Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Reader subculture

"Is that a book on computers?" this guy standing behind me in the queue (a mile-long queue for the subway train) poked his head out front and asked. I was fascinated to learn of his ignorance, as he had no clue from the author's name on the cover, Camus, in size matching that of the book's title.
"No, its fiction," I replied, curtly.
"Oh, science fiction"
"No, just fiction"
I was already imagining some techie seeing others in his skin, until he clarified...
"Rebel was a supercomputer that played chess. I thought it was about that." [wiki-wisdom: the Rebel had probably stayed in his head since it beat vishwanathan anand (the Indian chess genius) in 1998]
Now it was me who was short on clue. I just put pretended being a complete media illiterate instead of a half-geek.
"I only know about that.. IBM one"
"Oh, yeah, Deep Blue, that is one, too"
I spotted a book in his hands as well, which turned out to be some Russian spy thriller. I'm sure it was a horrible one.

When we finally got in, this guy, much like me, hadn't boarded the first of the trains for it being too crowded, and hopped on to the next one, and again much like me, whipped out his book as soon. There was a third guy in a short radius busy in his own book in a spacious corner. Its nice identifying a sub-culture of readers.

What the third guy was reading had my eyes wide for a moment: "Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men, and Ancestral Wives". [googling tells its a book on the lesbian culture prevalent under the hood throughout Africa]. You don't find many into this kinda stuff.

PS: im almost about to be done with the introduction to The Rebel after a week of reading

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