Hmmmmm. OK, for the first 3/4 of the book, I happily suspended disbelief and enjoyed the well-paced narrative. But there was a particular plot twist where my suspended disbelief reasserted itself, and it seemed to me that the plot unraveled into the various strands of what the book is trying to be: 1) a hard-to-put-down thriller; 2) a slickly packaged exortation to believe in the possibility of changing the world by changing consciousness. Although I was rolling my eyes at the petered-out remnants of plot by the end of the book, I also went to the Institute of Noetic Science website and found some interesting material on meditation, mind-body practices, and scientific research on whether various religious practices such as prayer and healing work — the kind of nonfiction I’ve been reading anyway. So The Lost Symbol was a mixed bag. Brown is an expert at catching the wave of zeitgeist. If he keeps writing novels he might want to aim for smaller waves that lend themselves to tidier plots.