Reading in the subway

There is a paper on the joy of reading in the Subway in the New York Times today. I indeed noticed when riding the Subway a few weeks ago that a lot of people were reading books (or Kindles) there. It is also true in the Parisian RER, but the difference seems to be that people like to share about their books, something you would never hear in the French metro! For instance, I witnessed a trio getting engaged into a lively conversation about Salman Rushdie after one noticed the other reading Midnight’s Children and mentioning how much she liked it compared with the Satanic Verses, to which the reader and a third party acknowledged they had not read it… I had to leave the train in the middle of the conversation, unfortunately, but this was an interesting moment! I hope those comments make their way to the Subway Book Club. Incidentally, my last book started in the métro is Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club and, were it mine, I could easily forget it there, so poorly impressed am I with the story, even though the rendering of the seventies in Birmingham—where I used to go at about this period—is tolerably realistic.