[CLClist] For Book Lovers

[Christine Bradley]

Hi All:

I share some cheer on a rainy Monday morning from this charming column below
by Susan Dominus from the Metro section of today's NY Times. As the numbers
of those of us who read newspapers, or actually any text at all, continue to
plummet, or so we are told (perhaps due to our profession, we are
particularly sensitive!) a column such as this is a joy.

 

It is supposedly about the Kindle, Amazon's eBook reader, which is
well-reviewed, but which, in crankier moments can be viewed as yet another
piece of new technology about which we librarians should know all the pros
and cons, and which we should purchase so we can be hip and our patrons can
have a free look-see, and which is yet another entrant in the crowded race
to replace the book, a medium which is in large part responsible for so many
of us being where we are, doing what we're doing, on this particular Monday
morning.

 

Even though we in CT travel by car almost exclusively, I think we can all
remember a time on a train or a subway when, tired of reading the repetitive
ads for obscure educational opportunities, we turn to observe our fellow
passengers. Knowing enough not to make eye contact, we can instead enjoy
reading the book covers with which they shield their faces as well as their
privacy.

 

I was doing just such a thing last week when I had to make an unfortunate
train trip to New Jersey, (a place also better accessed by car!) And, like
Ms. Dominus, I started to wonder why a certain title was being read by a
certain teenager, "judging people's covers by their books." I don't think
the Kindle or its competitors will end this sport anytime soon, but it is
nice to read that other people also read those covers and are "trying to get
a read on people who are reading." 

All best,

Chris

 

Christine Bradley, Executive Director

Connecticut Library Consortium

234 Court Street

Middletown, Connecticut 06457

Phone: 860-344-8777 ext. 103

Fax: 860-344-9199

cbradley at ctlibrarians.org

www.ctlibrarians.org

 

Got Questions? Try InfoAnytime!

www.infoanytime.org

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/nyregion/31bigcity.html?_r=1
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/nyregion/31bigcity.html?_r=1&ref=todayspa
per&oref=slogin> &ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin

Snoopers on Subway, Beware Digital Books 

By SUSAN DOMINUS
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/susan_dominus/
index.html?inline=nyt-per> 

Published: March 31, 2008

The man riding the A train uptown on a recent Friday afternoon was a little
hard to place. He was middle-aged and looked faintly distinguished, with
neatly cropped silver hair and a close shave. His clothing, however, was
incongruous, young for the rest of him: a parka layered over a snazzy, black
zip-up sweater. The book in his hand provided a possible clarification:
"Death of a Salesman." There you go - an actor, perhaps, not famous, but the
kind of working player who populates the city, showing up as Guildenstern or
Sentry No. 4.

Trying to get a read on people who are reading is one of those aimless but
satisfying subway pleasures that may eventually go by the wayside, like
scanning the liner notes on the way home from Tower Records. The Kindle, an
Amazon electronic book reader, may make getting your hands on a book faster,
but in the process, it could "make it a lot harder to indulge in the crucial
cultural task of judging books - and the people who read them - by their
covers," wrote the columnist
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/meghan_daum/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-per> Meghan Daum in The Los Angeles Times last fall. 

The Kindle may rob New Yorkers of a subway pastime that's more specific to
this city: judging people's covers by their books. That young guy slouched
in his seat, with the hoodie pulled tight over his head - his posture
suggests sheer indifference. The book in his hand, "Egyptian Cosmology,"
suggests something otherwise (to guess what, exactly, would require a
passing familiarity with Egyptian cosmology). 

The matronly woman with the pursed lips grasps a bodice-ripper in her hands.
A young, burly man in work boots - manual laborer? - is absorbed in Paulo
Coelho's "The Pilgrimage," a book that promises, according to its back
cover, writing that is "beautifully poetic." 

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. 

Maybe the person holding the book, upon noticing your prying eyes, shifts
away; occasionally, the opposite occurs. On a recent Friday morning, a young
woman with frizzy hair and black wire-rimmed glasses who was riding the No.
2 train uptown smiled when she sensed a seat mate's curiosity about her
murder mystery, "Taking the Heat," by Brenda Novak. 

"Do you want to read the back?" she asked. She said she wished more fellow
passengers would make the same offer, and occasionally they do. "That's how
I got hooked on James Patterson," she said. "I didn't want to give it back."

Starting a conversation in the subway with someone you don't know is always
intimidating (mostly because there are all those other strangers watching
the effort). But books - real books, not the virtual kind that show up on
some tiny, hidden screen - lower that barrier to entry, providing a visual
guarantee of common ground.

"Books are conversation pieces," said Ronald Morillo, the young man in work
boots reading Paulo Coelho; he turned out to be a clerk at Bloomingdale's.
"It's like walking around with a dog." Of the few conversations he's had in
the subway with strangers, almost all of them were inspired by a book in his
hand. 

For New Yorkers who crave connection among the multitudes underground, there
are books; for those who crave privacy, books, low-tech but adaptable,
provide that service, too, a fast track in the opposite direction of
everyone else, regardless of geographic destination.

Shannon Grace Jones, a manager at a W Hotel who was riding the A train
downtown, said, "Especially when I first got to New York, I read on the
subway so that people" - specifically, men - "wouldn't talk to me." 

Held high, and in front of one's face, a book is a perfect shield. Try using
a digital screen the size of an
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/iphone/index
.html?inline=nyt-classifier> iPhone for that. 

Of course, the Kindle won't stop people from reading in public, but it might
make that potentially public act seem oddly private. And we risk stripping
reading of the extra work it does, enlightening us about the curiosities of
the people with whom we so often seem to share space and nothing else. 

As for the man reading "Death of a Salesman," he wasn't actually an actor,
but someone who'd casually picked up the book that his daughter was reading
for high school. It turned out he wasn't acting in the play; he was living
it, in a manner of speaking: His job is to place ads, ads in print
publications. He was finding the play "rather poignant," he said, and then
he went back to reading his book, on paper, in peace, at least for a few
more stops.

E-mail: susan.dominus at nytimes.com