Underground Reading

I was in New York City last week, and as I always do, I rode the Subway.That’s some­thing I have enjoyed doing since I was a boy grow­ing up. (My graph­ic nov­el, City of Light City of Dark, has a lot about sub­ways.) This time as I looked over the pas­sen­gers, sit­ting and stand­ing, I became aware of an enor­mous dif­fer­ence. Back then—and it was not so very long ago—the sub­ways were full of readers.

There were the news­pa­per read­ers, includ­ing those who had mas­tered the art of fold­ing the New York Times. There were read­ers of the Dai­ly News, the Her­ald Tri­bune, the Dai­ly Mir­ror, and the New York Post. (I once observed a read­er read­ing a ser­i­al sto­ry I had writ­ten (The Secret School) which was being seri­al­ized in the Post. Many of the news­pa­pers were in non-Eng­lish lan­guages, Chi­nese, Span­ish, Russ­ian, among others.

Then there were the Bible read­ers, and here the lan­guages were just as varied.

Of course there were many book read­ers, both hard­back and paper­back. I can recall step­ping into a sub­way and real­iz­ing that at least fif­teen peo­ple were simul­ta­ne­ous­ly read­ing Mario Puzo’s The God­fa­ther, in paperback.

As a high school stu­dent, trav­el­ing back and forth to school via the sub­way, I could and did read with­out look­ing up to see what sta­tion I had reached. I could tru­ly feel which sta­tion I had come to, and just close my book and walk off at my home stop.

While on the sub­way dur­ing this last vis­it, how­ev­er, what I observed was that almost no one was read­ing. I saw per­haps one per­son read­ing an e‑book. A few were look­ing at cell-phones, but when I snooped, I real­ized they were play­ing games.

My old town had been a city of sub­ways and read­ers. Now it’s just the sub­ways. Read­ing has tru­ly gone underground.