Where We Read
There were some great responses to the question from a couple of weeks ago, “Where Do You Read?”
Kitty mentioned a fantastic place I never would have thought of: the wind-free pocket of air directly behind the driver of a motorcycle. That has to be the ideal place to page through a well-worn copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s classic Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, but I’m really curious if there are any other unusual and unlikely genres that make for good reading on the back of a tricked-out chopper. Can you leaf through a cookbook? Would you unnerve fellow motorists by perusing a helpful volume of Motorcycling for Dummies?
Kitty also mentioned two of my favorite spots I’d forgotten: grocery store checkout lines and the pharmacy waiting area. I’d really appreciate a more varied and interesting magazine selection in both places, though. Since the unfortunate demise of the print edition of Weekly World News I’m much more likely to just bring along my own reading material. Happily, copies of Bat Boy Lives! are currently available at deep discounts from your favorite online retailers.
Other transportation-reading venues were raised by both Kitty and Reggie, including one I’d especially love to try out. It must be awesome to read on a train, especially if you could mysteriously peek at fellow passengers over a handsome leatherbound edition of Murder on the Orient Express. On the other hand, I’ve attempted to read on an overnight trip on a Greyhound bus and was sternly admonished by the driver for distracting him with my reading light. I honestly thought “Leave the Driving to Us” meant I’d be free to knock out a few trashy paperbacks along the way at my leisure.
Carly noted the possibility of reading in a car, a practice at which I used to be a world-class expert. On trips with my parents as a kid, long before the age of backseat DVD players, iPods, and handheld Nintendos, I was perfectly happy to work my way through Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing for the twelfth time on the way to see the Grand Canyon or the world’s second largest ball of twine.
I never even considered the possibility of carsickness until much later in life when a friend mentioned her surprise that I could read in a car without getting nauseous. She helpfully explained in exhaustive detail exactly what the sensation felt like to her, and as a consequence I’ve not been able to make it through so much as a paragraph in the passenger seat ever since.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
And I think anywhere you can read, you can knit, Elizabeth Zimmerman used to knit on the back of her husband’s motorcycle. Or I guess you could read knitting books anywhere. Either one works for me.