No reader this week

Sometimes I ask people if I can photograph them reading and they say no. On Thursday night it happened at a restaurant in West Portal, where a woman eating soup and wearing sunglasses was reading a library book in the rays of the setting sun.

Sometimes I see a book, but there is no one reading it. This morning it was a paperback Sci Fi novel face down, with its pages spread in lieu of a bookmark, on the blanket of a homeless person sleeping next to Trader Joe's, but I didn't have time to linger, and hope they started reading again when they woke up.

Sometimes I wait until Friday or Saturday to start looking for readers to photograph and, in my normal day-to-day life, there is no one with a book. This afternoon I saw a man next to the Science parklet on Valencia Street bent over his cell phone, but I didn't know if it was a book, or something else that he was engaged with.

When I started this blog almost 10 years ago people didn't read books on cell phones. They had cell phones, but they weren't filled with enough distractions, or books, to make a physical book an unnecessary thing to carry.

What I'm trying to say is that it has gotten harder to wait until the last minute to come up with a blog post.

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