The "Making Books" column in the arts section of this morning's New York Times reports on three best-selling fiction writers. A book editor is quoted as saying about one of the authors, "A lot of his audience are women, and I see white women reading his books on the subway all the time, which is unusual to see people reading novels on the subway."
Smartertimes.com rides the subway too (only when our driver has the day off) and can report that, actually, it's not that unusual to see people reading novels there. In fact, it's pretty common. So common that quite a few publishers even buy advertising space in the subway cars to promote new novels.
Arguably, it's the book editor making this claim of unusualness and not the Times. Still, it seems like the newspaper might want to signal its readers to the fact that it is quoting someone who is saying something at odds with reality. Or the quote could have just been truncated after the words "all the time."
Lost in Brooklyn: The Times this morning again demonstrates its ignorance of Brooklyn geography. In the last couple of weeks the newspaper misplaced one Brooklyn neighborhood and misspelled another. Today the "Residential Sales" column in the House & Home section refers to the sale of a townhouse on "Remson Street" in Brooklyn Heights. It's Remsen Street, with an "e."