Friday, March 14, 2008

Unlikely combinations

They say you should never judge a book by its cover and the analogy is usually used as a warning against making assumptions about a person from their appearance.

So there I was on the bus.
And there was this young guy engrossed in a book.
He wore a sharp suit, his hair was gelled into spikes and he had a laddish glint in his eye.

And he was reading ...
Daphne du Maurier.

What's the most unlikely combination of reader and book you've seen?

8 comments:

Unknown said...

A tattooist, who had a copy of Wuthering Heights on his desk. I might have thought that someone had left it behind until we starting talking.
This guy, with earlobes the size of tennis balls and comprehensive body art, had a very sharp (tattooed) head.

Debi said...

Good one! Maybe that's what Heathcliffe would have looked like if he'd been around in 2007.

Anonymous said...

I was walking to Waterloo and near to the roundabout,very close to the Imax cinema there are pavement benches,outside St johns church..this was about 2 years ago,and something i saw which i have never forgotten,not forgetting i was street homeless at the time,was a man asleep on the bench,mid forties,with one arm dangling down almost touching the pavement,and next to his hand was hat upturned,but what stuck me was lying on his chest was a opened book,cover up...
and the book was called " Not a penny more" Not a penny less " by Jeffrey Archer..if he was homeless or begging dont know? but it was the image that stuck in my mind..
regards debi..homelesschicken xx

Yodood said...

This post brought to mind, not a book/reader memory but the finding of a book in the back of a neglected kitchen drawer with a full quarter of its volume eaten completely away at one corner of all the pages, leaving just enough of the cover to read the title, Diet for a Small Planet. I kept it as a reminder.

Yodood said...

I forgot to include that it was the enormous roach population of this small planet on whose diet the book was based and vice versa.

Unknown said...

That is an unlikely combination!

Unknown said...

Maybe yer man was studying the book for the OU course on 20th c literature: it's one of the set books!

Can't think of any unlikely reader/book combos unless you count the day me and a poet friend were coming back from Belfast on the train and were surrounded by Scottish rugby fans. 'What do you do,' they said, so we showed them our poetry books. They sat reading them, chomping on sandwiches and drinking beer and port, reading away goodo... for a good twenty minutes!

Debi said...

Blimey - you guys are really good at this.

Bloggers + intelligence = a highly likely combination!