Most of us will take the opportunity on a bus, trolley or train to see what our neighbors are reading…but e-books make the snooping that much harder.
The New York Times profiles the illicit pleasures of riding the subways and looking over your shoulder to see what your neighbors are reading:
“On the subway, sometimes the person with the book is sitting close enough, and the typeface is large enough, that you can peer onto the very page. At home, reading over someone’s shoulder merely constitutes annoying behavior; doing it to a stranger on the subway feels close to illegal, or at least illicit. To read a page, a paragraph, a line from someone else’s book is to bypass the common curiosity about what might be on a stranger’s mind; it’s to know with great certainty; it’s to appropriate the language floating around in his or her thoughts. Regardless of how banal the book, those stolen words practically shimmer with intrigue.”
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