Enjoy A Regra De Quatro Written By Ian Caldwell Represented In Interactive EBook

I can't deny that The Rule of Four was well written, I also can't deny that it was a thirteenhour esoteric, pretentious dissertation on two Princeton seniors obsessed with an ancient text called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.




This book was a Da Vinci Code wannabeonly the "clues" seemed to appear out of thin air and you'd quite literally have to know everything to figure out the meaning of the obscure references.
Instead of searching for and finding clues, Paul apparently had the brain capability of a theoretical physicist who merely had to think long and hard on something and voilà he figured it out!



The majority of the book was spent listening to Tom philosophize on his and his roommates privileged lives at Princeton and whine over his relationship with his deceased father.
The murder that the summary refers to doesn't take place until the final quarter of the book and there is very little suspense, In my opinion, the summary was extremely misleading, . .

"The Rule of Four takes us on an entertaining, illuminating tour of historyas it builds to a pinnacle of nearly unbearable suspense.
" No. Seriously. No. The "tour of history", which I would normally find interesting, was so convoluted that it was nearly impossible to follow, And lengthy "fact" recitation does not an "entertaining tour" make,



The Rule of Four would have been much more entertaining if it simply focused on the four roommatesall completely different, but coexisting in functional relationships.

Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason image from Curtis Brown

Princeton undergrads become obsessed with figuring out the riddles in a five hundred year old book, the Hypneratomachia.
The obsession was not new with them, It had puzzled researchers for hundreds of year, in particular the parents of two of the students,

The puzzling is interesting, The intrigue of battling scholars and murder on campus is tedious, and the description of campus life and the protagonists romantic entanglement are mostly annoying.
I found myself practically skimming some passages, I also never quite got the main buddies straight, Which one is talking now This contributed to a feeling of “who cares anyway”

But, given that I often found myself reading at odd times, like while walking from one end of a subway platform to another, there must be something compelling about the book.
There is much payload on ancient learning, and the info about Savonarola and the conflict in Florence between the humanist intellectuals and the church is very interesting, I hesitate to give this a full thumbs up.
Lets say I find the obvious youth of the authors a barrier, but there is enough there to sustain interest, and enough payload to make the trip worth while.
A debut novel by two Princeton grads, this story has a Dan Brown quality immersing the reader into the Renaissance years while the main two characters work to uncover the meaning of a mysterious book written in.
Well researched, paced and developed it engages the reader, raises questions and demonstrates good storytelling, The only fault I can find is somewhat of a let down with the finale, This isn't uncommon with first books though it did diminish the six years of work the authors invested, Regardless, I enjoyed it thoroughly and recommend it to anyone, I think I once read a more poorly written book,

Let me think for a minute, hmm . . er . . uh . No, I guess I was wrong,

Many books may suck, but few can exceed this one for true crappiness, I enjoyed this book immensely, sitelinkThe Rule of Four came out around the same time as when the Da Vinci Code was a big deal, and other authors were jumping on the suspense/ historical fiction bandwagon.
This was one of those books on that bandwagon, That being said, this is still a good read, The setting is Princeton. Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris are friends that have ties to ayearold Renaissance book they are researching, The research is followed by many surprises, clues, solutions, relationship conflicts, stress, and murder, I couldn't put it down, and it was a lot of fun, and becomes an obsession, There are many twists and turns followed by a good wrapup at the end of the story, Calwell and Thomason are both young authors with a great future of storytelling ahead of them, Rule of Four rocks! "The Da Vinci Code for people with brains, " The Independent.

Sigh. Yeah. More like a book for anyone who passed Englishfreshman year of college, At least the Da Vinci Code was a pageturner, . . an idiotic and predictable pageturner, but still entertaining, In The Rule of Four, it takespages for two hours to pass, The male protagonists are four college guys who drink wine yeah right and watch Audrey Hepburn movies suuuuuure, and one is such a genius that he can easily translate ath century Genovese dialect into English.
. . which can only be insulting to the reader "with brains" who knows that the Genovese dialect is a language of it's own, incomprehensible to native Italian speakers who live anywhere outside Genova.
In the end, this boring story which actually had great potential by exploring the origins of a mysterious book fromis really just a pseudointellectual rag and a snobby history of Princeton University.
Blaaaah.

It gets two for a few interesting insights about love and life, and the one developed character who was a fascinating librarian who only surfaced for ten pages or so.


