People Reading in Public (Pt. 2)
Discovering fifteen more books "in the wild"
Regan’s newsletter publishes book recommendations on a theme and the occasional essay. Subscribe, and you’ll find 3 new book recs in your inbox every few weeks. Past newsletters have covered the 5+ Club, the Cure for Autofiction, Women in Translation, and more.
Last June, I shared my first installment of “People Reading in Public,” documenting the readers that caught my attention on subways and planes, in parks, restaurants, and cafes. In a world of algorithms, and best-of lists, and bestseller lists, and trending content, it can feel so refreshing to pay attention to the people around you, notice what appears, and follow up. I’ve been keeping a list of the books I’ve caught strangers reading in public since August 2022, and I’m excited to share a relatively recent batch here.
1.
The Book: Best known for The Reader1, Bernhard Schlink’s newest novel, The Granddaughter, tr. Charlotte Collins, was published in German a few years ago and just came out in English this January. It follows Kaspar, who, after the sudden death of his wife, sets off to find her long-lost granddaughter: a radicalized fifteen-year-old in a rural neo-Nazi community.
The Reader: I made the warmest eye contact with a lovely older woman—who must have been a teacher, or a writer, or at least an avid reader, silver glasses and knit lilac turtleneck—at the gate for our Hamburg to Heathrow flight.
The First Lines: He came home. It was ten o’clock: he didn’t close the bookshop until nine on Thursdays, and at half past, after lowering the grilles in front of the shop windows and door, he had taken the half-hour route through the park, which was longer than walking along the street, but refreshing at the end of a long day. The park was overgrown, the rose borders covered in ivy, the privet hedges untrimmed. But it smelled nice, of rhododendron, lilac, lime blossom, of mown grass or wet earth. He took this route in summer and winter, in good weather and bad. By the time he got home, the irritation and worries of the day would have fallen away.
2.
The Book: Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N. T. Wright claims that Christians have gotten “life after death” wrong: “it will come as a great surprise to learn that heaven comes to earth instead of us going to heaven.”
The Reader: Across from me on the subway (E uptown), a businessman with an expensive haircut wore black from head to toe.
The First Lines: Five snapshots set the scene for the two questions this book addresses. In autumn 1997, much of the world was plunged into a week of national mourning for Princess Diana, reaching its climax in the extraordinary funeral service in Westminster Abbey. People brought flowers, teddy bears, and other objects to churches, cathedrals, and town halls and stood in line for hours to write touching if sometimes tacky messages in books of condolence. Similar if somewhat smaller occasions of public grief took place following such incidents as the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. They showed a rich confusion of belief, half belief, sentiment, and superstition about the fate of the dead.
3.
The Book: By Lily Dunn, Sins of My Father: A Daughter, a Cult, a Wild Unravelling is a memoir, investigation, and detective story about addiction, family, forgiveness.
The Reader: On a misty, late-winter morning, a girl in her mid-twenties on London’s Jubilee line held her tote bag in her lap, which was spilling over with fresh lavender.
The First Lines: I imagine that the fog had lifted, that it was a bright morning when my father finally dragged himself from his bed. He found his dressing gown on the chair, but didn’t bother with slippers, despite the broken cassette cases jagged across the floor. His cat Hope was circling the room, meowing for food and flicking her tail at his inertia, but he had become bad at listening.
4.
The Book: About Bora Chung’s collection of horror and sci-fi stories (translated by Anton Hur), Your Utopia, Alexandra Kleeman writes, “Chung builds out her stories with imagination, absurdity and a dry sense of humor, all applied with X-Acto knife precision.”
The Reader: A woman stood to read on the 1 train uptown, her long woolen coat swaying as the car rocked, sped up, slowed down.
The First Lines: “You know, I think I’m being stalked?” That’s what an unni at the Center confided to me two months ago, right in the middle of preparations for our anniversary event. Apparently, some man had called up the Center saying he was such-and-such and had come from the same region as my work unni and they were extremely close friends and he was running for the National Assembly and he would like to know the unni’s phone number. Of course, our receptionist had immediately picked up on the fact that calling oneself “extremely close friends” with someone was extremely suspicious in itself, but when the mention of his political ambitions was followed by a presentation of his clearly fraudulent campaign promises, she cut him off, saying the unni was not at her desk right now and, furthermore, she was hardly in a position to hand out personal information such as phone numbers to strangers. Still, as a common courtesy, she had asked if he had any messages.
5.
The Book: I read Elie Wiesel’s Night, the classic, harrowing Holocaust memoir, in middle school without knowing it’s the first in a loose trilogy about Wiesel’s experiences during and after WWII. The second installment is labelled a work of fiction. Dawn follows eighteen-year-old Holocaust survivor Elisha as he joins an Israeli paramilitary group resolved to force the British out of Palestine, and as he grapples with the morality of committing acts of violence and hate against the British—and, presumably, against Palestinians—the way acts of violence and hate were recently committed against him by the Nazis.
