Beginning today, every fifth person you see on the Metro for the next nine months will be reading Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. And for the next year or two, every third tourist you see will be on a quixotic quest to see for themselves all the D.C. “locations” where the fictional events in the book took place.

The question then becomes: will you read it right away in order to at least know what you’re up against, or put it off until some lazy holiday weekend or long plane trip? Or perhaps you’ll categorically refuse to read it, thus allowing yourself to become even more indignant whenever someone asks you where in D.C. they keep “the Hand of the Mysteries.”

The general consensus among critics is that the book is definitely stupid, but maybe not quite so astonishingly stupid as they were expecting.

Are you ready for endless Masonic conspiracy feature segments on every morning TV news show in the country?