The Book of Air and Shadows

I started reading The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber a couple days ago.  But I'm done.  I only got about forty pages into it.  It was alright, but it wasn't good and life is finite.

My first warning sign was in a blurb on the back which touted it as being better than The DaVinci Code.  I didn't really want to read anything that it would make sense to compare to The DaVinci Code.  But I started it anyway.  I'm not even 100% sure what it was about.  It started as a tale told by a man hiding out from some bad people, explaining how he got into the situation.  It's made clear an old, rare book was involved.

In the next chapter the perspective jumped to a man named Crosetti, a web manager for a rare book shop in Manhattan.  This was the chapter with the damning sentence, the one that made me set down the book for good.

"Crosetti was working on a particularly tricky bit of hypertext markup language at the same time as he was thinking these amusing thoughts."

No one on Earth says "hypertext markup language"!!!  It's HTML, and furthermore, it's not even used as much anymore.  And this book is only a couple years old.  The sentence just looks like the result of a non-computer-programming author googling "what language is the internet in?" or something.  Actually no, I just googled that question after typing it, and it doesn't produce any useful results.  But you get my point.  His non-expert status is so obvious, and it shouldn't be, when the character is meant to be a programmer.

I may run out to Borders tomorrow.  There's one in the area that's still open, I think.