A great perks of living in Boston for a people-watcher is observing people’s subway reading material. This ranges from comic books to Tom Clancy bestsellers to “Wavelet Theories in Economics” to treatises on multivariable calculus. I’ve seen people reading books in dozens of languages, living and dead. Once I saw a man reading a book entitled “God’s Yeasty People,” which Varia and I have yet to find reference to.

I confess that when someone is sitting next to me with a book I don’t recognize, it is very hard for me not to read over her shoulder. I’ve read many fascinating pages of books I will never know the names of.