WORD UNDER THE STREET
You know when you see a stranger on the subway immersed in a book and you’re just dying to know what they’re reading? Well, Geoffrey Vendeville asked for you
Randi Colfax, 26, visual merchandiser Book: Tearing Down the Wall of Sound by Mick Brown
Stop: Union It isn’t often that you get to peek into the mind of an insecure egomaniac. That’s why Colfax — a fan of rock biographies — was drawn to this account of the bizarre and pioneering music producer Phil Spector. A notorious recluse with a short fuse, Spector is serving a sentence of 19 years to life for second degree murder in connection with the death of actress Lana Clarkson, 40. Spector helped define the sound of the ’60s with the Wall of Sound production technique, giving oomph to classics such as “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “And Then He Kissed Me.” “I just finished reading this book about evil twins,” Colfax said. “I saw this on my shelf and it seemed like a good followup.”
Tyler King, 21, university student Book: Basic Biomechanics of the Musculoskeletal System edited by Margareta Nordin and Victor Hirsch Frankel
Stop: Pape In between subway stops, King opened his textbook to read about stresses on the lumbar spine and how to prevent them. The third-year University of Toronto student is specializing in kinesiology. He applied to the program because he’s passionate about sports and science. He doesn’t know yet what he wants to do after graduation, but he’s interested in analyzing crime scenes and car accidents to give expert testimony in court, like one of his professors, he said.
Zhala Taghi-Zada, 21, university student Book: Mortality by Christopher Hitchens Stop: College Hitchens wrote this thin volume at the end of his life. It was published months after he died, in 2011, of esophageal cancer at 62. Writing in the New York Times, Christopher Buckley describes the “fragmentary jottings” in the last chapter as “vivid, heart-wrenching and haunting — messages in a bottle tossed from the deck of a sinking ship as its captain, reeling in agony and fighting through the fog of morphine struggles to keep his engines going.” Taghi-Zada had never read anything by Hitchens before. “It’s personal to me because my dad passed away from cancer recently,” she said, adding that she never had a chance to talk to him about mortality. “I wanted to see what Hitchens thought. It’s very profound. I’ve been reading it all day.”
Veronica Zaretski, 30, editor Book: Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Stop: St. Patrick Zaretski — who has been a fan of Smith ever since her breakout novel, White Teeth — admires how the author tackles broad social and political subjects “in a way that’s very intimate” and digestible, she said. She was the first person to borrow Swing
Time from her library branch. In a Star review, Sadiya Ansari says the book explores poverty, toxic friendship and strained motherdaughter relationships, among other things. “Swing Time has a different approach to race than White Teeth — she doesn’t meticulously document London’s diversity, instead she invites readers into her mind,” Ansari wrote.