On the subway
In a (futile, I'm afraid) attempt not to buy more books before we put up more bookshelves, I've been going back through some old favorites. Now I'm finishing up a project I've meant to get to for a while: reading through all ten of the Martin Beck mysteries, one right after the other.
For those of you who don't know the series: It was written in the mid 1960s-1970s by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (yes, I'm missing diacriticals; live with it). They're a set of police procedurals, and the reflect the authors' increasing pessimism about Sweden's political mood and central bureaucracies. The authors devised and write these books as a series, and, much as I like the books, I think the series as a whole is really outstanding.
So anyhow, yesterday I was standing on the number 3 train on my way to the office, reading _The Terrorists_, when a man got out of his seat to approach me and say that he'd noticed what I was reading, and wasn't it a great series, and this was his favorite book. So I told him what I was doing, and said that, at the moment, I thought I preferred _The Locked Room_ (book number 8).
The last time someone approached me on the subway to comment on my reading was, I think, for something by Terry Pratchett. But my all-time favorite encounter was wordless. Some years ago I was sitting on an uptown train reading one of the Harry Potter books. Next to me was a boy of (I'd guess) nine or ten, reading a different Harry Potter book. We exchanged grins and went on reading.
For those of you who don't know the series: It was written in the mid 1960s-1970s by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (yes, I'm missing diacriticals; live with it). They're a set of police procedurals, and the reflect the authors' increasing pessimism about Sweden's political mood and central bureaucracies. The authors devised and write these books as a series, and, much as I like the books, I think the series as a whole is really outstanding.
So anyhow, yesterday I was standing on the number 3 train on my way to the office, reading _The Terrorists_, when a man got out of his seat to approach me and say that he'd noticed what I was reading, and wasn't it a great series, and this was his favorite book. So I told him what I was doing, and said that, at the moment, I thought I preferred _The Locked Room_ (book number 8).
The last time someone approached me on the subway to comment on my reading was, I think, for something by Terry Pratchett. But my all-time favorite encounter was wordless. Some years ago I was sitting on an uptown train reading one of the Harry Potter books. Next to me was a boy of (I'd guess) nine or ten, reading a different Harry Potter book. We exchanged grins and went on reading.