Why Slow Cities Seem to Read More

Let me be clear at the outset that this is not a statistic. I haven't counted anyone. What follows is the report of a man who has lived in a handful of cities, ridden a great many trams, and developed an impression he can't shake: that the slower the place, the more books you see.

In the small city where I lived for six years, I could not ride the tram for ten minutes without seeing someone reading. Not scrolling, not skimming. Reading, with the bent head and the faintly moving lips of a person who has gone somewhere else. It was so normal that I stopped noticing, until I moved, and the absence arrived like a missing tooth.

The geometry of a pause

Consider what a slow city offers. It gives you waits that are long enough to open a book but too short to feel like a loss. A tram that comes every twelve minutes. A café where the coffee takes its time. A bench that someone had the generosity to put at the top of a hill. The place builds small pockets of idleness into its day, and people fill those pockets, naturally, with whatever they've brought along.

A fast city, by contrast, tries to eliminate its pauses. Everything is timed, shaved, optimised. The wait has been engineered out. And when you take the pauses away, you take away the places where reading used to happen.

The queue as a reading room

I want to say a word on behalf of the queue. My favourite memory of that small city is a post office on a Saturday, with a line that ran out of the door. Half the line was reading. A man in a good coat was halfway through a thick novel; a girl in school uniform was mouthing the lines of a play. Nobody seemed to mind the delay. It was, I suppose, a reading room that happened to have a counter at the end.

That queue would be a scandal in a quicker place. Someone would write an angry letter. But here the slowness was doing quiet work, handing out minutes like small gifts.

A caution

I may be romanticising. Slow cities have their own failings: they can be insular, and their trams can be maddening when you're late. Perhaps the readers I saw were simply people who had no choice, and made the best of an empty twelve minutes.

But I don't think so. Time that you can't hurry is time you're free to spend, and what I notice is that people spend it on one another's company, on staring out of windows, and, quite often, on books. I've come to think of the pace of a place as a kind of climate. In some climates, things grow that wouldn't elsewhere.

Next time you're caught in a slow, ordinary wait, resist the pocket and the glass. Look around. See who has brought a book, and think kindly of them.