Every morning, I come into Manhattan from Brooklyn on the R. And one of those lovely side benefits of moving to the city that no one told me about is that mass transportation always gives me time to read. If I read only on the subway, I still manage about a book and a half a week.
I’m far from alone. Most of the people on my train, especially in the morning, have either a paper or a book in hand. It makes one think all these proclaimations of the death of literacy may be a little premature.
I find science and philosophy books are the easiest to read on the subway, since they’re generally chopped up into nice short sections where I can find a stopping point before I leave the train. Reading a novel can be a bit troublesome, as I discovered with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, because, well, you have to get off the train–and it’s terrible to do so in the middle of some important passage. Then, if you’re me, you spend the whole day at work slightly distracted, hoping to get back to your book. And short stories can also be good–unless you get off just before the end of the story, which is worse than getting off at the end of a novel.
And when I’m in need of book suggestions, I look at what my fellow passengers are reading–which varies widely. Yesterday I sat next to a young man in the middle of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. As I looked around the car, I realized that also present were George Eliot, Nora Ephron, and Mark Haddon–books I’d likely pick up sooner or later–along with James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, and Nicholas Sparks.
I found a whole community of readers in one easy place: mass transit. And for those of you New Yorkers who say you have no time to read, try this. It’s worth it.