Reading while Riding Part #1: Strange Pilgrims

For many, public transportation can be a pain. One can end up smushed between strangers on a crowded train, or late to work due to a bus running far behind schedule. However, my commute - a forty minute subway ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan - has somewhat surprisingly to me, become one of my favorite times of day. I spend my time on the train reading and have found that my daily commute has enabled me to move through my 2018 reading list at a rapid pace! One of the benefits of reading in the morning is that it helps jump-start my brain, and I often show up to work feeling more awake, energized, and engaged.

I've found that the literature I select is also important. Not every author is meant to be read on a noisy train - for example, don't try to read Finnegan's Wake on a busy subway car, you'll get nowhere - and I've found that short stories are often the perfect reading selection. I just finished, "Strange Pilgrims," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He is one of my favorite authors, the master of "magical realism," the literary effect in which extraordinary events are written as if it is the most ordinary thing in the world. Not only are Garcia Marquez's short stories the perfect length for a train ride, they enliven the imagination in the groggy early morning hours as no other author can.

Garcia Marquez's texts are sensuous, dramatic, horrifying, and stunning. "Strange Pilgrims" is a collection of short stories written over the course of the author's life. The slow churning of the subway along its tracks is the perfect accompaniment to the brilliant way that Garcia Marquez weaves metaphors through his narratives - the lifeblood of each story. One reads of a distraught father who travels to Rome with the incorruptible body of his deceased daughter. In another, a woman in need of a lift joins a caravan of drowsy passengers and finds herself pleading for her sanity. In yet another story, a group of young boys find their way through the dispersal of light like water, all from broken light-bulbs.

Reading his work while sitting amongst strangers -pilgrims as Garcia Marquez would say- on a subway car, one feels at home with the author's text. For in the transitory time of the morning, the fantastic comings and goings of Garcia Marquez's characters feel normal - and their faces and feelings are as oddly familiar, foreign, and enticing as the passengers on your daily commute.

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