Subwayland by Randy Kennedy

Author:Randy Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

4

CUSTOMS, COURTING RITUALS, CEREMONIES, AND HIGH CULTURE

Life in the subway: People have been born there. People have died there. Sometimes, people fall in love there.

READING BETWEEN THE RAILS

There are those who spend their days and nights on the subway because it is more pleasant and less dangerous than where they live, others because it is where they live. And there are also those who ride it because it comes with a captive audience, making it a highly effective place to sing songs, sell batteries and save souls.

But New Yorkers also use the subway for another purpose that goes woefully underappreciated: as a reading room. It is certainly nothing new. It has been going on since long before Arthur Miller eased his commute by reading “The Brothers Karamazov”—that “great book of wonder” as he called it—and decided that he was born to be a writer.

But there is some evidence, all of it thoroughly anecdotal, that the subway’s use as rolling urban library has expanded over the last several years, in direct proportion to the health of the economy. The theory goes something like this: The good economy makes people happy, but it also makes them work longer hours. Which means they spend their hard-earned money enjoying themselves later into the evening. Which means they have much less time to read books anywhere else except in the only place where their cell phones don’t work and no one is likely to know them or talk to them.

Many subway riders, like David Gassawy, a 29-year-old art teacher, see their commute as the best uninterrupted reading time remaining in their lives, one not to be squandered on newspapers or magazines.

Spending a long morning watching people read on the subway, one can learn a few general principles about the practice. Mr. Gassawy expounded the first one yesterday: fiction is superior subway reading. “Nonfiction is more work—it’s harder to do it on the subway,” he said. “Maybe it’s something about following a narrative in fiction.” (Mr. Gassawy was on a southbound A train, reading something called “The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts,” by Louis De Bernieres, a novel in which one character builds a Disneyland in the Andes called Incarama.)

Another general guideline is that people tend to have their subway books and then they have the books they are reading elsewhere. Rarely do the two libraries mingle.

Michelle Mills, a 25-year-old design student, well into Book Two of “The Lord of the Rings,” by J. R. R. Tolkien, said, “If I’m really, really into a book then I might keep reading it at home to finish it.” But mostly, she puts away her subway book as she steps out of the train doors and yearns for a longer commute, something other reading riders admitted to yesterday. “If your ride is too short,” Ms. Mills explained, “then you keep losing the story every day.”

There is, finally, a widespread phenomenon that might be classified as subway book bashfulness. It happens when people who usually read Kierkegaard at home

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.