Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

My first CBR post since 2019

Inferno (Robert Langdon #4) by Dan Brown

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This is my first CBR review since 2019. I’m not sure what happened last year (aside from the global pandemic), but it just kind of got away from me. I just checked Goodreads, and I read 55 books last year, so I totally could’ve hit another Cannonball. I just didn’t have the energy to review them. I think the problem was that I waited too long to start. I read a few books in January, but I also had this huge investigation I was writing […]

Well, science and religion are not competitors, they’re two different languages trying to tell the same story. There’s room in this world for both.

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Sometimes Dan Brown books and especially Robert Langdon as a character take credit for kind of obvious and not all that profound wisdom and philosophy. For example, there’s a part in this book where a character says a thing about evolution in a specific and creative way. Then, Dan Brown has Robert Langdon laugh at and admire how clever the saying was. That’s not how novels work dude! Don’t say something (not all that) clever and then have a character give you credit for it. […]

GUISE DID YOU KNWO THAT ROBERT LANGDON IS TALL AND HANDSOME??!1!

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I can not ever give a Dan Brown book more than a three for a handful of reasons. One, his books are completely absurd. Two, his writing is barely adequate to the task and kind of hilariously out of sync for the tone of his books, which are somber and pretentious. Three, he cannot let you forget anything in the book that barely  resembles characterization. So while the art criticism or whatever counts for it in the first three books gets by me as fine […]

So I am waiting for IT to come off Overdrive Holds, so here’s the books I’ve been tiding myself over with

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The Lost Symbol – Dan Brown 3/5 Let’s get this out of the way. This is big dumb weird book that is far up its own ass and pompous and pretentious and also big and dumb. Also, I love it. There’s a version of me, you’ve probably met him….for me, he was a senior in college and he carved his entire existence out of resisting mass culture….except you know…the right kind of mass culture….and loved jokes that the Family Guy mad about Dan Brown. But […]

Apparently, there are four of these books now?

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I remember reading Da Vinci Code when it first came out, and of course I’ve seen the movie a few times. I liked it, and I’m pretty sure I liked Angels & Demons, though I couldn’t tell you what it was about…I didn’t know a third and fourth Robert Langdon book had even come out until I stumbled across Inferno while looking for a e-audiobook to download from the library. It’s pretty formulaic, but interesting enough for the treadmill at least. “Dante’s poem, Langdon was now reminded, was not […]

Unexpected testicle reference

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I’m not sure if I really need to explain much about either Dan Brown or the writing style he spawned. Angels and Demons was published before The Da Vinci Code, but is part of the same world – mysterious historical cults with treasure hunts in famous art and a countdown before disaster. These books spawned a whole genre of occult mystery, or whatever it’s called. The books are best sellers, but not masterpieces of award-winning quality. HOWEVER. I had read this before but missed a […]



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