BETWEEN THE LINES

What New Yorkers read.

Making an appealing book debut, Beutter Cohen, a documentarian and creator of the Subway Book Review, gathers excerpts from more than 160 conversations she had while riding every subway line in New York City. The subway, she writes, is “the city’s beating heart that never stops.” When she noticed someone reading, she became an inquiring reporter, asking why they had chosen a particular book, eager to learn about them as a reader, and she also took photos of each person holding their book of choice. Themes of race, sexuality, the environment, food, power, history, art, music, home, love—and living in New York—emerged as widely diverse readers talked about an equally diverse selection of books. “I saw bestselling novels, experimental poetry collections, self-help books brimming with sticky notes, provocative memoirs, and well-loved classics,” Beutter Cohen observes. The books mostly fall into the category of serious literature, no matter what genre. Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of the Strand bookstore, was reading Roxane Gay’s Hunger. Beutter Cohen noticed Gay herself at the 23rd Street Station in Manhattan, reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which, Gay says, is a novel she has read at least seven times. Singer/songwriter Sophie Auster discussed Memories of the Future, by her mother, Siri Hustvedt. A reader who identifies as nonbinary chose Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Some readers Beutter Cohen met are immigrants, and their choice of books reflected feelings of exile and loss. A young woman from Southern India, living alone because her husband was deported, found comfort in Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City, which spoke to her own loneliness. Qween Jean, a self-described “Caribbean goddess,” read Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (“hella Black, hella feminine, and hella powerful”). Some readers were transplants from other parts of the country, as is Beutter Cohen. “A small town girl from Germany,” she lived on the West Coast before moving to New York in 2013. A list of the books mentioned is appended.

Delightful encounters with passionate readers.