Someone Else Was Sitting Around With a Book For a Change

I went to get my hair cut today and while I was waiting, a nondescript kid, maybe 11 or 12, came in to wait for a cut himself, and opened up a book to read. He had a hardback without a dust jacket, so I couldn't see the title. But for the purpose of my observation that didn't matter.

It was a kid with a real book, here in the middle of summer when it's unlikely to be assigned reading. It wasn't a comic book or graphic novel or Amero-manga. It wasn't the current equivalent of a Game Boy or any other kind of electronic time-killer, or a Kindle. It was an honest-to-God verso-recto book made of paper.

Cracking a book was more surprising that almost anything else he could have done, up to and including riding a unicycle into the shop and parking it to wait for his haircut.