One book for all New York to read? 'Fuhgeddaboudit'

"Usually you don't get a seat," says Aram Sinnreich, a music-industry analyst who takes the subway to Midtown from Brooklyn every day. "So with two hands you're attempting to hold a book, turn pages, hold on to your bag or laptop, and hold on to a pole so you don't go flying across the car."

Yet somehow, Mr. Sinnreich says, he's able to polish off a 300-word book every week or two. "Because of the onslaught of noise and information, New Yorkers are just programmed to block out all extraneous information that doesn't seem immediately relevant to them," he says. This week he's about to finish "The Elegant Universe," a book on quantum physics.

But people can also find solitude in a crowd in quiet places. Blocks from the 24/7 glitz of Times Square, the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library has for decades been a place where New York's literati have sat at huge oak tables and read books in this ornate, football-field-sized room. "Central Park is a great place to read, too," says Sinnreich. "New York is such a double broiler of a city - it can feel very claustrophobic and pressured - and reading in Central Park can be the ultimate vacation-in-an-hour."

If New Yorkers have found reading to be a quiet space within the intensity and high pace of living in this city, in some ways 9/11 has altered this, too. Instead of the "gifts of loneliness and solitude," as the writer E.B. White once put it, some New Yorkers may be looking for a more traditional communal spirit.

Indeed, while some scoffed at the suggestion there be a city-wide reading group - like Chicago's reading of "To Kill a Mockingbird" last year - others noticed that in the aftermath of the attacks, people want to talk more than they had before. It's much easier to chat with a stranger in an elevator now, or in a crowded subway car.

There is also a renewed pride in the city's self-understanding as cultural capital of the world, home of rough-edged intellectuals and readers. But if a post-9/11 desire for community clashes with New York's traditional image of obnoxious individualism, it's not likely to change the city's voracious reading appetite.

"Toggling back and forth between the public and private experience is the nature of reading more than for other aspects of culture," Mr. Elie says. "That's what makes it so interesting: A book you can feel possessive about, and yet have that sense of participation that the reading groups make possible."

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