One of the top selling U.S. novels of the past year has been The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, a story of modern day (47)______ old mysteries and secret codes hidden in works of art. Now comes another best seller offering a similar kind of mix. It’’s called The Rule of Four and it was written by first time novelists Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. But while The Da Vinci Code offers new revelations into some of the great icons of West European visual art, The Rule of Four (48)______ on the campus of an elite American University, and it revolves around a 15th century literary (49)______.
Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason say they became literary partners around the same time they became best friends in the third grade. The two joined forces to write a crime play while attending (50)______ school in suburban Washington, D.C. They continued writing together throughout their school years, even though they went off to different colleges, Ian to Princeton and Dustin to Harvard. A week after they graduated in 1998, they began work on The Rule of Four. Ian says the idea came from a course he took at Princeton.
"A Renaissance history professor suggested I write my final paper on a book called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, "he said. "So I went to the library to look it up, and it turns out to be one of the most (51)______ books in the history of Western printing. Nobody knows who wrote it, and yet there’’s a code inside the book that seems to suggest the (52)______ of the author..."
Ian and Dustin turned that real life mystery into a (53)______ story set at Princeton University, where a group of students race to unravel the secrets of the Hypnerotomachia. When things turn violent, the students realize there’’s more at stake than intellectual curiosity. Dustin Thomason says they drew (54)______ from their own college experiences and from the Hypnerotomachia.
As to why American readers seem so interested in reading about historical codes and long-buried secrets, Ian Caldwell has this explanation. "Part of it may be that a lot of people love history, but so much of history in school tends to be facts and dates and memorization," he said. "So I think there’’s always been an appetite out there to see the past in an exciting way ... It’’s actually surprising to me that more novels don’’t have a historical (55)______ like this."
If The Rule of Four is about bringing history to life, it’’s also about the power of friendship. And the good friends wrote it partly as a way of (56)______ their own. After college, Ian went to work as a software engineer in Virginia, and Dustin earned medical and business degrees in New York. But they’’ve stayed in touch through The Rule of Four and they’’re now working on a second thriller together. They say that while they might write separate books someday, it’’s hard to imagine, they’’ve gotten too used to relying on each other for inspiration.
Word Bank
A) fictional B) preserving C) elementary
D) inspiration E) whisper F) intrigue
G) charge H) valuable I) identity
J) formula K) manuscript L) consist
M) drama N) unfolds O) component