Rating: 
Summary: Dumbing Down The BSL
Review: I've noticed that this book has spent weeks on the Best Seller List. That seemed to be a good recommendation for reading it. That was a faulty assumption, and one I will not make again.The premise of Angels and Demons had a lot going for it. A combination of The Illuminati, The Vatican, physics, the Masons, symbology... this could have been a very interesting, even informative, book. I will say that it probably does qualify as a page turner in the same way that a children's pop-up book encourages turning the next page quickly to see what leaps up from the book next. However, this is somewhat of an insult to children's pop-up books since most I've seen are better written and have better thought out and researched plots than Angels and Demons has. I understand that Angels and Demons is the prequel to The Da Vinci Code. That too has spent a remarkable amount of time on the best seller list, and after reading Angels and Demons I have to wonder how this could have happened. The person at the core of both books, Robert Langdon, has no substance and possesses powers in Angels and Demons that would make The Hulk greener with envy. I don't think, outside of a comic book, I have ever read about a character who is less realistic than Robert Langdon. How he attacks the various challenges in the plot of Angels and Demons varies from predictable to idiotic to downright hilarious. I gave this book 2 stars because of that page turner thing, but I would definitely not recommend it to anyone who enjoys something above the level of a mediocre Golden Book.
Rating: 
Summary: Great read and a lot of fun!
Review: I enjoyed this book even more than The Da Vinci Code, because after reading The Da Vinci Code, I was used to Brown's wild imagination and roller coaster plotting. Like The Da Vinci Code, Brown mixes fact and fiction into a thrill a minute mystery that will leave you amazed at his ingenuity and breathless at the fast pace. Sure, his science is a little weak and his history is often a stretch, but his inside view of the Vatican is wonderful and his appreciation for art and art history are an education in themselves. Whenever he seems to stretch his facts too thin, just tell yourself "it's only a story" and enjoy the ride. It's a lot of fun!
Rating: 
Summary: This is not a novel.
Review: This is not a novel. It is not even a book. It is a tedious description of a video game. Dan Brown writes so terribly that he is beyond criticism. No adjective - no, string of adjectives - is too trite or cliché for him to throw in. All I can hope is that Mr. Brown made so much money off this mess of a book that he need not ever write another.
Rating:
Summary: Trite
Review: I am always given Dan Brown books to read by a friend or family member who loves them. I try to give them a fair chance but he is such a sorry excuse for a writer that I always end by skimming the final 3/4. Angels and Demons is yet another example. However it is so implausible that it actually elevated my opinion of The DaVinci code. The DaVinci code is bad but Angels and Demons is awful.
Rating:
Summary: C'mon...
Review: This is the second and last Dan Brown book that I have read and will read. The last book contained an evil senator who by all cliched standards just had to be a Republican. This man was so vile that his wife died over him and his daughter despised him. His entire plan revolves around saving NASA... and making big bucks from his sinister Sedgewick plot just like a true Republican would do. And damn everybody including his own family.
Just when I thought that Brown might break a cliche, he of course made the person in the church the maniacally misguided evil culprit... so vile in action that even his peers are disgusted. Yes, I read this and in the end, I had to laugh. I should have known. In fact, I was inclined about one third of the way through this book to know who the bad guy was going to be.
While I like mystery, action and fiction for escape from mundanities, one thing amuses me. Why is it in real life if someone is as demented as the character in this book, the average person can sense it? Yet the character in this book has hidden his flawed character and ensuing insanity from everybody. The premise for this book is just too goofy, and after working in a scientific endeavor for twenty-three years, it augments the belief the little gods stand in favor of and for the science minded.
Rating:
Summary: The back cover was the best part.
Review: There's not much I can add to the negative reviews here - ie: if you've read The Da Vinci Code, don't waste your time with this half-assed knockoff of an already bad book. Besides the factual issues and utter implausibility of the majority of the main plot points, the book is simply poorly written. I'm sorry Dan... italics don't make bad writing dramatic and intense. They just make bad writing a little slanty. Punchy one-liners fall flat, and when we're privy to the private thoughts of a character, it comes closer to resembling a single fly buzzing around a porch light than the workings of a brilliant mind. The theatrical exclamations had me laughing incredulously. Example: When a woman happens upon the lone eyeball of her mutilated father, Mr. Brown (with all the grace of a third grader telling a flashlight ghost story), breathes, "She would have known that shade of hazel anywhere!" Stumbling onto a lone eyeball is commonplace, it seems. But... this eyeball looks familiar somehow... (Have we met before?) I'm waiting for this to dissolve into a Saturday Night Live sketch. Aside from the bad writing, melodrama and implausibility, my main beef with the book is that it's insulting to the intelligence. We watch the main characters, supposedly brilliant in their fields, stumble around like a hapless horror movie cast. "Don't go in there, you morons!" we want to shout. Or, "For God's sake, I understood that 2 chapters ago! Are you just now having this revelation?? Get on with it!" Disturbingly enough, it seems many people read Brown like a textbook. "I learned so much! I didn't know there's a plane that can fly Mach 15!" FICTION, people. More educated people than I have pointed out the gaping holes and flaws in Brown's "facts." Read their reviews. If you can stand it for 600-odd pages, be my guest. About the only positive mention I can give this book is the fact that the title font creates an anagram, a type of code that relates to the story.