Sucked. I opened this book with a fair amount of enthuzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz blink but, sadly, it wasn't long before I realizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz yawn I mean, multiple authors can work quite nicely, but it's always wizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz snort underground in a sewer forever, clanging around and banging heads in that mazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz stretch something about trees, and what the hell was with that hazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz shift sure, I gave it my best shot, but I just could not manage to keep my eyezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz phfffft well, what else can I say, I barely remember anything about this collaboration between two guyzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz rub eyes Now, I'm not saying don't have at it, but there are so many other books, and time fliezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ear tug so now I keep it right by my bed.
Just before reading this book, I read sitelinkThe Lost Symbol, Before I reached the end, I'd researched the ending, While I sometimes do that with a movie that I don't really care about, this was the first time I'd done it with a book.


As I listened to The Rule of Four, I have several books on Audio that I listen to while driving, I was confused by the plot.
While I knew that the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was central to the story, the jumping back and forth in time was odd at times and I couldn't grasp what I needed to care about this old book.


Than I reached the end, I smiled not only at the actual ending, but in understanding,

The confusion I felt was due to everything being shown from Tom's point of view, who spends almost all of the story being confused by his past and future colliding.
So much of his life was filled with a love/hate relationship with the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, that became melded with the death of his father AND a sense of both wanting to finish what his father had started, but not BE his father.


As an adult who's lost a parent beforeolder than Tom was, but in many ways still in a developmental stage, I understood the sense of being torn between who they wanted you to be and who you are.
. .

I was saddened when I finished and came over to write the review and saw so many negative reviews, This isn't in the same caliber as a classic, but in my eyes, . . Dan Brown could learn a thing or two on research from this book, This book was billed as a more intellectual version of The Da Vinci Code, and while I suppose it is essentially that, I honestly did not enjoy it as much as I enjoyed Dan Brown's book.
The story is about a Princeton student who inherits from his father an obsession with an ancient text called the Hypnerotomachia, purported to contain directions to a vault of treasure.


Unfortunately, less than half the book was really devoted to the treasure hunt itself, with the remainder consisting of tooextensive background stories about the main characters and the ways in which they grew apart as they got older.
Don't get me wrong this is a perfectly valid thing for a story to be about, I just personally wasn't nearly as interested in these fairly generic characters going through fairly generic experiences at college as I was in the deciphering of a mysterious text.
And it's definitely not just any college it's PRINCETON, The book reminds you of this left and right, to the extent that in the end you feel like half the reason this book exists is that the authors really wanted to brag about how great Princeton is and how great they are for having gone there.


All in all, the book carried my through to the end, and the Da Vinci Codelike sequences in which the characters unraveled the text's mysteries were entertaining.
Those were just too few and far between for my liking, I enjoyed it a lot! It leaves a pleasant aftertaste like a good walk through an orchard, Is a bit similar to the Langdon series but a bit different in its languid pace of the plot,
DDA reread!
Q:
Like many of us, I think, my father spent the measure of his life piecing together a story he would never understand.
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A son is the promise that time makes to a man, the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that the person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him.
c
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The adventure of our first days together gradually blossomed into something else: a feeling I'd never had, which I can only compare to the sensation of returning home, of joining a balance that needs no adjusting, as if the scales of my life had been waiting for her all along.
c
Q:
Hope, . . which whispered from Pandora's box after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things, Without it, there is only time, And time pushes

at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion, . . It's a law of motion, a fact of physics, . . , no different from the stages of white dwarves and red giants, Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge, Time is simply the yardstick of our separation, If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude, We are lonely in proportion to our years, c
Q:
Never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness, c
Q:
I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among booklearned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.
c
Q:
That was the recipe of our relationship, I think, We gave each other what we never expected to find c
Q:
The only things people can ever know about you are the ones that you let them see.
c
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Never mix books and bed, In the spectrum of excitement, sex amp thought were on opposite ends, Both to be enjoyed, but never at the same time, c
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Because every desire has its proper object, It means people spend their lives wanting things they shouldnt, The world confuses into taking their love and aiming it where it doesnt belong, c
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Time passed, worlds diverged, Time is what disperses us, c
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Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth, When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in.
c
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His intelligence was relentless and wild, a fire even he couldn't control, It swallowed entire books at a sitting, finding flaws in arguments, gaps in evidence, errors in interpretation, in objects, far from his own, с Un libro strano che parte con tanto coinvolgimento per poi scemare pian piano verso una noia quasi mortale, La trama è incentrata su uno studente di Princeton che eredita da suo padre un'ossessione per un antico testo chiamato Hypnerotomachia, che si presume contenga le indicazioni per un "tesoro".

Tanti gli spunti interessanti citati: il Rinascimento, il conflitto di Firenze fra umanisti e intellettuali, Savonarola, ma alla fine persi nel vuoto perché, spesso, il filone principale esce dai binari per raccontare d'altro come, ad esempio, una parentesi rosa che c'entra come i cavoli a merenda nella storia e un finale davvero inverosimile.
Mi ha dato come l'impressione di voler ricalcare il più famoso " Codice Da Vinci", ma con pessimi risultati, .