Do Not Disturb

I've mentioned before that I work in television. There are a lot of good people in the television business, but they are not - absolutely not - the big readers of the world. One of my coworkers only read two books last year: The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons. I am positive, after five years of working together, that another reads no books at all - no cookbooks, diet books, nothing. I am in frightened awe of her bizarre, book-free universe.

Readers and non-readers are different breeds. In some ways, they just don't talk the same language. For instance, non-readers apparently can't resist marching up to a colleague who is reading on her lunch hour and saying: "Whatcha reading?"

They're just trying to be nice, of course, but this is a serious breach of reading etiquette. Readers never do this to each other. We get intensely annoyed at it, not least because we can't fathom why someone would insist on asking a question they have no hope of understanding the answer to (after hearing the title, which of course they haven't heard of, the next response is always a polite "Oh. Is it good?")

But of course, the main reason we get so irritated at the interruption is because it's just that - an interruption. We wish we had a sign that said If I wanted to talk, I'd be talking right now. Non-readers really don't see reading as, well, doing anything. They imagine it must be like watching TV. It isn't.

When fellow readers see someone reading, we, too, absolutely must know what that person is reading. But we wouldn't dream of interrupting. Instead, we - and you know you do it - circle the person quietly, angling our heads, trying to get a surreptitious look at the book's cover. I've been known to make multiple passes, waiting for the reader to turn the page and angle the book. I've been known to pretend to drop something to get a glimpse. Sometimes it's disappointing (Clive Cussler? WTF?) and sometimes it's intriguing (Wodehouse; Catch-22; Moby-Dick).

I've never seen anyone read a romance novel at work, though I see it all the time on the commuter train. Maybe most women, like me, are bold enough to read a romance in front of a bunch of strangers who aren't going to interrupt, but too shy (or just too tired) to face the non-readers' inevitable "Whatcha reading?" with "An erotica called She Goes and Gets It" or "The Greek Tycoon's Virgin Bride". Your HP is for the train; your Wodehouse is for lunch hour.

I always carry three books in my bag. I can modify this if one of them is trade and weighs more, but for mass market it's always three. In case I finish the one I'm currently reading, I have the next one in line; in case I start the next one and don't like it, I have a third for backup. Oh dear, you think, she has OCD, I think she needs to see a doctor.

But on Friday, on my commute home, the train's engine died in the middle of nowhere and we sat for three hours. Oh yes, children - three hours. I didn't get home until after eight o'clock. What did I do with my time? Well, I finished the book I was currently reading (Beau Crusoe - fantastic book), started the next one (a mystery I got from the library), gave it 70 pages and was bored, so I moved on to number three (Colleen Gleason's The Rest Falls Away.) The non-reader across from me was stuck with three hours of Soduku - her brains must have been leaking out her ears - and everyone else was bored stiff.

And I didn't get interrupted, either.