Five Pocket-Sized Paperbacks and the Art of Sneaky Reading

[james_davis_nicoll]

Five Pocket-Sized Paperbacks and the Art of Sneaky Reading

Comments

[dagibbs]

DW is complaining about bad markup.

[dagibbs]

Better now.

[oursin]

The Green Ripper seems to me one of those cases in which there has been a mix-up and writer/series character have been allocated the wrong plot by mistake.

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

Those DAW paperbacks -- I'm looking at you, Earl -- were the perfect thing for the 11:00-7:00 shift as night auditor; unless it was a football weekend, I was usually done by 2:00. And as this was the early 80's ...

[(Anonymous)]

When I was a security guard, some sites were perfectly fine with guards reading. When you were sitting in a parking lot booth controlling the gate arm, what else was there to do? A buddy of mine got fired for painting wargaming minis, though. Apparently the client thought it looked unprofessional.

--
Nathan H.

[scott_sanford]

I didn't even have a gate arm. I had a warehouse full of sheep and a phone number to call if they got out. I was expected to walk around the outside at least once an hour and became an over-achiever by doing it every 45 minutes.

I got a lot of reading done.

[jsburbidge]

The ultimate pocket reading reference was the Railway Shakespeare. It would slip into a jacket pocket and it had all of Shakespeare's plays. Of course, you had to out up with two-point type...

More readable, but also very small, were the Temple Classics Dante volumes.

[(Anonymous)]

James reading 'The Mangler': "What is that strange noise intruding upon my lonely vigil? Ah, it is but a cat."

Shortly: Dear kitty, I did not pet you because you are not in fact a cat but
[x] a demon-possessed industrial laundry press

Riderius

[ba_munronoe]

A cat that sounds like a demon-possessed industrial machine on a rampage? I certainly wouldn't want to meet such a beast without an ample supply of tuna.

[james_davis_nicoll]

One of the worst maulings I ever got came from a feral kitten who went beserk, screaming and slashing, when I picked him up.

[ba_munronoe]

The killer is always the cat you least suspect.

[austin_dern]

I worked my way through undergraduate life working in the quality control lab for a nitrocellulose factory. There'd be hourly new samples. But depending on just how busy things were, and how efficient you were about your business, there'd be from ten to as many as fifty minutes free time each hour. More during the evening and overnight shifts, of course. Even more if there was a lightning storm nearby.

The company left us that time, as long as we stayed in the lab (apart from smoke breaks, for people who somehow could not quit smoking while working in a plant covered with a thin film of proto-dynamite). With the proviso that if senior plant people were likely to walk through --- so, normal office hours --- you should try and not be obviously wasting time.

My stations even had this nice little side room that maybe once upon a time had some use, but now were just a great spot to deposit my hard hat, not needed in the quality control laboratory, and my book, and discover that the rigging of the hat was surprisingly good as a way to hold a hardcover open and hold the pages still, somehow.

Anyway the two-month stretch where I bounced between second and last shift was maybe the most efficient books-per-day reading time of my life.

[dormouse1953]

I remember Douglas Adams telling a story about how he once worked as a security guard to an Arab prince. Long hours sitting in an hotel corridor, which he spent reading.

A number of young ladies were going in and out the suite and one of them, seeing him sitting there reading, said, "It's all right for you, you can read on the job."

[jreynoldsward]

I wrote several book reviews while working as a temporary receptionist. The company liked me so I kept getting called back, and they didn't seem to mind me scribbling on a notepad between calls.

[martianmooncrab]

I miss Chesbro... sigh..