A while ago Shelf Talk had some posts on what people are reading on the buses in Seattle. I’m visiting family in New York right now, riding the subway every day, and decided to check out the reading tastes of New Yorkers on the MTA.
I had to be careful that the riders wouldn’t think I was stalking them, so I kept my glances furtive. Some people have book covers to keep their reading private. Others are so lost in what they are reading that they get off at their transfer stop, never taking their eyes off their book, and stuff themselves into the next train, hold on to the strap, and manage to read and turn pages with one hand.
My first target was the man sitting next to me on the F train from Brooklyn to Columbus Circle in Manhattan. He was reading a book in Russian. I can recognize the Cyrillic alphabet because I took a few years of Russian when I was in junior high in Milwaukee during the Cold War. We had a Socialist mayor, fluoride in the water, and my teacher, Mrs. Deptulla, vanished right after the U2 incident. But I digress. I could see that the Russian man was reading Ul’timatum Borna by Robert Ladlem, in Russian translation of course.
My next victim was a woman probably in her 20’s, reading, of all things, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. This was the “in” book when I read it at her age, back in the early 70s. A young man further down in the car was reading The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger– for pleasure, or for an assignment? Both probably. The quintessential coming-of-age novel has been assigned for 50 years– certainly long enough to be a classic.
Of course there are the men reading The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal on their way to Madison Avenue and the Financial District. These men still go to work in conservative dark suits, white shirt, ties and well polished Daddy shoes. It could have been 1962– a scene from Mad Men. The working class guys were more likely to be reading the other daily paper, The New York Post— a tabloid which is smaller and easier to read on the subway. Not surprisingly quite a few people were reading The New Yorker. Young women were reading People, so I was able to keep up with the latest on Sandra Bullock and her new (Orleans) baby Louis.
An unlikely man was reading How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, which originally came out in 1937. My father encouraged me to read this self help book 50 years ago, when I was 13 years old and not very popular. A woman was reading The History of Love by Nicole Krauss– one of my favorite books of last year. Another woman was reading Harlan Ellison’s Deathbed. There was another reading The Girl With No Shadow by Joanne Harris.
I myself was engrossed in Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, short stories by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of the Maladies and The Namesake. It is so good I actually missed my stop and rode the A train all the way to 125th. Or maybe I just nodded off for a minute.
I only saw one person reading with a Kindle. Like an ipod, I think they are just too valuable to use in the subway. And oddly, the one type of book I never saw anyone on the subway reading was Urban Fiction, a genre so popular it has its own section in the New York Public Library, next to the mysteries.
~Beth K., Central Library
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