<P> The book immediately broke sales records, becoming the fastest selling adult - market novel in history, with over one million copies sold on the first day of release . By the end of the first week, a total of two million copies had been sold in the U.S., Canada, and UK . According to the publisher, the rapid sales prompted the printing of an additional 600,000 hardcover copies to the 5 million initially printed for the US market . On its first day the book became the #1 bestseller on Amazon.com, and the Amazon Kindle e-reader edition became the top - selling item on Amazon.com, outselling Amazon's sales of the hardback copy of the novel, which is the sixth best selling book of 2009 on pre-publication orders alone . The Lost Symbol also ranked as the #1 bestseller in Amazon's Canadian and British sites . Both Barnes & Noble and Waterstone's reported the book has broken all previous records for adult fiction in the United Kingdom . According to Nielsen BookScan data, 550,946 copies of The Lost Symbol were sold in its first week of sale, taking $7.49 million . By the end of the second sales week, Transworld intended to have 1.25 million copies printed . </P> <P> By September 25 the book ranked #1 in the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction . </P> <P> The New York Times praised the book as being "impossible to put down" and claimed Brown is "bringing sexy back to a genre that had been left for dead ." Nevertheless, it noted the overuse of certain phrases and italics, as well as the lack of logic behind characters' motivations . It also likened Inoue Sato to Jar Jar Binks . Los Angeles Times said, "Brown's narrative moves rapidly, except for those clunky moments when people sound like encyclopedias ." Newsweek called the book "contrived", saying that to get through The Lost Symbol, just like The Da Vinci Code, it was necessary to swallow a lot of coincidences, but the book was still a page - turner, and that Brown "is a maze maker who builds a puzzle and then walks you through it . His genius lies in uncovering odd facts and suppressed history, stirring them together into a complicated stew and then saying, what if?" The National Post's review called it a "heavy - handed, clumsy thriller" and that the character of the villain (Mal'akh) "bears an uncomfortably close similarity" to the Francis Dolarhyde character in Thomas Harris' 1981 novel Red Dragon . The Daily Telegraph said the novel was "not quite the literary train - wreck expected ." TIME said the plot was fun, if bruising, but "It would be irresponsible not to point out that the general feel, if not all the specifics, of Brown's cultural history is entirely correct . He loves showing us places where our carefully tended cultural boundaries--between Christian and pagan, sacred and secular, ancient and modern--are actually extraordinarily messy ." Novelist William Sutcliffe's review in the Financial Times panned the book as "a novel that asks nothing of the reader, and gives the reader nothing back", adding that it "is filled with cliché, bombast, undigested research and pseudo-intellectual codswallop". The digested read by John Crace in The Guardian ends with Robert Langdon begging Dan Brown "Please don't wheel me out again ." Slovene philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek described the book as "a candidate for the worst novel ever". </P> <P> Following the worldwide successes of The Da Vinci Code in 2006 and Angels & Demons in 2009, which were both based on Brown's novels, starring Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon and produced and directed by Ron Howard, Columbia Pictures began production on a film adaptation of The Lost Symbol . Hanks and Howard were expected to return for the film adaptation of The Lost Symbol, along with the franchise's producers Brian Grazer and John Calley . Sony Pictures eventually hired three screenwriters for the project, beginning with Steven Knight and then hiring Brown himself . In March 2012, Danny Strong was also hired to collaborate on the adaptation . </P>

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