Hiding What I'm Reading

The book I am currently reading, London Fields by Martin Amis, contains a fair amount of naughty bits.  I'm only a third of the way through, enough to know the movie version would be rated R for language and sexual situations - today the protagonist of the black comedy insouciantly justified rape.

I'm painfully self-conscious and worry even about the options of complete strangers.  So it was only after I was assured my seatmate was sufficiently conked out that dared to crack open my book on the Amtrak back to Providence this morning.  There's a lot in there that'd be easy to take out of context.

Several years ago I sat down on a plane to read a book entitled White Man's Burden (by Bill Easterly) for an economics class.  Guess who sat next to me?  A non-Caucasian, let's just say that.  If it came up I could have explained that the book was actually about identifying effective development strategies - a noble goal, of course - but it coming up at all means digging myself out of a hole so I simply buried the spine (displaying the title) in my lap until we departed the plane.

Amtrak coach is cramped enough that it's easy to read over someone's shoulder, and books cannot accommodate privacy screens.  Computers can, but no one bothers with them.  On the train home last Monday I couldn't look up without looking straight into the movie some college kid was watching on his laptop (this morning those same college kids were mostly asleep).  All was pretty tame.  The person in front of me watched Captain America, to my right, Titanic.  So, no one's media choice revealed their perversions, only how boring they are.

Now, back when I was in college - on a trip to the NCAA basketball tournament I ended up sitting next to the mascot on the plane.  On his laptop, in loop, he played the scene in Road Trip when Amy Smart takes her shirt off on loop, pausing it at the most obscene point when the the flight attendants passed.  Maybe you don't have to worry about shame when you hide inside a giant foam head.

It was this memorable plane ride I recalled when I heard how over this most recent Thanksgiving travel period a flier was in arrested in Boston after other passengers noticed him viewing child pornography on his laptop.

Certainly, such a gross episode makes all other questionable viewing seem strictly PG-13.  But, I still retain my self-consciousness.  I wouldn't reveal to my mom what I was reading when she asked, lest she seek the book out, read it herself, and confirm my exposure to the F-word (Fiction, Adult).