A-Train Reading Material

What the 10 people standing or seated nearest me on the uptown A train were reading around 9 p.m. today:

1. woman with glasses perched atop head: paperback of Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson.
2. girl with Emily Dickinson hair and a scarf striped like a roll of mixed berry LifeSavers: grimly designed hardcover of 31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today by Barry Werth.
3. grandmotherly type: article in current issue of New York magazine: “What Is That For? A Visual Guide to Some of Chinatown’s More-Intriguing Ingredients.”
4. guy with a Crate & Barrel bag containing a Cuisinart programmable coffeemaker: a chapbook entitled Saved.
5. shifty eyed guy in paint-spattered cargo pants: laser-printed copes of emails.
6. fidgety woman: fidgeting so much I couldn’t even read the title of her book. Something like Trivial Secret or Rival Secret, with a florescent green cover.
7. woman with curly hair: a stapled-together photocopy of an Alice Munro short story, the words on the inner edge of the copied pages falling into the shadow cast by the book’s binding.
8. Japanese girl: a yellowing paperback, printed in Japanese, with a woodcut illustration of a bunch of grapes on the front (back?) cover.
9. nerdy guy: what appeared to be a magazine article by Stephen King called “The Secret Garden” (which is weird, because I thought that was a novella he published back in 1990).
10. guy in expensive gray pants carrying New York Sports Club tote: alternately reading a tiny spiral-bound notebook and writing in it.