People Reading in Public
Taking book recommendations from 20 strangers in trains, planes, parks, & cafes
A couple years ago, a friend of mine started a Goodreads shelf onto which they added books they saw strangers reading in New York, which I thought was genius. My TikTok for-you page offers the occasional compilation of short clips showing book covers spotted on the subway. I readily peer across cafe tables and over commuters’ shoulders to catch glimpses of open pages, maybe the title or author in a top corner, perhaps a distinguishing character’s name on the page. And I’ve come to notice that people sometimes suit the books they’re reading in the way dog owners resemble their dogs and vice versa.
I recently wrote about feeling like books are signs and about the marketing / publicity lingo that declares you need to see or hear about or encounter a book seven times before it sticks. Noticing the books strangers around me are reading, then, is a sort of practice in openness and curiosity—and maybe also divination.
1.
The Book: The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants by Ramsey Campbell is the first story collection by the well-known British fantasy and horror writer. The ten early stories, published in 1964 when he was just 18, feature Lovecraftian and cosmic horror in a traditional English setting.
The First Lines: Is it some lurking remnant of the other world that draws us toward the beings which survive from other eons? Surely there must be such a remnant in me, for there can be no sane or wholesome reason why I should have strayed that day to the old, legend-infected ruin on the hill, nor can any commonplace reason be deduced for my finding the secret underground room there, and still less for my opening the door of horror which I discovered.
It was on a visit to the British Museum that I first heard of the legend which suggested a reason for the general avoidance of a hill outside Brichester.
The Reader: A man with one very small suitcase had his face buried in his paperback in the Amsterdam Sloterdijk train station’s Starbucks at 8 am, the only place to sit down after I had faced a cancelled flight, cancelled train, and two successful overnight busses.
2.
The Book: I read four stories from Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold by Bolu Babalola in an undergraduate creative writing seminar called Exercises in Style; they were “Osun,” “Alagomeji,” “Scheherezade,” and “Yaa.” In her debut collection, Babalola focuses primarily on contemporary, decolonialist retellings of West African folktales and love stories, but she also includes myths, histories, and legends from Ancient Greece, the Middle East, and more.
The First Lines: Osun was used to being looked at. In awe, lasciviously, curiously. Instinctively, she knew when eyes were drawing across her, trying to figure out what they could from her figure. Chin slightly raised, arms and legs lean and athletic, and wide hips that swayed and exuded a femininity so innate it refused to be contained; to some it was a call they felt they had to respond to, to others, a declarative statement of power, something to fear, revere. As a competitive swimmer at Ifá Academy, she had an intrinsic allure that followed her as she flew into the air before diving into the pool.
The Reader: My neighbor on a transatlantic flight tucked this into her seat pocket before she promptly fell asleep.
3.
The Book: Player Piano, published in 1952, is Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel. It’s about an engineer named Paul Proteus and his attempt at rebellion in a world run by supercomputers.
The First Lines: Ilium, New York, is divided into three parts.
In the northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional people; in the northeast are the machines; and in the south, across the Iroquois River, is the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all of the people live.
If the bridge across the Iroquois were dynamited, few daily routines would be disturbed.
The Reader: A fully suited, clean-shaven, middle-aged man was reading Vonnegut on the 2 train uptown. I wondered where he might be going at 2:30 pm on a Wednesday.
4.
The Book: Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement by Daniel Kahneman (and co-authors Sibony and Sunstein) is about the human predisposition to making bad judgements—and what we can do better. Case studies include doctors giving different diagnoses to the same patient, judges giving different sentences to the same perpetrators, and health inspectors giving different ratings to the same restaurants.
The First Lines: Imagine that four teams of friends have gone to a shooting arcade. Each team consists of five people; they share one rifle, and each person fires one shot.
In an ideal world, every shot would hit the bull’s-eye.
The Reader: A woman in a sundress was reading Noise on a picnic blanket while, it seemed, waiting to get into a Shakespeare in the Park performance of As You Like It.
5.
The Book: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, a comic, energetic Russian-language masterpiece, retells the stories of Goethe’s Faust and the Bible’s Pontius Pilate set amid Soviet life in the 1930s.
The First Lines: At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch’s Ponds. One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers.
