Inferno

Ten years ago I read Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code between my senior year of high school and my first year of college, and I thought they were just great. Then came the movies, first The Da Vinci Code and then Angels & Demons, which together made Dan Brown's Robert Langdon a household Tom Hanks character, but also kind of sucked. And hey, in hindsight, the books kind of sucked too, and the Internet agrees, and at this point Dan Brown has become a bit of a laughing stock among people who read, oh, at least one book a year you can't buy in an airport.

Five years ago I read The Lost Symbol, and it was just terrible. Six-hundred-some-odd pages of the same old formulaic romp through Washington, with symbol-based riddles and ancient secrets and a giant conspiracy and a boatload of pseudo-science. Hot garbage, completely unmemorable, and the best thing I could say about it was that it flew right by.

So it was with very little enthusiasm that I started into Inferno a week ago. Imagine my surprise when the book, hey, wow, wasn't that bad! I mean, it was still "Dan Brown" bad - at one point a woman was described as "an epidemiologist of epidemics" - but it was tough to put down and easy to get into and loaded with all kinds of twists and turns I didn't see coming. (Some of them cheap as hell, sure, but still!) Look, what I'm saying is that I liked this book against all my better judgment. Dan Brown is still a bad writer from any technical standpoint, but airport paperbacks are meant to be quick comfort food, and sometimes a big old McDonald's combo meal sits just right.

Apparently a film adaptation of this one is coming out in less than a week. Wow! I had no idea! I will watch it within the next few years, I am sure.