Adventures with Langdon!

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Inferno by Dan Brown


Robert Langdon has woken up in a hospital room and doesn’t remember the last two days of his life. He has  stitches on his head from a gun shot wound and just escaped from the hospital with Dr. Sienna Brooks. Bertrand Zobrist is an extremely smart geneticist and transhumanist who believes that humans are on the verge of extinction due to overpopulation. He has recently committed suicide after going into hiding for a year. His goal is to come up with a solution to our problem of overpopulation in the most extreme way possible: a plague that will wipe out half of humanity. Robert has been given the clues to stop this from happening but he must dive into the mind of Zobrist and its obsession with Dante Alighieri’s poem The Inferno and between his amnesia and the people trying to kill him, he isn’t having an easy time with it. Robert takes us on a journey through many countries and as always we are able to experience different European countries as he tries to save the world.
                I enjoyed this novel and it is exactly the type of writing I expected from Dan Brown, in a good way. The Robert Langdon adventures, as I like to call them, are very good at capturing our imaginations, mixed with a lot of history and imagery and of course suspense. Robert Langdon , inadvertently, is always a tour guide in these novels because he has to describe to you the imagery and explain in detail its history. Dan Brown is just very good at doing this without slamming it down your throat or beating you over the head with it. I have never been to Europe and I get excited when reading Dan Brown novels because this imagery is so beautiful and entrancing. Dan Brown is very adept at creating interesting story lines. Here we have the issue of overpopulation, which is an issue that I believe many try to ignore. He takes this issue, engages the reader and uses it to not only horrify you with the realities but to make you reexamine the issue humans pose as a whole.

                I found that this novel was much better than The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s previous novel. It might be because I am so interested by the topic or that the cast of characters around Dan Brown were better. If you are a Dan Brown enthusiast or simply want to try a new suspense novel I would suggest this novel. The mix of history in our real world is breath taking. 

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