw the exhibit at Montreal Museum of Art with all Da Vinci's handwriting originals written backwards) and is interested in languages, Dan Brown's "mysteries" are like knocking my head against concrete while drinking roofing tar. But surely someone else will love it!