We are all for bringing reading material on the morning and evening commute, but if you happen to forget a book, Subway Library has you covered. The six-week program from the New York City MTA and New York Public Library, celebrating the new wifi in underground subway stations, is offering hundreds of ebook excerpts and short stories timed to half-hour, hourlong, and two-hour-plus commutes (which might come in handy if your train runs into some unforeseen delays).
“The New York Public Library’s mission is to make information and knowledge accessible to all, and this exciting partnership with the MTA is certainly right on track,” said NYPL president Tony Marx. “By making thousands of free stories easily available to subway straphangers, we are encouraging reading, learning, and curiosity.”
Subway Library’s offerings are separated into nine different categories, with plenty of genre titles in each. New York Stories features excerpts from Daniel José Older’s Half-Resurrection Blues and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, as well as “The Tallest Doll in New York City,” Maria Dahvana Headley’s Tor.com Original love story about Big Apple skyscrapers. Head on over to New & Noteworthy and you can start M.R. Carey’s The Boy on the Bridge. Selected Shorts let you read Cory Doctorow’s “I, Robot” and begin Ken Liu’s collection The Paper Menagerie. Or go for the Classics with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The War of the Worlds.
And if you’re riding the E or F trains, you might find yourself on the very-Instagrammable Library Car (above), outfitted to look like the Rose Main Reading Room at the 42nd Street branch of the NYPL.
“It used to be that you were ‘unplugged’ on the subway, and even though you’re connecting to the wireless now, you’ll still have the sense of being unplugged when reading books,” said Lynn Lobash, manager of reader services for the NYPL. “It’s a lot different than the frantic sense of checking your email or being on Twitter.”
But it’s only for six weeks, so hop aboard while you still can!