Rating: 
Summary: solid entertainment
Review: This book is a good book. It's exciting and interesting, exactly the two things most readers of this book are looking for. It is not a pulitzer candidate, or a definitive treatise on religeous myth and dogma, or the final scholarly word on ancient civilizations. People who are turnig up their noses at it because it is not any of these things reveal themselves to be truly ignorant. It's like going into a burger joint and complaining about the wine list: you're looking in the wrong place. It's like biting into a radish and declaring "This is the worst apple I have ever tasted!" And people trying to show off about how smart they are with all of their historical references, if you're so smart, you should know better. This novel is for fun, and it delivers. If you want novels that help you sound smart at gallery openings over wine and cheese, you ought to know where to find them, and you ought to know this isn't it. Myself, I like all kinds of books FOR WHAT THEY ARE. This one's a burger joint, and I love a good burger!
Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your time
Review: After reading The Da Vinci Code, and loving it, a friend told me I HAD to read Angels and Demons. She went on and on how it was so much better that TDVC, but I could not disagree more. First, the action is slow going --- it takes a while to see where Brown is heading with this one. You need to be about 1/3 through the book before the plot line emerges and then there are so many holes (left on purpose to fill in later --- but there are too many) that the story is very choppy. I also felt that this novel is a little graphic for my taste. If you are looking for a good mystery but do not enjoy graphic violence, this is definitely one to keep on the shelf. The ending -- while I love books with twists until the end, (Tell No One by Harlen Coban is a good one for this)the ending here is a bit contrived. I felt as if Brown felt this might be the last novel he might ever write and had to put all the possible twists he had ever thought of in this book. While Da Vinci was a fun book to read, I felt like this one was no more than a huge waste of my time.
Rating:
Summary: The DaVinci Clone
Review: If you've read DaVinci Code, don't read this one. Don't ruin it for yourself. I think that reading Brown must be like doing a drug-- the first time it's exciting and you're willing to overlook the unpleasant side effects. The second time you hope to re-experience the high, but just can't get there and the side-effects are worse. With each successive new read, you're less and less satisfied and increasingly ill. The sad truth is that Dan a) writes the same book over and over and b) writes that book pretty poorly. I got Angels & Demons (on CD) to listen to while driving. It was masochistic in me, as I have done this with other Dan Brown (DaVinci, Digital Fortress, Deception Point) books and knew in advance that without the ability to skim the irrelevant parts, the book would probably be maddening. It was, and I've learned my lesson at last. Dan Brown is just NOT growing as a writer, and there is no hope of finding that one really great book in his current oeuvre that makes up for the others. I'd say the DaVinci Code represents the apex of his work Angels & Demons has an interesting, if unlikely, premise (startlingly similar to that of the DaVinci Code). It's just badly carried out. As others point out, with ample examples, it's full of bad research, bad Italian, bad Latin, bad characters...yet the book desperately wants to come across as instructive and intellectual as well as entertaining. Sadly, Dan Brown does not straddle that line well-- as one might expect from a professor, he does too much lecturing and as an afterthought creates an improbable,dragging plot to fill in around the (frequently incorrect) factoids he's presenting. His characters speak to each other like duelling narrators on History Channel/Sci Fi Channel specials. Even their thoughts occur in lectures, which can be especially annoying when they're musing about symbols while being shot at or suffocated. The characters are cartoonishly obtuse. A favorite device in Brown's writing is for the characters to be presented with a surprising, but true, fact and to cry out "Impossible!" "It can't BE!" or some such thing-- this is forgiveable once or twice, but in an action packed book, it's exhausting to have to wait on every other page for the character's incredulity to turn to acceptance and then action. His highly intelligent characters lack common sense completely. They think, they rethink, they ponder, they muse... and eventually they act. In the meantime yet another crisis occcurs. This gets old fast. Brown is also incabable understanding that once we're given a certain amount of information about a character, we know enough about him/her to occasionally anticipate how he/she is feeling or thinking in a given situation. He has to explain it to us at length, which creates distance between the reader and the character. We can only watch Langdon, he's far too 2-dimensional for us to really inhabit him. Brown must be the only English professor in history who does not live by the old writing adage "Don't tell, show!" Dan also lacks faith in his readers ability to follow the plot's twists or character's trajectories without beating them over the head with the relevant concepts or facts. When it comes to suspense, he's so anxious that we won't understand what's happening that he gives ham-handed hints that ruin the surprise. You find yourself hurrying to the end of the novel not to find out what happens, but to confirm that you had already figured out what happened 200 pages ago. This is a problem common to all of Dan's writing in my experience. It's not good when Jane Average Reader correctly interprets a symbol faster than Dr. Langdon, Harvard Symbologist and then has to wait a few chapters for him to catch up. Dr. Langdon's Alma Mater is clearly a den of grade inflation. As for specifics about the CD version, I must say that the reader has a pleasant voice and can do some decent accents, but he absolutely butchers all foreign languages and English, to boot. Eschew is pronounced ess-tchew. Dour is pronounced doo-or. Not pretty if you're bothered by that sort of thing. In short, you can enjoy this book best if you are a fairly patient and uncritical person and have no plans to compare it to other, better works by Brown or other authors.
Rating:
Summary: Fun Mystery
Review: I love Dan Brown's books and the mystery they hold.
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