Stef read and liked Elena's review of The Lost Symbol (Robert Langdon, #3):

"I think I finally figured out why I hate Dan Brown. He writes very average thriller/ mystery books, just like many others do, and the thing is that I don't have a problem with the other writers. Sometimes their books are entertaining, sometimes they ...more I think I finally figured out why I hate Dan Brown. He writes very average thriller/ mystery books, just like many others do, and the thing is that I don't have a problem with the other writers. Sometimes their books are entertaining, sometimes they are not, sometimes they are poorly written, sometimes they are not so bad, and I'm perfectly fine with it. The thing I can't stand about Dan Brown is his attitude. He truly believes he has been invested with the power of 'omniscience', and he looks down at the reader as if he were talking to a bunch of retarded individuals (which we actually probably are just by virtue of the fact that we are reading his books). But this is still ok, it doesn't upset me all that much.
What I think is unacceptable is the fact that in his 'all encompassing knowledge', all we find is an endless bunch of lies, lies about the most obvious evidence anybody can prove. Angels and Demons, which takes place in Rome, is filled with sentences in Italian, except that Mr. Brown didn't even bother looking up the spelling of the words and, as if that were not enough, he invented words to look cool in the eyes of his readers which, come on, wouldn't be able to pick all the bull I'm trying to sell them in a million years!
In the Italian version of The Lost Symbol, I noticed that the translators skipped more than one passage because what DB had written not only wasn't accurate, it was blatantly WRONG! So, I don't know if they didn't want to look stupid themselves or did it to try and give Mr. Brown a better image abroad. Just one tiny detail out of many: Classical Greek 101 - Apo is a preposition, with different meanings but still and only a preposition, for sure not a verb. No!!! not in the Lost Key. Dan Brown has to show us he knows the ethimology of the word apotheosis, and so Apo, for him, turns into a verb, and he lectures us as if he were revealing this great truth. I read on a review that his books are an insult to human intelligence. I agree, and not because they are necessarily awful books, but because taking reality and twisting it so that it can fit the story line and, on top of that, selling it as if it were some kind or revelation we can only obtain through Dan Brown's grace, to me is unacceptable.(less) "