Wednesday, March 18, 2009

A Mediocre Book and A Terrific One

Within the last few days, I have finished James A. Connor's "Pascal's Wager", which was mediocre. No fault of his, I wasn't as interested as I thought. Pascal was a scientist for whom the computer language was named, and may be best known for his wager-he decided there was a God, because if he were wrong, the worst that could happen was he wasted some time on Earth, whereas if he did not believe and were wrong, he would be cast into Hell.

Then I picked up Adam Gopnik's "Angels and Ages", which was sublime. It's a really quick read, a nice little essay on Lincoln and Darwin and what they mean to us today. It would have been just a little bit cooler if I had been reading it closer to their 200th birthday on February 12th. But you can't have everything.

I went to the library in search of David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest", which interested me when it was recently featured on Slate's Audio Book Club. But they didn't have it, so I came home with Michael Crichton's "The Great Train Robbery", which I haven't read in a while, and two Star Trek books. Which is kind of the same.

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