Review: An intriguing plot, but eventually fails.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 6, 2011
Don't get me wrong.  I regard 3 stars as the minimum rating necessary to make a book worth reading.  I use 2 stars to mean that I finished the book, but with difficulty.  Dan Brown's 'the Lost Symbol' falls into this group.  1 star means I wish I'd never started.  I read this book mostly in one continuous session, so it mostly engaged my interest.The science is appalling, and wouldn't work.  There are not 16 different types of quarks; there are two basic ones (up and down) arranged in three generations (the other two being strange and charm, top and bottom).  And then there are the antimatter forms of each, so there's actually 12.  And genetic modification, by replacing the quarks in a segment of DNA, to allow limited time travel, wouldn't work.  Where would the novel quarks come from whenever the DNA replicated for a start?Just needed a more plausible explanation for the ability to time travel.