When I see somebody reading, cannot stop spying what kind of texts it is about. Sometimes I am able to see the title, the author, or to identify the language. Or the kind of newspaper article are interested in.
Sometimes I am moving strategically close in order to see better. An interested professional look if it is something interesting, I've heard and read about. A secretely smile. Comme entre les conaisseurs. A surprised look when I discover it is a complicate mathematical book.
Whatever the public transportation, I am always looking for the very short company of people with books. They are always offering me a kind of imaginary secure comfort. Hoping their vicinity will confer a better mental space than, for example, those with bottles of beer, wine, champaign or vodka.
Surprised and ashamed sometimes, when early in the morning after a party I see people reading something. I do not carry a book with me all the time. Mostly when I am in a foreign country, I prefer to listen to the people speaking in their mother tongue, ready to grasp some new words or testing my capacity of understanding their language. Trying to understand their culture following the way they dress, find their place ina crowdy tube, or sit.
But, very often I have something to read with me. For a long time, reading in-between stations or, even more, in the airplanes, was the perfect time to concentrate. When the phone was not ringing, of course.
And for a while, my reading habits were subject of casual rude observations from the part of the other "travellers", as long as, in some places, the pleasure of reading is seen a disgraceful anti-social self-assumed status.
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