Angels and Demons
One thing I found cool and is presumably a good thing to do in a thriller: there's a point ~40% into the book where it seems like things must resolve, one way or another, in short order, except you can see that there's a lot of book left, so the question of "how the hell does this book not end soon?" acts as a really strong force to keep you reading.
One thing I find kind of distracting is that I really wish Dan Brown would learn how guns work. I am open to the possibility that it's just "rule of cool" type stuff, where it's just better if the silencer actually silences the gun, but it was at least slightly relevant to the plot, which I found distracting. I also find that "rule of cool" isn't as easy to suspend disbelief for as compared to a film, at least for me. I also have some vague recollection of some more gun-related errors in The Da Vinci Code, though it's been 15 years since I read it, I suppose I will read it again after I finish this.
As I write this, I'm about 80% of the way through the book, and I feel like it's kind of a bummer of a situation no matter how it ends. Of course, books don't have to have a happy ending, but so far I don't necessarily feel like all of the people dying will have a payoff that makes it worthwhile, emotionally speaking. I guess I'll see. I am also beginning to get impatient for things to be resolved, which is distracting me from what's happening.
There are occasionally things in the book that I can't decide if they're an interesting insight into the character's thought process, or kind of a lazy way to remind the reader of something. For example, the main character gets soaked in water, and then puts his jacket back on, which has a priceless page from an antique folio in it, so he thinks to himself that he sure is glad his Harris Tweed jacket is double-layered, so the folio will not get wet. I think it's good to point out to the reader that you, the author thought of this, so it doesn't appear as an oversight, but I do wonder if there's a more elegant way to have done so. Maybe not!
The payoff wasn’t super rewarding, overall. I think I was meant to care more that the big finish of the “hassassin” with Vittoria and Robert coming together to bone or whatever, but I just really did not. I think there was not enough effort put into creating ”romantic energy” or whatever between them throughout the book, and, simultaneously, it was really obvious that they were gonna fuck at some point.
some of the last-minute twists were pretty good, which made me feel like the book was worth finishing, but the state we leave the world in as the book ends doesn’t feel satisfying.
One thing I did like, though, is that I feel like Brown puts the right amount of effort into describing the places the story is taking place in. It’s enough to be like “oh, this is a cool or unique place” but it never makes me feel like I am reading a history book. One thing that kills my interest in a lot of high fantasy books is that they dedicate pages and pages and pages to describing things that feel like, at best, a distraction from the story. I would be thrilled to read a companion book explaining the intricacies of government, architecture, etc. in a universe I was already invested in because I enjoyed some books that took place in it, but having those intricacies explained in a way that interrupts the story, rather than enriches it, is irritating. Brown doesn’t do that, at least not in this book. It is slightly different, because if I were interested in knowing more about the Pantheon or the Vatican Library, there are surely entire books already dedicated to those subjects, he doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting there himself.
I should have been taking bullet-point notes as I read the book, and then refined them into a post after I finished, because this whole thing feels fairly meandering, and not easy to edit into something coherent, so I guess that is a good meta-observation to make.
