Spotted on the Red and Purple lines of the El today and organized by Amazon ranking:
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt (4)
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (7)
Wicked by Gregory Maguire (140)
The Source by James Michener (9,873)
Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt (15,939)
Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia (21,324)
Fabulous Small Jews by Joseph Epstein (37,316)
Jungle of Cities and Other Plays by Bertolt Brecht (505,028)
You’ve got the bestsellers Blink, Freakonomics and, to a lesser extent, Wicked on one end, and you’ve got Brecht on the other… probably a grad student, but I like to see those literary, engaging books (the Arendt, Garcia, Epstein) that occupy the broad middle reaches along the span between big media-backed bestsellers and academic obscurity (with no disrespect meant toward Brecht, he just happened to be there). As for the Michener, well, you never know what you’re going to see people reading on the El.
