The Lost Symbol
by Dan Brown · first published 2009
7% recommend79% neutral14% critical
The Lost Symbol is a 2009 novel written by American writer Dan Brown. It is a thriller set in Washington, D.C., after the events of The Da Vinci Code, and relies on Freemasonry for both its recurring theme and its major characters. Released on September 15, 2009, it is the third Brown novel to involve the character of Harvard University symbologist Robert Langdon, following 2000's Angels & Demons and 2003's The Da Vinci Code.
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…reading him is kind of like solving puzzles. Across the Nightingale Floor: Tales of the Otori, by Lain Hearn - Historical fiction set in feudal Japan with lords and their retainers, assassins, etc. The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown - If you liked The Da Vinci Code or Angels & Demons, you'll probably like this one as well. While Dan Brown will probably never write anything that matches the utter genius of Umberto Eco's…
on “Ask HN: Great books you read in 2009?” ↗... then OP, could you share this structure? "Soon the structure underlying The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons and The Lost Symbol was laying bare before my eyes. I could see why the stories worked. I had reverse-engineered Dan Brown."
on “How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools” ↗…danger of learning from fiction books; you have to watch out for the actual fiction :) However I think the Dan Brown books are a great example - you have to side step the made up crap particularly in the lost symbol. But his earlier books have a lot of excellently researched information.
on “Why I read fiction” ↗"Soon the structure underlying The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons and The Lost Symbol was laying bare before my eyes. I could see why the stories worked. I had reverse-engineered Dan Brown." Could you talk a little more in depth about what Dan Brown's pattern/structure is?
on “Pandoc” ↗This liquid breathing stuff was also used in Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol
on “Liquid breathing” ↗…Neuromancer William Gibson 22% Ender's Game Orson Scott Card 20% Brave New World Aldous Huxley 19% Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell 18% Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick 17% The Lost Symbol Dan Brown 16% Inferno Dan Brown 15% Divergent Veronica Roth 15% The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 15%
on “ChatGPT Secret Training Data: The Top Books AI Bots Are Reading” ↗The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown.
on “Ask HN: What are you reading right now?” ↗…guarantee that someone at Google doesn't read our gmail account, or any number of other sites and scenarios. The demoralizing part for me is that a lot of the top quoted passages are from The Shack and The Lost Symbol, and the very top one is from a Malcolm Gladwell book. In fact all of the top 12 are from those 3 books, and 9 of the top 25 are from The Shack (which I had never even heard of before, then again I rarely…
on “Kindle: Most Highlighted Passages of All Time” ↗…it on her Kindle she would have to remove the DRM and convert to mobi... But she doesn't need, or even want, the DRM removed. Also, second-hand books. I could very easily get hold of a Dan Drown's The Lost Symbol for £0.50 in a charity shop/second hand book store. But it costs £4.96 to get the Kindle edition. There's also no way to trade/sell/give Kindle books to other people. Removing DRM but then deleting within…
on “The Demise of the Public Library” ↗…find one that was in the database, and when I finally tried the book I'm reading, the only recommendation it said it was like was way off - The Devil in White City has no relation that I can see to The Lost Symbol.
on “Project Alexandria – A graph based book exploration and recommendation engine” ↗…request a lot, so I'll have to write something about it :) All I can offer right now is my raw notes, which are in Spanish. This is a structural analysis of Angels and Demons, The da Vinci Code, and The Lost Symbol: https://imgur.com/bX6ByJA This is an one-page treatment of the three books, with the "blanks" filled appropriately for each: https://imgur.com/LlDVUKn I doubt any of this is groundbreaking. Story structure…
on “Pandoc” ↗…I could easily see that I could get Casino Royale for £4.35. If I think that's too expensive it would take me about 30 seconds to see that I could get The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo for £2.68 or the Lost Symbol for £2.76. Piracy is not just not the only alternative and indeed I'd suggest that in the vast majority of cases it's not the main alternative. (If you think that £2.68 is too much for a novel then…
on “Memo To Ian Fleming’s Heirs” ↗This reminded me of the Lost Symbol book (which is also mentioned in the article. For reference, it's from the same author of The Da Vinci Code). I recall reading this in the book and regarding it as junk science, but it really exists…
on “Liquid breathing” ↗If you have read The Lost Symbol it will sound terribly familiar :)
on “How to Breathe Water...and Not Die?” ↗