Dan Brown

I’m a train book creeper.

General Geekiness

While riding the subway, seeing what other people are reading is half the fun. I’m the sort of person who can’t read on subways, preferring to people watch, talk with friends, annoy the car with dramatic readings of the backs of Agatha Christie novels, etc.

But I love to see what others are reading. You get a wide variety on trains. The college kids finishing their homework. People reading foreign language newspapers. The current New York Times bestseller (I was surprised to see only one reader of The Lost Symbol on the train last Saturday) or other popular works. It made me happy to see someone reading Proust.

But the most popular train book I’ve seen? Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It’s everywhere. I haven’t read it (and don’t plan to) but I like the cover, and that’s probably why I notice it. Conceptual typography is brilliant.

Destroying characters in one smack

General Geekiness

Ah, the pages of pulp fiction. A place to lose yourself in the fast paced world of fancy…or laugh hysterically at an author’s expense.

I’m currently reading Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons. It’s light and a quick read; thus far I have only one major beef.

How idiotic can the physicist Vittoria Vetra be?

Case in point:

“Is the Pantheon even a church?”

It is. Vittoria, you’re Italian. You’re apparently intelligent (you helped create an antimatter-creating particle accelerator for Chrissake) and your adopted father was a ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIEST. I imagine he must have taught you something about it amongst all the math and science.

I realize that not everyone knows the Pantheon is a church or that it is in Rome (no, it isn’t the Parthenon, that’s in Athens). But seriously.