Because the movie version of Angels & Demons is being released soon, I decided to read the book first. As is almost always the case, I'm sure the book is far better. The book has great suspense that keeps you interested on each and every page. Because this edition is the illustrated edition, I also enjoyed doing arm-chair travelling in Rome and Vatican City. The photographs are beautiful and are very helpful in picturing in your mind where the story unfolds.

This was Brown's book before the infamous "The Da Vinci Code." In many ways, this book was like a rough draft for "The Da Vinci Code", same character Langdon, same other characters, same basic start, same concepts, same bad research passed off as fact, same trick of having nearly every chapter end in cliffhanger, the same in so many ways.
Sadly, I think he did a better job the first time around.

I recommend you have a computer handy so you look up what Brown is talking about, and that way you can have a better idea of what it really looks like. Added bonus too, you can have a laugh over how Brown had to forced it into his world to make the plot somewhat cohesive.
Look, if you want to write fiction, do so but please own up to it being fiction! Trying to pass off the Ecstasy of St. Theresa as being so pornographic in nature that the Vatican had it exiled to a small church, is, well, wrong as wrong as gets.
Brown throws out a number of stunningly stupid statements, like asserting that since Christianity is syncretic, God-eating (the Holy Communion) was taken from the Aztecs. How, Brown never explains, since the practice was established by Christ himself during the Last Supper around 33 A.D. and the Aztecs didn't show up until 1248 A.D. I figure Brown left it open so he could write some sort of time travel book, involving a long lost secret that the Aztecs built their pyramids as sort of a dry run, traveled back in time and were actually behind the pyramids in Egypt. And, of course, were the sect that created the Christ-myth due to a poorly thought out plot.

Thanks to the internet, you too can have fun poking holes in the book. See, for example, CERN's site on the book. And if that doesn't do it for you, here's a good site looking into all the errors.

A sample from the last site:

"While walking around the CERN campus, Langdon notices a marble column incorrectly labeled Ionic. Langdon points the mistake out to Kohler: "That column isn't Ionic. Ionic columns are uniform in width. That one's tapered. It's a Doric -- the Greek counterpart." (26) The problem is that Ionic columns are themselves Greek. The three orders of classical columns, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, are all Greek in origin, so it's impossible for the Doric order to the be the Greek counterpart of the Ionic. It's also much easier to distinguish the Doric from the Ionic based on their capitals; Doric columns have plain capitals, while Ionic columns are topped by volutes or scrolls."

That irked me when I read that passage, because not only is a poor joke, it doesn't make sense!

Let's ignore the bad, the erroneous, and the ugly, and you have decent little thriller zipping around Rome looking at art. Of course, it has to zip along, slow down long enough to think about it, and a host of questions start to swarm up. Like how Langdon has a whole theory on who the bad guy is and how Langdon was involved in these rather preposterous circumstances. Of course, the premise is wrong, so that that whole house of cards fall down. Not bad in of itself, but then Brown doesn't ever provide any reason Langdon was involved after that.

Of course, you aren't supposed to notice while reading it, and preferably not afterwards, either. Doing so reveals how badly Brown writes. He can't provide a single decent reason why his hero is there, aside from a vague "Because" and a shrug.

I'm envious of Brown, he can't write well, has plot holes big enough to drive the Popemobile through, bad research and "facts" that aren't, and yet still is entertaining, popular and, most galling perhaps, published.
Caveat lector.

Eher 4,5 Sterne. Tolle Story und super Schreibstil, allerdings gab es doch einige Stellen, die sich sehr gezogen haben. Man hätte das Buch locker um 100 Seiten kürzen können, ohne wichtige Teile der Story auszulassen :)

4.0 Stars
This was such a gripping page turn that kept me reading in order to find out what was going to happen next. The story really felt very cinematic and I could really picture the scenes (even though I haven't watched the movie). The book had some info dumps about physics and religious history. This could bother other readers but I lapped it all up. I would highly recommend this one to anyone in a reading slump.

Angels and Demons is so far one of the best thriller book book I have ever read!
The combination of religion, science, secret brotherhoods and is what makes me a Brown fan.
This is so far the best book I've read for Dan Brown.

n  "Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end, we all are just searching for truth, that which is greater for ourselves."n

When a physicist/priest is murdered, the word Illuminati branded into his chest, and a quarter-gram of antimatter stolen, it's up to renowned symbologist Robert Langdon to find the goods and the murderer. But can he stop someone from using the antimatter as a weapon, even with hot physicist Vittoria Vetra in tow?

