I mind my own business with a restraint that puts me at the outer edge of normal (just barely), but suffer from a compulsion to know what other people are reading. Planes used to be good places to indulge, walking back from the lavatory down the narrow isle with a good view of seats on either side. Pickings are slim, these days. I don’t care what’s on a glowing screen. If pages aren’t being turned, I don’t bother.<\/p>\n
What’s left? New York City’s subways. A recent trip suggests a New York Times’ decline. If people are buying it, they’re not packing it. Contrary to years’ past, most of the newspapers I saw weren’t in English. (One of the joys of NY is the range of languages, the daily reminder of living on the earth, not just burrowing through a single life’s construct.) After Lots of fictional shots ring out on the subway. Sadly, I saw nobody carrying John Godey’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three<\/i><\/a>, even though last year’s movie remake must have brought it back. If there’s more perfect subway-reading fare, I don’t know about it.<\/p>\n On the other hand, transcending your surroundings is always an option. A young man in a bowler hat, jeans and vest with a lattice of tattoos running up his right arm got on at Columbus Circle to ride downtown. Out of his satchel he took a hardback copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson<\/i><\/a> and proceeded to lose himself in her pages. I mustered every shred of super-ego not to say, Thanks for the sight of you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I mind my own business with a restraint that puts me at the outer edge of normal (just barely), but suffer from a compulsion to know what other people are reading. Planes used to be good places to indulge, walking back from the lavatory down the narrow isle with a good view of seats on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1707","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo<\/i><\/a> continues ubiquitous. Good book, although I skipped a lot of it, not being able to take the sick\/slasher-on-girl action. I’m not even sure how it turned out, but my fondness for the main character remains. I keep hearing that nonfiction dominates. Not on the subway. For every person hefting a biography, history, self-help or textbook, there are five plowing through a once-upon-a-time. <\/p>\nHenry<\/strike> Kingsley Amis expressed contempt for his son Martin’s prose, a reporter asked Martin if he had a rejoinder. He quoted dad, who late in middle age told him, “I’m never going to read another novel that doesn’t begin with the
\nwords, ‘A shot rang out.’ “<\/p>\n