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TOP OF MIND

Summer reads are specific reads. The book that is your beach read, with a steamy plot you can interrupt with another iced tea or piña colada, isn't the same as your airplane read, a book that is fine on the way out, but on the way back starts to feel too heavy to fit in your suitcase. Your cabin-in-the-woods vacation read has a story that you can read in a week, accompanied with whatever animals are howling out there.

These books, according to novelist Adam Sternbergh, are short-term pleasures by design. There's another kind of reading, though, the book that you can read in a hot, fluorescently lit subway car during rush hour. That's subway read. As he writes, in that situation "I want to be anywhere else, and fast." The subway read has to capture your attention and hold it through your stops. Sternbergh continues,

While I envy the razor-focused commuters who crouch over a dog-eared Dostoyevsky, I’ve learned that my subway-brain, addled by constant announcements and the overheard conversations of my neighbors, can’t give a dense classic the close attention it requires.

So I want thrilling plots, yes — but also thrilling language. I want sentences I’ll stop to read twice. This is why standard throwaway airport thrillers don’t migrate well beneath ground.