I leaned against the metal pole of the subway car as we started chugging into the heart of New York City. If my music hadn’t stopped playing I might never have noticed—one, two, three, four, at least ten people were holding up their giant orange books. Some were halfway through, some nearly all the way through. Some propped it on their legs, and a few more had taken off the jacket so as to be inconspicuous. They spanned all ages, and were all engrossed.

One young woman, not much younger than me, sat near the end of my eye line; she was reading, too, her colorful backpack on her lap and her arms circling it, her book acting as a buckle to hold it in place. I traveled to the next pole down to get a surreptitious closer look; she wasn’t reading Deathly Hallows at all. Her book wasn’t orange but rose and water and sand, and featured a kid on a broomstick and a white unicorn. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. She didn’t notice me staring at her.

‘Oh, I envy you,’ I thought, but was smiling for her. She had just begun.

-Harry, A History, Melissa Anelli