No reader this week

Sometimes I ask people if I can photograph them reading and they say no. On Thursday night it happened at a restaurant in West Portal, where a woman eating soup and wearing sunglasses was reading a library book in the rays of the setting sun.

Sometimes I see a book, but there is no one reading it. This morning it was a paperback Sci Fi novel face down, with its pages spread in lieu of a bookmark, on the blanket of a homeless person sleeping next to Trader Joe's, but I didn't have time to linger, and hope they started reading again when they woke up.

Sometimes I wait until Friday or Saturday to start looking for readers to photograph and, in my normal day-to-day life, there is no one with a book. This afternoon I saw a man next to the Science parklet on Valencia Street bent over his cell phone, but I didn't know if it was a book, or something else that he was engaged with.

When I started this blog almost 10 years ago people didn't read books on cell phones. They had cell phones, but they weren't filled with enough distractions, or books, to make a physical book an unnecessary thing to carry.

What I'm trying to say is that it has gotten harder to wait until the last minute to come up with a blog post.

Sometime between 1888 and 1889, Reading author unknown

While I was in New York at the end of May, I visited the Met and saw this portrait of a reader, painted by the gentleman in the straw hat. The reader, according to the plaque on the wall, is Marie Ginoux, the proprietress of the Café du Gare in Arles.

The plaque doesn't tell the title of her book, but from the expression on her face, my guess is that it caused her to think about something in her own life. What I like best about reading is that it's a conversation between the reader and writer (I'm not sure who said that first). It looks like, in the moment van Gogh chose to capture, Marie Ginoux is having her say.

July 9, 2016, Saturday afternoon -- Reading James Patterson and Mark Sullivan

In downtown, Markleeville, California

She is reading The Games (Private), a novel by James Patterson and Mark Sullivan, while watching the Death Ride -- a 100+ mile bicycle ride up to 5 mountain passes. Her husband is participating in the race, and she's enjoying a day in the sun with her book. She's already read a few books on her vacation so far, and exchanges them in her condo book exchange.

James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell are her favorite authors. She's a chef and does not read about food on vacation.

July 3, 2016, Sunday afternoon -- Reading John Leppelman

In the Mission District

He is reading Blood on the Risers: An Airborne Soldier's Thirty-five Months in Vietnam, by John Leppelman. He said that it's a good book and everything that he's read so far is true, and he knows this because he was a medic in Vietnam. Usually, he says, 1/3 of a book is true, 1/3 of a book is false, and 1/3 is not important. A professor at Marquette University told him this and he's found it to be accurate.

Television, he said, is less true. He prefers radio to TV. He grew up in the Virgin Islands listening to The BBC and CBC (British Broadcasting and Canadian Broadcasting) and will never watch TV because of the propaganda.

He enjoys reading about science, philosophy, mysticism, the occult, and anything but European literature.