After all the hype, I managed to dodge this bullet for over a decade but when my girlfriend caught me in a vulnerable moment between books, I knew the time had come.

Overall, it was a fun read. It reminded me of a high tech Indiana Jones a lot of the time. However, at the end of the day, it was pretty much a by the numbers thriller, complete with forced sexual tension.

Like I said, it's pretty Indiana Jones-ish, except instead of an archaeologist who has crazy globe-trotting adventures, Langdon is a symbologist who has crazy globe-trotting adventures.

As much as I want to hate on this book, it's a page turner; Short chapters, nearly all of them ending on a cliffhanger. However, even for a thriller of this type, the plot seems a little overly complicated. A centuries old secret society is going to use some stolen antimatter to blow up the Vatican? Wouldn't it be easier to get a surplus nuke from the former Soviet Union?

The writing is so cheesy and over-dramatic I can't help but be amused. It's really pulpy but not in the good Raymond Chandler way. More like an early Doc Savage. Seriously, Langdon could have said "I'll be super-amalgamated" and it wouldn't have felt that out of place. It almost feels like Brown was trying to do a Black Dynamite-style commentary/spoof on conspiracy thrillers.

One thing I didn't enjoy is that the book suffers from "I did a bit of research so I'm going to cram it all in the dialogue" syndrome. There are infodumps galore and lots of redundant information, mostly about symbology. I'm not going to touch on the things that weren't researched and are erroneous since most movies have equally shitty fact checking.

I guess I'll rate it 3 stars. It's not well written or to any degree believable but it's a fun and exciting read, like a pack of Skittles for your brain. Not good but definitely entertaining. Not only that, Dan Brown's milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. Any book that gets so many non-readers reading gets a little slack from me.

Es gibt viele Dan Brown Hasser da draußen, die behaupten seine Bücher wären keine richtige "Literatur". Ich wollte mich selbst mal an seinen Robert Langdon Romanen probieren, da er ja wohl nicht grundlos einer der erfolgreichsten Autoren der Welt sein kann. Und jetzt weiß ich auch warum!
Ich habe zuvor noch nur nie ein Buch gelesen, indem sich Historische und Thrillerelemente überschneiden. Jetzt frage ich mich wieso eigentlich nicht...Es war nahezu immer spannend und die Grundstory hat mir wahnsinnig gut gefallen! Finde aber man hätte die Story ruhig kürzen können, ohne wichtige Handlungselemente zu verlieren. Aber da ist bestimmt in den nächsten Romanen noch Luft nach oben!

Have to admit a few things:
1) I didn't realize this was the first book in the series
2) This is my second attempt- I started this in college and couldn't get into it...
3) Started on audio (great narrator) when I realized it was ABRIDGED! (The horror!!) and I decided to stop listening and start all over with the physical copy of the book

I really enjoyed this book! You can still pick this book up almost 20 years later and it doesn't feel outdated. I constantly found myself wondering how Dan Brown came up with this stuff in between googling images to see these Roman statues exactly as they were described. The action never let up and the twists kept me wildly entertained, although, I did figure most of them out. I enjoyed the Religion vs Science argument and the Illuminati connections are so interesting. To think that this entire adventure takes place in 24 hours is ridiculous, and impressive. I read The Da Vinci Code first years ago, so looking forward to picking up the third book in this series to see if Brown can keep the momentum and conspiracies going. I'm also curious which city will be next??

Enjoyable enough suspense thriller. It was a high octane adventure lurching from crisis to crisis but I only occasionally found it exciting- possibly less often than I was meant to! That was certainly an eventful weekend that Robert Langdon had!
I read the Da Vinci Code years ago as a stand alone and I think my judgement for this book suffers as the second book I've read because it seems so similar and formulaic.
Maybe I will dip into the other books in this series eventually but I'm not in any hurry...

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1182548.html

You are the Director of CERN, and one of your senior colleagues is killed in his room with a peculiar word branded on his chest. Do you:
1) inform the authorities
2) google the word branded on the dead man's chest and then phone the first Harvard professor whose name appears in the search results
3) have a nice cup of tea?