**Like most of the books on this list, Dawn isn’t a novel I’ve read, and I’m unable attest in detail to its content or themes; as a result, its inclusion in this list shouldn’t be taken as a recommendation. I do, however, want to include a link here to a recent novel by a Palestinian author that I have read and would recommend wholeheartedly. Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, tells two overlaid stories: that of a Palestinian teenager who is raped and murdered by Israeli soldiers in 1949, and of the woman who, in contemporary Palestine, tries to uncover this girl’s story. I’m also eager to read Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance, newly long-listed for the International Booker Prize 2025.
The Reader: A French man in a Cubs baseball hat read a vintage paperback of Dawn in Ronda, Spain.
The First Lines: Somewhere a child began to cry. In the house across the way an old woman closed the shutters. It was hot with all the heat of an autumn evening in Palestine.
Standing near the window I looked out at the transparent twilight whose descent made the city seem silent, motionless, unreal, and very far away. Tomorrow, I thought for the hundredth time, I shall kill a man, and I wondered if the crying child and the woman across the way knew.
6.
The Book: “The deepest waters hold the darkest secrets” in Still Waters by Tami Hoag, a pulpy crime fiction thriller about the “current of evil” that runs through fictional Still Creek, Minnesota, a rural lake town nestled in an Amish pocket of the Midwest.
The Reader: A little old lady dressed in sweet baby pink sat peacefully in the sun on a bench near the beach on the Greek island Skopelos.
The First Lines: “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” The words had no sooner slipped from Elizabeth Stuart’s lips than the slim stiletto heel of her Italian sandal glanced off an especially large chunk of rock. She stumbled, swore with the fluency of one raised on a cattle ranch in West Texas, and gamely pressed on, limping.
7.
The Book: A book for parents and educators, The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens by Peter Levine covers approaches to civic learning in schools and practical projects to foster communities’ engagement with their government.
The Reader: At Charles du Gaulle, a man with spiky silver hair and a gray goatee—giving high school history teacher and baseball coach—wore a Milwaukee Brewers t-shirt and flashed a phone case sticker that said “Facts are democracy’s seatbelt.”
The First Lines: “Civic education” sometimes sounds like a rather specialized or optional matter—especially at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when we are desperately trying to make all our students competitive in a global economy that values mathematics, science, and literacy. Under these conditions, it is necessary to explain why civic education is not a luxury that can be considered only after we are satisfied with all our children’s basic academic skills.
8.
The Book: The 2019 finale to Holly Black’s NYT-bestselling Folk of the Air trilogy, The Queen of Nothing, is a work of young adult fantasy about an exiled Faerie queen.
The Reader: A teenaged older sister hunched her shoulders and opened Black’s fantasy novel in between rounds of a Northwoods-themed mini golf course with her parents and younger siblings on the Fourth of July.
The First Lines: The Royal Astrologer, Baphen, squinted at the star chart and tried not to flinch when it seemed sure the youngest prince Elfhame was about to be dropped on his royal head. A week after Prince Cardan’s birth and he was finally being presented to the High King.
9.
The Book: Author Jess Lourey spoke about her locally published mystery/romance series2 and YA fantasy books at my high school’s career day when I was in ninth grade, and I’ve had such a fun time watching her career evolve and expand as she’s gained more recognition, especially in the thriller genre! The Quarry Girls is set in the 70s and inspired by true events.
The Reader: A woman in my row in the waiting room started reading a serial killer thriller on our first day of jury duty.
The First Lines: That summer, the summer of ‘77, everything had edges. Our laughter, the sideways glances we gave and got. Even the air was blade-sharp. I figured it was because we were growing up. The law might not recognize it, but fifteen’s a girl and sixteen’s a woman, and you get no map from one land to the next. They air-drop you in, booting a bag of Kissing Potion lip gloss and off-the-shoulder blouses after you. As you’re plummeting, trying to release your parachute and grab for that bag at the same time, they holler out you’re pretty, like they’re giving you some sort of gift, some vital key, but really, it’s meant to distract you from yanking your cord. Girls who land broken are easy prey.
10.
The Book: Confess by Colleen Hoover won the Goodreads 2015 Readers’ Choice Award for romance. A top review explains: "OMG"... THIS BOOK! THE NOTEBOOK, UGLY LOVE, TFIOS [The Fault in Our Stars], AND HOPELESS HAD A SECRET LOVE CHILD! AND THAT LOVE CHILD IS CONFESS.
The Reader: Jury duty day two; the woman seated in front of me in the waiting room pulled Colleen Hoover out of her purse after we locked away our phones.
The First Lines: I pass through the hospital doors knowing it’ll be the last time.
On the elevator, I press the number three, watching it illuminate for the last time.
The doors open to the third floor and I smile at the nurse on duty, watching her expression as she pities me for the last time.
I pass the supply room and the chapel and the employee break room, all for the last time.
