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You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Recently, I was on a long, long flight.

And I caught myself passing the time by looking around to see what all my seatmates were reading.

And it’s funny how much we know, or we think we know, about the stranger next to us based on the book he’s reading.

And to some extent, you know, we do judge a person by their book covers.

And the writer Megan Daum has a wonderful essay about this.

She writes about how we do evaluate people to some extent, depending on, for example, whether you see them with the telltale orange spine that denotes a penguin paperback or the foil-embossed dead giveaway of a romance novel.

But, you know, Grant, I’m hearing a lot of hype these days about electronic books.

And I keep thinking if everybody’s carrying e-books and laptops, we’re not going to have that same simple pleasure of just looking around a public place to see what other people are up to in terms of what they’re reading.

You could just ask, though, if you see somebody with a kid.

Well, that’s true.

Who says technology is impersonal?

Well, right.

I mean, if you see somebody with one of the Sony products that they have that use the electronic paper or the Amazon Kindle or any of those kinds of devices, even reading on their palm pile, you could always ask if they’re really engrossed.

Maybe it’s a little nosy.

I don’t know, Martha.

Maybe there are better ways to judge a person.

Well, anyway, if you want to talk about books or reading or writing or you have a question about language, you can send us an electronic message, night or day.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

You can send us an email about anything related to books or music or prints at words@waywordradio.org.