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Swamp Attack

Games

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Defend your house! Your swamp cottage is under attack by animals gone crazy. You have to defend it...

Bloons TD

Games

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Play the classic Bloons TD mobile version that started one of the most popular strategy game...

Theatre, Education and the Making of Meanings: Art or Instrument?

Anthony Jackson and Chantal Hamill

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This book is a study of theatre's educational role during the 20th and the first years of the 21st...

Tiger Head, Snake Tails: China Today, How it Got There and Why it Has to Change

Jonathan Fenby

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This is a comprehensively updated account of where China stands today, covering the generational...

Seventyseven Clocks

Christopher Fowler

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'The newspapers referred to it as the case of the seventy-seven clocks. There was quite a fuss at...

The Bunker: Volume 2

Joshua Hale Fialkov and Joe Infurnari

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"There are shades of The Twilight Zone, Lost and Stand by Me in The Bunker, but it's also a bit of a...

A Land

Robert Macfarlane and Jacquetta Hawkes

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Book

The Collins Nature Library is a new series of classic British nature writing - reissues of long-lost...

David McK (3721 KP) rated Angels and Demons in Books

Jul 4, 2021

Angels and Demons

Dan Brown | 2016 | Fiction & Poetry

7.7

(64 Ratings)

Book Rating

First published back at the turn of the century (in the year 2000), this - while the second of the two Tom Hanks starring Robert Langdon movies, after The Da Vinci Code - is actually the first book in that particular series, albeit less well known than its sequel (the aforementioned The Da Vinci Code).

And, like, I'm sure, many others, I actually read that sequel first, only later discovering it was such (although, admittedly, not a direct sequel) and going back to read the first on the series.

This is the one largely set in and around Rome, with a high-tech ticking time-bomb counting down in Vatican City as the Cardinals all meet to elect a new Pope following the death of the previous incumbent of that role. It also makes lots of the (supposed?) divide between religion and science, drawing on lots of conspiracy theories and bringing back into the realms of popular culture that old secret society, the illuminati.

I have no problem with any of that, and I do like a bit of derring-do, mystery and romance, but even I found it hard at times to swallow some of the outlandish scenarios and set pieces of this novel - I think, for me, the icing on the cake was the surviving-a-jump-out-of-a-helicopter-without-a-parachute bit towards the end!