I read this book while I was in the car, listening to it on CD. While the plot is wonderful and the research was good, I found that I kept wanting to fast forward the disk to get to the next part of the story. It seemed that nothing could just happen, it had to be dissected, remembered, interpreted and analyzed to extreme. I am sure that if I were reading the actual book, I would be able to skip over the extraneous verbiage and keep the story moving better. In some of the action segments, had Langdon actually had all the thoughts and observations that were attributed to him, he would have used up so much time that he would not have been able to get the job done.
Dan Brown has improved his craft as he has written other books -- The Da Vinci Code, for example has not been bogged down with all the "padding."
This would be an easy book to abridge.