Why is it a good reading commute? Well, as forementioned, it's long--40 minutes each way. It's also one train, and I usually get a seat for most of it. In eight years of train commutes, I've found that being seated, in one place, for a long time, is the golden combination for getting a lot of reading in.
Train reading is good reading. Even if someone is saying something insane or someone's bud earphones are leaking the tinny trebble of hip hop--common occurances on New York City's A Train--a decent book allows me to drown it out. The rocking of the train or the white noise of the subway running over the old rails maybe help me focus. 40 minutes is, for the most part, a good amount of time to read at once. It's short enough that if I'm not enjoying what I'm reading I can cut out before getting too bored and long enough to get into it if I'm compelled.
Short stories and short essays are not bad. Even better is the type of journalistic non-fiction that links vignettes together into a meta-narrative. I frequently read books of this last kind on the train.
For me, the journalistic non-fiction I've been reading recently falls into two categories.
The first is a tour of how we got into this mess. Matthew Desmond's Evicted, an anthropology of the urban housing crisis, and Sam Quinones' Dreamland, a multi-facted look at the spread of heroin and prescription opiates, have taught me a lot about our struggles as a nation. They're of a piece; to some extent multi-character, multi-arc stories about the ill-fated decisions made by important people and their distributed impacts. It's easy to read them and feel smarter and sadder, but I ultimately don't gain all that much from them beyond a drawn out form of the anger that I get from reading Twitter each morning. Whatever the intentions of the authors, you can read them and come to the liberal's natural conclusion: that neo-liberalism has led to a situation where selling drugs is profitable, but running a capital-intensive business that employs blue-collar workers isn't (or at least isn't profitable compared to running the same business in Mexico or Asia). You can also come to the conservative's natural conclusion: the corrosion of community foundations like faith have led to a moral decay that lead to bad choices across generations. Of course, neither conclusion excludes the other.
The second category of journalistic non-fiction I've been reading a lot of lately is about the creation of communities--rather than their destruction--especially pre-internet. Books like Amy Yates Wuelfing and Steven Dilodivico's No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes (on a Trenton, New Jersey punk rock venue) and Tom Acitelli's The Audacity of Hops (on the history of the craft brewing movement) are relatively unheralded, but in reading about leaderless efforts to build things it's easy to find yourself rooting for a phenomenon and hoping that you're in the middle of something similar someday.
While all these books make for great train reading, they're not great reading in general. Journalistic non-fiction, as a genre, tries to mix the fact-finding and -explaining of reporting with the character development of a novel. Trying to do both makes it hard to do either well. I am left with few characters drilled deep into my memory nor a true understanding of the political or cultural issues that led to disaster or success. Occasionally, a book makes one end work--Evicted has some very remarkable moments and story arcs, and Dreamland does a good job of explaining the pipeline of drugs and drug runners from Mexico to the United States--only to fall short on the other.
Take, for example, book-length essays. I've recently enjoyed Kyna Leski's The Storm of Creativity (on the creative process) and William B. Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life (on stoicism), but I sometimes struggled to remember their main points from train ride to train ride.
Or, even tougher, novels and creative non-fiction. Despite the fact that I read relatively few books from these genres, I find that there is more to savor from them. Perhaps it's because at their core they have a beating human heart, fictional or non-fictional. Pnin in Vladimir Nabokov's eponymous emigrant novel and David Foster Wallace in David Lipsky's extended interview with the author, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, certainly count. Not only is it easiest to enjoy the experiences of a character you connect with, it's also easier to learn from them. Pnin's genorisity and Wallace and Lipsky's thoughtfulness have taught me more than anything else I've read recently.
However, these books sometimes ask more from the reader than what 40 minutes of attention allows. To understand Pnin's predicament as a man out of place and goodness as a human being necessitates reading for longer durations where you follow him closely. David Foster Wallace and David Lipsky's conversations in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself are beautiful, but processing them--who do you agree with and why on the questions posed by Lipsky and turned around by Wallace--require far more than a moment's thought. Sporadic reading in either will reqiure going back for reminders about just what is going on.
The easiest reading for me to do is train reading, but the best reading requires greater context and concentration than can be had on a commute-length train ride. Long-term, the solution is clear--read more in my own free time--but for now, with work and coursework and social commitments, I'm left mostly with train reading and the sometimes beautiful, sometimes informative images that can be found there.