The Reader: A dark-haired young woman descended the stairs to the 1st Avenue subway station and walked along its entire platform with Bulgakov’s novel open in her hands, smiling.
6.
The Book: A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life by Jack Kornfield came out in the 90s and is a “practical guidebook” offering wisdom, techniques, and guided meditations for practicing Buddhism and spirituality in America.
The First Lines: In the summer of 1972 I returned to the home of my parents in Washington, D.C., head shaved and robed as a Buddhist monk, after my first five-year study in Asia. No Theravada Buddhist monasteries had been established in America at that time, but I wanted to see how it would be to live as a monk in America, even if for only a short while. After several weeks with my parents, I decided to visit my twin brother and his wife on Long Island. With my robes and bowl I boarded a train en route from Washington to New York’s Grand Central Station, carrying a ticket my mother had purchased for me—as a renunciate, I was not using or handling money myself.
The Reader: On an overcast Tuesday morning jog, I passed a bench facing the Hudson River where a man, in his late twenties, maybe, was sitting and reading A Path with Heart in gym shorts and flip flops.
7.
The Book: According to a top Amazon review, The Lost Art of Steam Heating Revisited by Dan Holohan is “a must have if your house has a steam heating system in it.” The reviewer, Scorch345, now has “the confidence to maintain my system and know it should last for a long time.” Another reviewer says: “Possibly the singularly best book ever written about steam heat” and “I'm on my 7th copy of The Lost Art, gave the others to friends.”
The First Lines: I was never too nuts about history when they made me study it in school. Oh, it didn’t exactly put me to sleep, but then it didn’t have me leaning forward, wide-eyed, in my chair either.
Maybe it was the teachers. I don’t recall any of them having a fire in the belly for this stuff. Nope, the teachers I had to endure made history about as dry as Deuteronomy. The dates and facts they threw at me landed like old chicken bones on the dusty floors of Hicksville High School.
Yeah, it took a few steam systems to get me excited.
The Reader: A millennial with a handlebar mustache propped this paperback tome on his crossed knee on the C train uptown.
8.
The Book: A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger explores case studies of breakthroughs that began with a single simple question, asks why we’re never actually taught how to ask questions, and gives practical strategies for using well-crafted questions as tools in daily life.
The First Lines: As a journalist, I’ve been asking questions my whole professional life. But until a few years ago, I hadn’t thought much about the art or the science of questioning. And I never considered the critical role questioning plays in enabling people to innovate, solve problems, and move ahead in their careers and lives.
That changed during my work on a series of articles, and eventually a book, on how designers, inventors, and engineers come up with ideas and solve problems.
The Reader: A lean, silver-haired man stood on the 96th Street subway platform, scribbling wildly in a notebook that could have been a prop in Oppenheimer or A Beautiful Mind.
9.
The Book: One of Obama’s favorite reads of 2022, Simon & Schuster says Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein offers “a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.”
The First Lines: The first thing I need to do is convince you something has changed.
American politics offers the comforting illusion of stability. The Democratic and Republican Parties have dominated elections since 1864, grappling for power and popularity the whole time. Scour American history and you will find Democrats and Republicans slandering each other, undermining each other, plotting against each other, even physically assaulting each other. It is easy to cast a quick glance backward and assume our present is a rough match for our past, that the complaints we have about politics today mirror the complaints past generations had of their day. But the Democratic and Republican Parties of today are not like the Democratic and Republican Parties of yesteryear. We are living through something genuinely new.
The Reader: A young woman in a pantsuit began reading this book across the subway car from me on my morning commute to FiDi.
10.
The Book: A decade-spanning memoir, Nonbinary by Genesis P-Orridge covers the life and experiences of the transgender icon, musician, and visual artist.
The First Line: I thought it had to be fake.
William S. Burroughs’s address was right there, in the middle of a magazine called FILE.
There it was in an “image bank request list” section in the part of the Yellow Pages devoted to correspondence art. One artists could request an image from another artist living thousands of miles away. And now, right before me, soliciting “Ideas and Camouflage in 1984,” was Burroughs’s home address—in London.
The Reader: A reader dressed all in black stretched out on a Hudson River Park bench in the sun on unseasonably hot autumn Saturday.
11.
