I think my memory might be faulty.

I kept thinking of Dan Brown‘s novels as being similar to James Rollins’ ones but I was wrong (I find Mr. Rollins’s ones much better).

But since I’ve read all Dan Brown’s novels so far, I definitely wanted to read Inferno and see where the story with Dante might take us. I learned a lot again – which is one of the good things about this book.

One of the bad things about this book is that it annoyed me to no end. 🙂 From the beginning to the end pretty much.

All of my initial misgivings about some seriously “stupid” plot parts were satisfyingly explained afterwards (I was hoping for that, otherwise it would have been a serious error on the side of the editor).

I do hope I am not going to give away any spoilers but I found the plot to be consciously misleading for the reader until such time as Mr. Brown decided to let us in on what’s actually happening. First, I had a hard time turning my mind around who did what, then I expected that to be another smokescreen until it seemed at the end, that was it.

Speaking of the end, I’m also a bit unsure of how did that female partnership come to happen so easily but I’m happy with that being the case.

And if you think from the start that this might be a mystically fantastic story, you’re going to be wrong. There is a good, rational explanation to everything (except the reason why every character is SO terribly smart).

I would say that the best thing about this novel is that it tackles one theme that I found scary in an another book I read this year (Frozen Solid by James M. Tabor) and that is over-population, i.e. private ideas and actions on how to curb it. Which are never good.

Inferno makes some good, hard points about the fact that we collectively need to start thinking about this as rather soon it will kill the planet we live on. Correct term for it being “Malthusian growth model” or exponential mathematics. Very scary stuff and unfortunately very true.

That is just one of the interesting things I learned reading Inferno. One other interesting thing is that it makes you wonder and ask yourself some things that you probably wouldn’t like to answer (or know what your answer might be).

For those reasons alone I would say it’s a book worth reading. Just turn a blind eye to the frustrating parts. 😉

Tagged: Book review, Dan Brown, Dante, Dante Alighieri, Inferno, James Rollins, Robert Langdon