A quick review for a quick read. With fantastic, high stakes, fun plot, this book manages to wrap us in the cozy ambiance of Italian art and architecture while also being an adventure worthy of the 2016 film of the same name.
Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon awakens in an Italian hospital, disoriented and with no recollection of the past thirty-six hours, including the origin of the macabre object hidden in his belongings. With a relentless female assassin trailing them through Florence, he and his resourceful doctor, Sienna Brooks, are forced to flee. Embarking on a harrowing journey, they must unravel a series of codes, which are the work of a brilliant scientist whose obsession with the end of the world is matched only by his passion for one of the most influential masterpieces ever written, Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno.
Dan Brown has raised the bar yet again, combining classical Italian art, history, and literature with cutting-edge science in this sumptuously entertaining thriller.
What a speed read! I kept seeing Dan Brown—especially Inferno—on all the bookshelves (even in Korea). After picking it up on a whim, I immediately read the first two hundred pages.
Then the next day, I read the remaining four hundred.
Knowing nothing going in, I was delighted by how well-researched and descriptive this novel is, with a resounding, wholehearted love for history, architecture, and art. I imagine this aspect might not draw in someone without any interest in these things; however, I’ve always been interested in Italian history and Rennaisance art, so this book found itself in a pocket I didn’t know existed.
Cozy, professor-ey, full of gilded, crenelated monuments to history, but also heart-pounding, fast-paced, high-stakes, and excellently mysterious.
If you’re looking for something to pick up in the airport, I would absolutely recommend this book. Though I have to say, I just put it down and I feel like the finer details are already starting to slip from my memory…
Definitely not anything to do with how quickly I read it, right? Right?
ejstories 