I like this essay about taking peeks at other people’s books on the subway:
On the subway, sometimes the person with the book is sitting close enough, and the typeface is large enough, that you can peer onto the very page. At home, reading over someone’s shoulder merely constitutes annoying behavior; doing it to a stranger on the subway feels close to illegal, or at least illicit. To read a page, a paragraph, a line from someone else’s book is to bypass the common curiosity about what might be on a stranger’s mind; it’s to know with great certainty; it’s to appropriate the language floating around in his or her thoughts. Regardless of how banal the book, those stolen words practically shimmer with intrigue.
Sometimes I try to surreptitiously glance over and see what the person next to me is reading. I try to read the author and title at the top of the page. I love getting little windows into random people.
I TOTALLY read other people’s books and newspapers. In fact, I was reading an article about baseball on the subway today and i was mad when he turned the page when I made it to the last column and I didn’t get a chance to finish. I almost wanted to ask him to turn the page back, but I didn’t.
Hmm…I smell idea for my next blog post! (Procrastination, here I come!)
so I just got back from my first trip to Tokyo. When riding the subway, I would always check out what the other riders were reading. The one that flipped me out was a ~50 yr old woman reading full-on alien manga porn. Like tentacles up the ass of schoolgirls kinda stuff. I was impressed.