Foi o 1º policial que li e o 1º livro do Dan Brown. Bem… e que livro! Uma obra-prima! Tudo começa com o assassínio do cientista. Com o desenrolar da trama, começamos a perceber as suas implicações. O tema principal é sempre a religião, representada pelo Vaticano, e a ciência, pelo CERN. No meio, aparecem os Illuminati. Este é um livro cheio de acção e de ritmo. Quase toda a informação provém de falas das personagens, por isso é muito difícil aborrecermo-nos. De facto, este livro chega a ser viciante porque os acontecimentos sucedessem-se uns aos outros, sem tempos mortos. O que mais me impressionou foi como tudo está ligado entre si, os factos históricos misturam-se com a ficção de forma perfeitamente verosímil. Ficamos com vontade de visitar Itália para comprovar se as descrições, as estátuas, as passagens secretas, se são mesmo assim. O livro conta ainda com reflexões muito pertinentes sobre qual a influência da ciência e o papel da religião. Destaco o discurso do camerlengo na página 400-403 que opõe a Ciência à Religião. Recomendo vivamente.

The Robert Langdon series has slowly become one of my favourites. I love the short and easy-to-get-into chapters, the mystery, the perfect mixture of fiction and reality, and the history, art, and architecture. I couldn't put this book down, and when I did, I couldn't stop thinking about it. The only thing I wanted to do was to read. I wanted to go back to this so familiar Rome of Bernini and Michaelangelo that I've studied for a whole semester. Being able to recognize some of the names without needing to do a Google search was really fun. I started reading this series with The Da Vinci Code then jumped to Origin and now I've returned to the start. For sure, reading the series in order helps to fully understand Robert. I knew he had claustrophobia since it's mentioned in all the books I've read so far, but I don't recall the reason why he has it be mentioned in the others. Because of this, I'm thinking of rereading the Da Vinci Code to see what I've might miss out. The only thing that bothered me was the time progression. Langdon is always running against the clock to solve the mysteries, but adding an actual countdown it showed how weirdly passed the story was. From one chapter to another it would take a couple of minutes and in others, it would take almost half an hour. And it seemed that the chapters with shorter time jumps were the ones that had more information, so it felt a lot was happening and the time wasn't moving accordingly.