Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Inferno

I have absolutely fallen in love with Dan Brown's style of writing. He tells so many details about a very short time frame that makes you think the story took much longer. Inferno is a story that spans about a day, but it takes so long to explain all of the details needed to get the full meaning out of the text. The plot is so complicated it's often suffocating at times, but you'll love it all the same. I think this is just because I'm barely delving into the realm of adult historical fiction. As I mentioned before, I am very new to this concept of reading adult books and I avoided them because I know how crazy they can get.
After reading Da Vinci Code, I felt that I needed more of this type of writing. I found that I like this style of questioning popular belief and writing a fictional story around it.

The cover-



Our returning hero Robert Langdon has woken up in a Florence hospital with no memory of how he got there and of what he did within the last few days. All he knows is that he has retrograde amnesia and that he suffered a bullet wound to the head. He even has stitches to prove it.
When a woman with spiked hair comes to the hospital and murders one of the doctors, Langdon is rushed out by a woman named Sienna Brooks who says she wants to help him.
This Sienna is not an average doctor. She is a young medical prodigy with an exceptionally high IQ. She was known to have a sort of tumor in her brain, but not the extensive multiplying of unwanted cells, but a multiplying of helpful cells that allowed her intellectual capability to be more than that of the average human.
Though everything is not what it seems when Brooks and Langdon find themselves in a race to stop the most dangerous pathogen known to man from spreading around the world. They find that their allies are no longer their friends and their enemies are not who they think they are as the duo try to find the meaning behind a Dante-fanatic scientist's clues and modified paintings into a world they wish they could never see.

My thoughts-

Once again it was very beautifully written. Each twist and turn was so beautifully calculated that it didn't seem like a desperate author trying to end their book. The story flowed very well and throughout the whole book, the story never strayed off track and kept moving with the same kind of energy throughout.
Honestly, I'm going to talk about he biggest spoiler in this book, so please shut this tab and read the book if you don't want to know. You all should know by now that I have a tendency to talk about huge spoilers. Zobrist's "plague" wasn't really a plague in the end. It was a genetic mutation that would render one third of the population sterile. It's actually a pretty good idea that won't harm the current population in way that spreading an almighty virus would and will never be able to kill off the whole population. It will just reduce it to a fairly manageable number so that the population can be kept in check.
Once I read that part, I was wondering about the morality of this idea. Genetic mutations, no matter how simple, can be disastrous if not constructed properly. In fact Sienna makes a very good analogy to a house of cards which I like a lot. She says that the human genome is like a house of cards. One card placed wrong or taken out and the whole thing will fall down. She's not wrong. I feel that if there is some kind of proof that this actually works, then the whole morality thing would die down. It was never detailed if he tested it on animals or not. How does Zobrist know that this is going to work?
Come to think about that, he is correct about the fact that the next step in evolution for humans is us to take control of the way we evolve. We are technically a little bit in control of how we are evolving. Our habits are influencing (a little) the selection process of what traits we need and what traits can be replaced with something new. Who knows... I get this feeling that one day humans will have giant thumbs and our smallest fingers will be gone and our feet will become purely flat. That is my guess by looking at the lifestyle of the human today.
Now I'm just going to go off on a completely different tangent about how confusing the last quarter of this book was. Honestly, the whole thing with Sienna actually betraying Langdon because she is Zobrist's lover and watched him jump off a building was like being hit in the head by a curveball. And then there's the whole thing about how Langdon actually does not have amnesia and was given a drug that is normally given to people who witness traumatic events so he could forget what he did in Florence. It was definitely not at all a nice feeling to realize that everything that the book has put out there so far is actually inside out and backwards. Way to throw something weird at the reader. Though I had no problem with that. Once I got all the allies and enemies straight, then I was good to read the rest. In fact I stopped reading Inferno around that point and let it go for a few days just so I could get everything straight. And when I did, I understood enough to enjoy the end. I recommend leaving the book for a few days and just processing it before you rush into the end of the story.
Otherwise, this was a very thought provoking book that I find quite interesting in the way of predicting the end of the human race. And yes, unless we stand up to it, the human race is killing itself. (In fact, recently I watched the new movie Tomorrowland and I recommend watching that after reading this book. I could find a lot of similarities between both the movie and the book, even though they focus on two completely different theories of the end of the human race.)

((So, I wanted to continue reading more Dan Brown books, but currently my mother is hogging up The Lost Symbol, so I won't be able to read it for a while. And please do expect reviews to be coming in like lightning because I went to a book fair about a month ago and bought a bunch of books that I think are worth reviewing. I need to make up for the fact that I did not review anything during the month of May and my goal was to double the amount of reviews on this blog by December. So far it's June and I'm not even there yet. Anyways, this was a long, rambling Author's note, so please excuse me. Happy Reading my friends!))

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