I continue down the hallway and keep my gaze forward and my heart brave as I tap lightly on his door, waiting to hear Adam invite me in for the very last time.
11.
The Book: Samantha Irby is a humor writer, blogger, and screenwriter on shows like Hulu’s Shrill and HBO's And Just Like That. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life is just one of her four bestselling essay collections.
The Reader: The hoodie-wearing host of a small-town Minnesota brewery’s trivia night set this paperback next to her laptop and microphone set-up on the plastic folding table.
The First Lines: I am squeezed into my push-up bra and sparkly, ill-fitting dress. I’ve got the requisite sixteen coats of waterproof mascara, black eyeliner, and salmon-colored streaks of hastily applied self-tanner drying down the side of my neck. I’m sucking in my stomach, I’ve taken thirty-seven Imodium in case my irritable bowels have an adverse reaction to the bag of tacos I hid in my purse and ate in the bathroom while no one was looking, and I have been listening to Katy Perry really, really loudly in the limo on the way over here. I’m about to crush a beer can on my forehead. LET’S DO THIS, BRO.
12.
The Book: After Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, Australian author Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall is another bestselling domestic/psychological thriller (with another tv series adaptation!).
The Reader: In a late-summer downpour, the woman in front of me in line for Broadway rush tickets contentedly read on her dripping kindle.
The First Lines: The bike lay on the side of the road beneath a gray oak, the handlebars at an odd, jutted angle, as if it had been thrown with angry force.
It was early on a Saturday morning, the fifth day of a heat wave. More than forty bushfires continued to blaze doggedly across the state.
13.
The Book: I was so intrigued by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a time travel-utopia novel that was published—and takes place—in 1888, until its Bostonian main character suddenly wakes up in the year 2000.
The Reader: On the 1 train uptown, the man across from me wore a pinstripe button-up that nearly blended in with the cover of his paperback: an impressive optical illusion that made me wonder if the coordination was intentional.
The First Lines: I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. “What!” you say, “eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course.” I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It was about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in the present year of grace, 2000.
14.
The Book: Halle Butler’s third novel, Banal Nightmare, is “[s]o searingly precise in [its] ability to capture a certain moment or experience that you have to stop every few pages to send another perfect quote to your group chat,” according to The New York Times.
The Reader: I spotted a woman reading a hardcover copy the week it came out. She was walking up a sunny Upper West Side sidewalk arm-in-arm with her boyfriend/partner, who was busy guiding her between pedestrians and out of harm’s way as she flipped pages.
The First Lines: Margaret Anne “Moddie” Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist. She was trying not to think about it, trying to have a decent time in her new life, but invariably some bleak thought would draw her back and then the memories would start, vivid, cinematic, relentless, like a brainwashing clip reel for a cult with an unclear mission statement.
15.
The Book: What more is there to say about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood—an all-time classic and trailblazer in the nonfiction and true crime spaces (that I admittedly still need to read! I will!)
The Reader: A man with a silver ponytail took it upon himself to read this aloud on a packed subway in mid-summer. The a/c in our car was broken; maybe he thought he was boosting our spirits, lightening the mood.
The First Lines: The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the country-side, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointy toes.
As with my previous “People Reading in Public” newsletter, one of my favorite parts of putting this together was reading through the first lines of each book—some being titles I wouldn’t have ever thought to pick up, read, learn more about, etc. It continues to surprise me how much of a book’s energy and tone comes through a single passage. I couldn’t help but think of a note Naomi Kanakia posted about (literary) novels’ publicity pitches and prose/substance from January:
And one more quick note—this is my first email out after having reached 200 readers/subscribers3, so thank you for reading and sticking around! I’m excited about the upcoming newsletters I’m planning and drafting for the coming weeks/months, including a return to my three-reviews-on-a-theme format and more thoughts on both translation and “completionism.”
If you’re looking for more in the meantime…
I’ve always found LitHub’s Annotated Nightstand to be the perfect nosy peak into writers’ reading habits. I really enjoyed Aria Aber’s most recently (and her debut novel Good Girl is equally worth checking out!).
Similarly, I have been loving Petya at a reading life’s “The Reading Life of…” series. She asks all the best questions in interviews with authors like Lauren Elkin and everyone’s favorite bookish Substack writers: Ochuko Akpovbovbo, Matthew Long, & many more, including herself!
Would recommend! The novel is a quick / difficult / worthwhile read—and I’m eager to stream the Kate Winslet & Ralph Fiennes adaptation sometime
Now newly revised and reissued ! They are so fun!
And now 250! which shows this newsletter’s been sitting in my drafts for a moment…
This was so enjoyable to read and made me so jealous of you for living in a city with active public life where you get to encounter so many beautiful strangers.
why is #8 little me 😭i used to bring books to restaurants and found things like the circus boring and my family harassed me for it
on my honeymoon at a fancy resort in mexico i saw a guy reading Bret Easton Ellis' Glamorama which is a really effed up book and i wanted to say something to him so badly about it but i chickened out. love this series