Ever found yourself reading over someone’s shoulder on the tube or the train? Our eyes are drawn to text and there’s nothing wrong with it… as long as you benefit from it. Next time you’re on the receiving end of someone’s carefully chosen reading material feel free to write a review for us at Underground Book Review and we’ll be sure to post it up asap…
Title: The Da Vinci Code
Author: Dan Brown
Reader: Looked a bit like Paulie from the Sopranos, but orange, balding and unshaven.
Journey: Traveling to Brixton on the Victoria Line.
Date: 03/07/09
Review by:Russ Booth
I was slithering through London’s vile bowels in my unusually smelly train carriage, waiting to be appropriately excreted in Brixton, when confusion slapped me in the face with its all too familiar clammy palm. I had a profound moment of Deja vu.
Sitting there munching sunflower seeds happily from a paper bag, was a heavy set, middle-aged, perma-tanned man reading The Da Vinci Code! Exuding childlike serenity, presumably caught up in Dan Brown’s neck-break prose, he casually let the sunflower husks fall about his person with not a care in the world.
This Underground spectacle angered me for two reasons. Firstly, just who did he think was going to come and clean up after him? Take some responsibility man! Would you do that in your own home?
The second reason is something less direct and more personal, something that the book represents to me. The deja vu I refer to was not the reader himself; thanks be, but the very act of the book’s appearance on the Underground. I remember when it came out in 2004 the damn thing was everywhere! When it was re-released in paperback giant posters adorned the sides of stations, billboards and bus shelters. Then when the dire film version followed the posters came back with a vengeance and there was no escape from Tom Hanks high forehead and odd hairstyle.
Title: Ghostwritten
Author: David Mitchell
Reader: Retro Modern Secretary With A Jane Austen Fetish
Journey: Finsbury Park to Oxford Circus
Date: 22/06/09, morning rush hour
Review by: Chris Blaine
I don’t travel on the same underground as most people. A born anti-9to5-er, I travel when the tube is pleasant and trains are laid on almost exclusively for my own circumnavigation. So to get a job editing in Soho for a week for a series of online shows about the Ashes was a bit of a shock reminder. The good – the cricket. The bad – the lack of material to cut together. The ugly – the underground at rush hour.
Although to be honest, that’s not really fair. For the underground at rush hour isn’t ugly, rather, strangely beautiful.
It is the only place you’ll see so many people so intimately entwined outside of an orgy, and the only reason they’re all bumping on grinding on the train is because of the train, not any sexual desire. If you travel on the tube during off-peak hours, there’s always the remembrance of that advert that gets copied every now and again for a new generation whereby two youngsters eye each other up on the escalators. But at rush hour, crammed in close to some stranger’s armpit as you are methodically pushed from behind again and again, there is nothing sexual. That particular button has been turned off, and you are in the only place where you combine interpersonal intimacy and confined and considered emotion. There is nowhere else other than public transport where you can see the transformation of normally rambunctious human beings into pliant and quiet statues. Maybe that’s what dead statues was all about. Teaching us how to ride on the tube.
Title: The Gift Of Years – Regret
Author: Unknown
Reader: Elderly lady with vivid purple lipstick and a woolly coat
Journey: London Bridge to West Hampstead
Date: 05/03/09
Review by: Katie McCullough
It’s been a while since I’ve done an Underground Book Review but what better way to come back into the fold than with a self-help book masked as a novel. I don’t often make the assumption of people’s book choices by their casual appearance but something jarred with the image I was presented with. The lady in question was what one could only politely put as being ‘comfortably eccentric’. She was wearing a bold and jazzy woolly coat on a blisteringly hot day, had hair to rival Vivienne Westwood and seemed to constantly pout as if her life depended on it. What struck me as odd was on the surface she seemed to not need this book that so clearly coached you through regret; she looked as if regret was far from her and she lived life to the full. Lived it to the maximum in her warm woolly coat and lashings of purple lipstick. But evidently not. I suppose she could have shipped her first and only child off to be fostered and had never really recovered. I was ignoring the fact that she could be harbouring sinister thoughts towards an ex Italian lover from days gone by. A mother she’d never quite connected with… A photographer whose name she didn’t catch after liaising behind closed doors… The next door neighbour she didn’t quite own up to stealing his pornography DVDs… It goes to show that we all feel regret but not all of us will buy a book to put on display to all other humans that highlights the fact.
What snatches I did manage to read were direct and over-wrought with solemn ‘life’ questions. It was therapy written down on the page in such a way that you couldn’t read it without forming a triangle with your hands and nodding every so often. “Ask yourself why you feel regret, how does it make you feel?” Yup. One of those books. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure these books bring great relief to many who choose to spend many pennies on them… But c’mon, these are questions we all ask each other everyday down the pub, around the dinner table and most importantly in our own heads. Some people digest things better when they’re written down by an author and there’s been an exchange of money, that I can accept.
“We need to imagine that we’re on the edge of a cliff and happiness is one way and loneliness is the other. Will yourself to walk the right direction and you’ll be at one with inner peace. Regret is an ugly festering mass within oneself and to dissect it we need to have our own space.”
Want me to carry on? Nope, didn’t think so. The last quote maybe slightly embellished but it all means the same thing. Then again there might have been an amazing plot twist coming up and if that’s the case I’ll go out and order one for all of you… A must read!
No, thought not.
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