origin

Dan Brown is at it again. I read Origin mainly because I was in Italy, out of books, and the shop in Sulmona that sold books in English is no longer.

Side note: The Great Recession, or World Economic Downturn, or whatever you want to call it, has not lifted in Italy as much as it has here. Where it started. thank you greedy, coke snorting, trust-fund, ivy-league, frat boys who blew up the world to make a few bucks on all of our backs*

I've read a couple of Brown's books, and like most people, I read The Da Vinci Code first, which was pretty good and then I went back and read Angels and Demons, which was better. I think I've said this before, Brown's character Robert Langdon is a pretty good character; he has the skill set as a professor of symbols or whatever to help solve the mysteries he stumbles upon, but the story arc in each of his stories is just too similar. Langdon doesn't begin a mystery solving venture until he stops of at the adventure store and picks up two things: a mysterious and shady quasi religious organization bent on murdering him before he solves this mystery (complete with some crazy, holy water guzzling psychopath with C-clamps on his junk) and a foxy lady to run around with and mansplain his brilliance to, for our benefit.

If you're a Dan Brown fan, I think you'll enjoy this. If not, then I'd say you could probably skip this one and never know the difference.



* Please note, I have no idea if the people who tranched up a bunch of bad loans, sold them as AAA and then broke the banks, Wall Street, and then the world, actually snorted cocaine, were funded by trusts, went to Ivy League schools, or were in fraternities. I'm pretty confident about the greedy part. And I actually feel pretty good about the rest of it too.