Spotted: Después de Babel: Aspectos del Lenguaje y la Traducción by George Steiner

En Inglés: After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

Where: Q-train

Who was reading: A middle-aged woman with dyed auburn hair in messy schoolteacher curls. I could just picture her dropping the chalk as she adjusts her glasses.

Her glasses had rhinestones on them, by the way. Which totally fits in with the imaginary narrative I concocted in which she plays an endearingly quirky Spanish teacher who lives in an apartment full of potted plants and caged birds. Ever notice how language teachers wear the wackiest garb? (Excluding German teachers, of course.) Her story reaches its dramatic climax when Javier Bardem swoops in to teach her a language she’s never even heard of....

The Language of Love! Which, by the way, is notably absent from Steiner’s book. Apparently getting some fancy Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award makes him too important to enjoy Better Off Dead with the rest of us.
But that's OK... He's still responsible for some of the greatest literary criticism ever, and this seminal text is a fine example of his work.

5332: A lengthy ramble on 2 people reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

Where: Both on the R-train, traveling in opposite directions.
Bet that would sound WAY more poetic if you framed it as a nautical analogy: Good point. Perhaps the esteemed "Unknown" said it best when s/he wrote "There are those who pass like ships in the night, who meet for a moment, then sail out of sight."
Much better, now who was reading? Ship #1 was a young woman in a purple-and-yellow plaid skirt, with black tights and black everything else including a pair of clunky Amelie shoes. Ship #2 was a young man of the hipster persuasion, with an unseasonably bronzed face and light brown whiskers. Said whiskers were swaddled in a saffron-colored scarf and he carried a sack of art supplies.
How come none of this has anything to do with 2666? Pure oversight. But come to think of it I heard that book was good. Like really good.
Isn't it amazing... that Bolaño has been writing novels since the early '90s, and yet his work has only recently come into the limelight in this country? It makes me wonder how many great works of literature go unnoticed—or "sail out of sight"—simply because they're never translated into English.