The Book: Journalist and author Mark Kurlansky has written books about the histories of cod, oysters, paper, and more, and in 2002, about a tabletop household item in his best-selling Salt: A World History.
The First Lines: I bought the rock in Spanish Catalonia, in the rundown hillside mining town of Cardona. An irregular pink trapezoid with elongated, curved, indentations etched on its surface by raindrops, it had an odd translucence and appeared to be a cross between rose quartz and soap. The resemblance to soap came from the fact that it dissolved in water and its edges were worn smooth like a soap bar.
I paid too much for it—nearly fifteen dollars. But it was, after all, despite a rosy blush of magnesium, almost pure salt, a piece of the famous salt mountain of Cardona. The various families that had occupied the castle atop the next mountain had garnered centuries of wealth from such rock.
The Reader: A “guy in finance,” complete with button up, black vest, and slick hair read Salt while standing on a crowded morning A train down to FiDi.
12.
The Book: According to its blurb, historical young adult novel Out of Darkness, by Ashley Hope Pérez, “transplants Romeo and Juliet to a bitterly segregated Texas town.” It’s 1937 when teens Naomi Vargas, who’s Mexican American, and Walsh Fuller, who is Black, fall in love. A 2016 Printz Honor Book!
The First Lines: From far off, it looks like hundreds of beetles ringed around a single dome of light. Then the shiny black backs resolve into pickups and cars and ambulances. The bright globe divides into many lights. Work lamps. Spotlights. Strings of Christmas bulbs. Stadium floodlights borrowed from the football field nearby. Men and dust and tents. Thousands of spectators gather, necks craned. But it is not a circus, not a rodeo.
Within the great circle of light, men crawl over the crumpled form of a collapsed school. They cart away rubble and search for survivors. For their children. Mostly, though, they find bodies.
The Reader: On the E train uptown, a young middle or high schooler swung off her backpack and pulled out a lap desk.
13.
The Book: I can’t even begin to imagine how many copies The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides has sold; it’s a thriller about a famous painter who shoots her fashion photographer husband then refuses to speak.
The First Lines: July 14. I don’t know why I’m writing this.
That’s not true. Maybe I do know and just don’t want to admit it to myself.
I don’t even know what to call it—this thing I’m writing. It feels a little pretentious to call it a diary. It’s not like I have anything to say. Anne Frank kept a diary—not someone like me.
The Reader: One morning commute, it seemed like everybody in my nearly full subway car had a book in hand. On my right, a woman reading this thriller.
14.
The Book: The main character in iconic science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven has dreams that are able to alter past and present reality. Enter a manipulative psychiatrist…
The First Lines: Current-borne, wave-flug, tugged hugely by the whole might of the ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the fast diurnal pulses beat in the moon-driven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.
The Reader: On the same commute as above, the man just to my left held a very worn copy of this Le Guin. Between them, I was reading the manuscript for Sakina’s Kiss by Indian author Vivek Shanbhag on my kindle for work.
15.
The Book: Horns is the sophomore novel of dark fantasy author Joe Hill, and it was adapted into a 2013 film staring Daniel Radcliffe.
The First Lines: Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples, and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances. He was so ill—wet-eyed and weak—he didn’t think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry.
But when he was swaying above the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept. He lurched in surprise, and for the second time in twelve hours he pissed on his feet.
The Reader: On a very foggy, quiet, late-fall morning, I sat across a subway car from a man wearing a red beanie and reading this book from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
16.
The Book: Mia P. Manansala’s debut novel, Arsenic and Adobo, is a cozy mystery thriller, and the first in the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series (its fifth book comes out this November!).
The First Lines: My name is Lila Macapagal and my life has become a rom-com cliché.
Not many romantic comedies feature an Asian-American lead (or dead bodies, but more on that later), but all the hallmarks are there.
Girl from an improbably named small town in the Midwest moves to the big city to make a name for herself and find love? Check.
Girl achieves these things only for the world to come crashing down when she walks in on her fiancé getting down and dirty with their next-door neighbors (yes, plural)? Double check.
Girl then moves back home in disgrace and finds work reinvigorating her aunt’s failing business? Well now we’re up to a hat trick of clichés.
