A Book a Week - Inferno (No big spoilers)

A few weeks ago I brainstormed while writing a blog that I should read a book a week while in quarantine. I rattled off a few early on that I had already started before COVID-19 hit - Catcher in the Rye and What I Talk about when I Talk about Running - But I either wrote about them before, or don't really want to talk about them.

My sister lent me the book Inferno by Dan Brown when she was in Edmonton last spring. I read through all of Dan Brown's early books after reading and liking The Da Vinci Code. He's got a pattern which is engrossing the first time, but got a bit older by the time I was reading his first (and less good) novel Digital Fortress. That said, after The Lost Symbol came out, I bought it brand new, read it quickly, and fairly hated it. It was not a good book. I decided I would get off the Dan Brown fanboy train for a little while.

So that was playing in the background a bit as I picked up this new book my sister had finished. Still, it pulled me in right away with a captivating beginning, a good plot, and the classic structure known to Brown's most famous works of The Da Vinci Code and Angles and Demons. I really enjoyed the first half, and then it got worse. There are two things I want to complain about: the plot and the philosophy.

I won't say much about the plot, because I don't need to put random spoilers in here, but suffice it to say there's a level of "you thought this was happening, but really it was this all along" that I found really frustrating. As for the philosophy, it talks about population ethics and existential risks, which are both topics I've thought about a lot and listened to people talk about a lot. The book was simplistic at best and sometimes very wrong. If you've read it, the end conclusions are interesting or decent enough, but some of the conversation thrown out by apparently smart people throughout is just miles away from how experts talk about these areas.

Just for a taste, would you be willing to Thanos the world (kill half the people by snapping your fingers) if you knew it was the only way to stop the world from exploding in 100 years. Well, the long-termist and consequentialist in me would have to do it, even though I wouldn't like it, and maybe wouldn't even feel capable of doing it. The stupider question, though, is would you be willing to bomb half the people to death very painfully if there's some unknown probability of reducing the chance of extinction in 100 years. These are clearly entirely different questions that the book treats as identical. It also ignores the strong likelihood that any kind of violence on that scale would spiral into nuclear war and full on apocalypse. Generally I just wanted a higher level of discourse.

And so, once you get tired of the plot points, the rest of the book gets a lot more boring a lot quicker. Like, yeah, stop prattling on about European art, I just want to get to the end of this novel so I can whine about it.

Task complete.