You are the head of the Swiss Guard, responsible for the security of the Vatican during the conclave which will elect the next Pope. You receive reliable information that an explosive of unimaginable power has been hidden somewhere in the Vatican and will detonate in a few hours. Incidentally, four senior cardinals have also disappeared. Do you:
1) evacuate everyone, including the cardinals and most of the population of Rome
2) lock the cardinals into the Sistine Chapel and hope that the explosive device will be found by the Harvard professor and the cute physicist who have just turned up
3) have a nice cup of tea?

What was the fate of Copernicus?
1) executed by the church for heresy
2) died in his bed after a lifetime as a priest and senior government official in a church-run statelet
3) he had a nice cup of tea

How likely is it that a Catholic priest would be allowed to adopt a daughter?
1) if they are both interested in physics and she looks good in shorts, I can't see why anyone would find it unusual
2) you must be joking
3) perhaps they could have a nice cup of tea together

Was Winston Churchill a Catholic? Are only cardinals eligible to be elected Pope by ballot?
1) Boring technicalities!
2) A poor excuse for research
3) I've put the kettle on

Who do you trust most for good information on the historical relationship between religion and science?
1) Dan Brown
2) Richard Dawkins
3) Stephen Jay Gould

We have a term called ‘paisa vasool’ in Hindi. It means ‘worth the money’ and is generally used in reference to films. A mainstream Bollywood film is termed paisa vasool and is commercially successful only when it constitutes the following factors:

1)tA hero who can do anything and everything under the sun. He can achieve impossible feats and always survives bizarre accidents.

2)tA heroine comes across as smart independent women in beginning but turns into a cardboard cutout by the end. Just another pretty face, another damsel in distress.

3)tA plot which is always over the top. Includes dramatic twists, graphic deaths, a little romance thrown here and there, and a demented villain. In the end the hero saves the day and then shares some steamy/mushy moments with the heroine.

Halfway through Angels and Demons, I realized that except for the trademark bollywood songs, this book shared every other characteristic of a typical masala film. Logic and reason have only cameo roles, all the characters are one dimensional, there are unexpected twists and turns all along, the prose can be described as pedestrian at best, but somehow you feel compelled to finish the book. To be honest though, my compulsion arose more from the fact that I had bought the book (damn these book sales) than from anything the novel had to offer. That Dan Brown got half of the facts wrong does not please me either. Still, I would give this page turner 2.5 stars, because at the end of the day it was “paisa vasool” and entertaining.

This book was amazing. That's my one word to describe it. Throughout it, I had a diversity of emotions: At the beginning I loved it; at about 30% , I was still enjoying it, though it sometimes seemed a little convenient; by around 85-90% of it, I was sure I was going to rate it 2 stars, because of probably the biggest Deus Ex Machina I had experienced so far in books... but Brown saved the book in the cleverest way possible, and here I am, giving it a well-deserved 4-stars rating.

That is not to say the book was perfect, because it wasn't. Here is what I kept thinking while reading it (at it quickly became my main complaint): It read like a book made out of a movie, not otherwise, which was actually the case. I have in fact read books made out of movies, that is, the movie came first, then the book. What do they all have in common? The writing is deficient and tells me barely anything about how things look like... in other words, the descriptions are weak. Like, I didn't know how to picture things in my mind. I had to google some things because their descriptions were not enough to give me a clear image.

Truth be told, descriptions are very important. You cannot exaggerate with them because what you'll create is a tedious book no one will want to read. However, if barely no detail is given about the imagery of the book, you can't simply see the things how the author wants you to. That is why this book gave me problems. The deaths of some of the cardinals were impossible for me to picture. I even had to watch the movie to get an idea, if that tells you something.

Nonetheless, I still deeply ejoyed the book. It was one of the fastest-paced books I've ever read. Really, I can't remember a book that got in the action as quickly as this one did. Riddles, Illuminati, deaths, ancient books... I loved every piece of it and I do not regret reading it. I wonder why in hell it took me so long to start it. My father had gotten himself a copy of it more than 4 years ago, and till now I am reading it. Why, though, I know not. I totally recommend it. Now I'm immediately starting the next of Langdon's adventures.

P.S.: I'm perfectly aware I spoke next to nothing about the plot, but believe me, it's better the less you know about the book. I went completely blind to it. Believe it or not.