A question of etiquette, dear readers. This morning, after my daily lapse of consciousness on the train ride to work, I glanced over at one of my fellow passengers. He was reading a book on his lap so I couldn’t see the cover; I could just make out that the pages were yellowing, and figured it was a find in a used bookstore that I had no chance of recognizing.
He turned the page, and I recognized the picture of the Doomsday clock, a few minutes to midnight, with the picture of something red ‘oozing’ down an otherwise black page. This was the only graphic novel to make it to Time’s 100 Top Novels of the 20th Century: Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a dark epic of humanity’s failings that transcends its format.
When I’m talking to a customer on the phone and I see a book in a member’s pool that I’ve read, my usual reaction is to bellow in approval and encourage swift reading of the title. This kneejerk reaction doesn’t seem appropriate on the train. At the same time, though, it’s tough being a book fan– it’s not like a movie, where millions tend to see the same film at the same time. Where can we go to talk about our books and share our enthusiasm? When we notice one of those easily-missed details in a book, and we’re excited to share it with other readers who might not have seen something so small, who do we talk to?
Reading a book is a solitary experience– when we we someone reading the same book, it can be hard to fight that impulse to share our insights because we have so few opportunities to do so. Hard to say on the morning commute, though, when everyone is struggling to muster the energy for the day ahead and may not be open to literary discussion.
So, the question that began this post: fellow book-lovers, when you recognize a book that a random stranger is reading, what do you do?
