The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown This was very formulaic. Toward the end of the story, my husband and I were dreading reading it. It was all just a bunch of pseudoscientific drivel passed off as facts in a novel by an author that people take literally (I hope not everyone does, but I do know many do take this sort of thing literally).Up until about halfway through, it is an intriguing story that is hard to put down, and then it descends into a bunch of woo woo. The suspension of disbelief dissolved into highly preachy rhetoric. I was shocked that Katherine was able to turn Langdon from a skeptic to a believer in a few short paragraphs. As someone who is about to begin her studies as an archaeologist to dispel some of this junk from pervading society, this made me twitch considerably.Needless to say, this is going to my local literary reseller; there are far better books to take up my shelves.