PSA

This scenario occurs often. I'm sitting somewhere reading a book. There's another human nearby. We're on an airplane or at the breakfast table or in an employee lounge. The other human is not reading; he or she is not a human who has embraced this most luxurious pastime, this comfortable and instantaneous envelopment in a different time, place, and perspective. This human has finished fiddling with his smartphone, flicked the lint from her sweater, shifted from one position to another too many times. I still read. This human envies my quiet engagement.

"So...whatcha reading?"

I used to humor this question more good-naturedly because I think of myself as a "nice girl", but after offering too many (I think) succinct blurbs as the questioner's eyes glaze over ("It's your typical empire-building fantasy but with this, like, steampunk Asian slant." "It's a period piece with lesbian lovers and murder, but so subtly done!" "Well, imagine Watership Down, with deer instead of rabbits, and a healthy dose of mysticism."), I've finally settled on a response that feels cold and bitchy but successfully quells this untoward attempt at small talk: "Oh, just some book."

I only direct this shutdown at people who don't care. If you don't care what I'm reading, DON'T ASK. Sometimes I make snap judgments that aren't fair, but if you look and talk like some bro who has only read Kerouac/Hunter S. Thompson/Edward Abbey and wants to draw every literary conversation back to the fact that The Monkey Wrench Gang changed his life and convinced him to move from New Jersey to the west and drive his midsize pick-up the two blocks to work every day and drink fair trade coffee out of disposable cups while posting videos on social media about the scourge of hydroelectric power...

Well, I don't want to tell you what book I'm reading.

My mom will never receive the response, "Just some book". Ever since I started reading more than just boatloads of fantasy, she and I have enjoyed a really great repartee of book comparison, suggestion, and denigration. I have friends like that too. And if you're a person on a plane or in a restaurant who, instead of using "Whatcha reading" as a way to fill the emptiness of your own experience, sincerely wants to know what I'm reading, maybe to compare notes or flash the title in your own hands as a satisfying corollary, or to reach out to another human in this world that thinks the written word is the most wonderful thing ever invented, feel free to ask "Whatcha reading?"...if I don't beat you to it.

This post needs a meme