My favourite things about the new Dan Brown novel, The Lost Symbol? These two sentences:

"'Actually, Katherine, it's not gibberish.' His eyes brightened again with the thrill of discovery. 'It's ... Latin.'"

and

"Is there life after death? Do humans have souls? Incredibly, Katherine had answered all of these questions and more."

Thanks to Benedicte Page and the New York Times for highlighting them – pure genius.

Thanks also to @hencehemmo, who shares with us the fact that "This guy eluded the French police ... in loafers" is now her favourite sentence in a book ever. Tweeting her way through the night and through The Lost Symbol so we didn't have to, she also raged about Brown's obsession with one character's grey ("gray") eyes: "soft gray eyes", "the humility in his gentle gray eyes", "usually calm gray eyes", "regal gray eyes".

"Ok, I'm annoyed already. The same character having 'soft gray eyes' and then eight pages later 'gentle gray eyes' is not necessary. I GET IT," she wrote.

At 2:22am, she asked the question which seems to have been the response of many of The Lost Symbol's early tacklers: "I'm genuinely trying to work out how badly written can also be gripping." @readyfuels agreed: "On page 58 of 509 of The Lost Symbol. Dammit, hooked again. Curse you and your intriguing shit based loosely in reality, Dan Brown." @bunnirice was also drawn in, tweeting: "Finding The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown to be an engaging and fun ride of a book, despite the repeat formula and unbelievable plot."

Reviews are already appearing on Amazon.co.uk – some even from people who have read it, some from pro- and anti-Brownians (Brownites? Brownies?) spoiling for a fight. "It's really great, because it covers themes the world has to discover, to reconsider who and what we are and what ancient history and quantum physics is telling us... and not just for a little in-crowd, but for all the world to enjoy, because it's fast-paced and exciting as hell!" wrote Wildly A Wake. "People that say Dan can't write are so wrong, ok maybe it's not high literature, but telling a story that you can't put down and bringing interesting (and important) themes to almost everybody's living room is an art as well."

The paper reviews have been a mixed bunch: "there remains a heft to his potboilers that is hard to imitate," said the Times; "his miracle is to have made Jeffrey Archer read like Dostoevsky in comparison," said the Guardian; "the narrative is still lumpen, witless, adjectivally-promiscuous and addicted to using italics to convey excitement where more adept thriller writers generally prefer to use words," said the Telegraph.

Philip Pullman, meanwhile, has weighed into the whole Brown debate: while he doesn't quite match the phrase-coining abilities of Salman Rushdie, who said The Da Vinci Code was "a book so bad it makes bad books look good", he's nonetheless pretty harsh: "His basic ignorance about the way people behave is astonishing – talking in utterly implausible ways to one another," he said. "The basic quality of the prose is flat, stunted and ugly – all the usual literary things he just doesn't know how to do."

But, like others, Pullman admits that Brown does have one strength. Talking about The Da Vinci Code, he says that "from every point of view except one it's terrible. The way in which it succeeds is that he does keep the narrative moving forward. People also enjoy the idea of mysteries and things that we're not supposed to know and secrets and ways of finding them out. So he's tapped into that."

Indeed. Our own John Crace, meanwhile, has been manfully liveblogging his way through The Lost Symbol: it looks like he's almost there, so tune in for a soon-to-be-forthcoming verdict.