Unaccustomed Earth; By Jhumpa Lahiri.

Lahiri wrote a complete in itself story when writing The Namesake, capturing most common experiences of a migrant community of well educated and middle class white collar people from across the world making a life in a surrounding so very unfamiliar. Now, in this collection of stories long and short she captures fragments of experiences and emotions as incomplete and jagged as shards of a broken mirror, leaving the reader forever dissatisfied and asking - what happened next to this person, that one? - and too, hurt by the various pains of the various characters she leaves no solutions or satisfactory endings for.

It is at once a testament to her quality as a writer that one not only ends up feeling this way about a whole lot of characters and a community that one might or might not be familiar with, but even nostalgic to the point of being homesick at heart for the places she mentions, whether one has loved them in fact or not known them at all.

One does not, of course, love every character - that would be inhuman, especially in case of a man who uses a society he does not stem from, and its freedom of people and relationships that is foreign to him, to make use of people pretty much as one uses facilities of a supermarket or a laundromat or so, only to discard them or reuse them as it suits his purpose. One wishes Paul could have done something rather than being stunned by the audacity of the guy in threatening to sue him, having himself perhaps ruined one or more lives that Paul was witness to the process of of. But Paul does stem from the society that offers the freedom and has the values that make it possible to have them, which is, to be civilised in a way the other male is unfamiliar with and perhaps even contemptuous of, and so Paul ends up looking like a loser in a contest with a comparatively primitive male, which almost anyone from a civilised society would when suddenly confronting a beast of prey, even a small one.

And one ends up finally too stunned at the end of the tale of the sensitive son of the beautiful woman leaving no imprint except for his work documenting others, wishing it were not so, wanting to go back in time and shake the daylights out of him for the couple of mistakes he made - hurting the two adoring little girls with his words stemming from his own pain, being unable to seize the opportunity to grasp the woman that was his last chance at love and life and to hold on.

One wishes one could shake him into changing and wiping off those mistakes, make up for having hurt the little girls and be friends with them again since they already adore him and understand him enough to not tell on his tirade, and being able to find happiness - even living in the beautiful house his mother chose, to live with his love, and in fact marry her, so he could have a family, a wife, children - but then, one does wish for much.

Life often denies such beautiful ends.

The Lost Symbol; by Dan Brown.

Da Vinci Code was history's secrets, Angels and Demons was those of Rome in particular of Vatican, Digital Fortress about IT and coding and security, Deception Point about science. In this one Brown uses the same murder thriller format yet again to unveil some secrets and mysteries from ancient times until now, most hidden in plain sight.

Washington D. C. was named Rome by those that planned and settled it, and until the names were changed Potomac (which reverted to the original name) was called Tiber. Freemasons wished and planned for a glorious future for humanity and the architecture of the city holds their dreams in various symbols.

From this grand enough beginning explored throughout the book Brown connects today's latest science research to the most ancient secrets and far more, to a basic 101 beginner's discourse on spirituality. A good one too. He also manages to subtly albeit clearly bring out the distance and contradiction that has arisen between religion and spirituality, the power brokering by institutionalised religion, and so forth, and states it plainly too, not leaving it for surmise.

Most thrilling part on physical level, satisfactorily resolved, is the victim and killer in the dark vault with neither able to see the other, both using mind and other inputs to escape and kill respectively. Most horrifying, the death of our favourite Langdon by drowning towards the end. One wonders how Brown will write anything else interesting without him. But Brown surprises one.