The Reader: On the C train, one of the most sophisticated, distinguished older women I’ve ever seen was reading a library copy of this book and wearing an incredibly chic polka dotted scarf.
17.
The Book: The New York Times and The New York Review of Books both described Edward Said’s Out of Place as engrossing, absorbing, and Proustian. The memoir follows the philosopher and critic through his childhood in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.
The First Lines: All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in with the world of my parents and four sisters. Whether this was because I constantly misread my part or because of some deep flaw in my being I could not tell for most of my early life. Sometimes I was intransigent, and proud of it. At other times I seemed to myself to be nearly devoid of any character at all, timid, uncertain, without will. Yet the overriding sensation I had was of always being out of place.
The Reader: At Blackline Coffee in St. Pauli, Hamburg, an older man wearing all denim sat at a small table by himself, with this book, a coffee, and breakfast.
18.
The Book: German-Swiss writer Herman Hesse, perhaps most widely known for his novels Steppenwolf and Siddtharta, wrote and published Narziß und Goldmund / Narcissus and Goldmund (or Death and the Lover) in 1930, about a young man who leaves a monastery to wander medieval Germany.
The First Lines: Outside the entrance of the Mariabronn cloister, whose rounded arch rested on slim double columns, a chestnut tree stood close to the road. It was a sweet chestnut, with a sturdy trunk and a full round crown that swayed gently in the wind, brought from Italy many years earlier by a monk who had made a pilgrimage to Rome.
The Reader: I saw this Hesse in the hands of a young man in a quarter-zip on the regional train from Lübeck to Hamburg after spending the day chaperoning a class trip.
19.
The Book: Killing Moon is the thirteenth (!) crime novel in Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø’s series of Harry Hole thrillers.
The First Lines: “Oslo,” the man said, raising the glass of whiskey to his lips.
“That’s the place you love the most?” Lucille asked.
He stared ahead, seeming to think about his answer before he nodded. She stared at him while he drank.
The Reader: I was distracted trying to figure out what book was being read by a very small German woman wearing a very large green sweater when I realized I missed my stop; but actually, I was on the wrong train to begin with.
20.
The Book: A decade-spanning, genre-spanning novel, We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker is equal parts thriller, Western, and coming-of-age novel.
The First Lines: You see something and you raise your hand. Doesn’t matter if it’s a cigarette paper or a soda can. You see something you raise your hand. Don’t touch it, neither. Just raise your hand.
The townspeople readied, their feet in the ford. Movement in line, twenty paces between, a hundred eyes down, but still, they held together, the choreography of the damned.
Behind, the town emptied, the echo of a long, pristine summer had been smothered by the news.
She was Sissy Radley. Seven years old. Blond hair. Known to most, Chief Dubois did not need to hand out photographs.
The Reader: Happy birthday to the woman who was sitting one table over at the Italian restaurant in Mainz! Her two friends—her two adult children?—gifted her the German edition of Whitaker’s 2021 novel. They seemed to be having a wonderful time.
This is the first “bonus” letter I’ve put together since starting my biweekly recommendation series, and you can still expect a newsletter recommending three books on a theme in your inbox next Friday. Diving into my Goodreads “people reading in public” shelf for this piece was a lot of fun, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed typing out all these opening passages (so many vastly different genres!); I was especially interested from a craft perspective—what style of opening / hook do I like best, what don’t I like, what might I want to try myself? How many words does it take to get to the moment that really catches a reader’s attention? Is it always about catching a reader’s attention? Which is all to say, I had a good time working on this, and there’s a good chance I put together a “People Reading in Public: Pt II” in the future.
If you’re looking for more…
I’ve been reading the free pieces available from The European Review of Books for over a year now and finally caved on a digital subscription. Favorites recently include Madeline Gressel’s “What an animal isn’t,” Michael Erard’s “Cannibalinguistics,” and Alexander Wells’ “Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag.” (You might still be able to get a year’s digital subscription for half the price.)
If you’re ever on TikTok, check out author Ann Patchett’s Friday book recommendations: “If you haven’t read this book, it’s new to you.” The short segments are posted by her bookstore’s account, Parnassus Books / @parnassusbooksnashville. She gives off librarian energy in the best way <3
As a fellow dark haired young woman who is (planning) to read Master and Margarita in the coming weeks, this feels validating