Our peripatetic spies spotted the following books being read by their fellow travelers this week. We decided just for fun to try categorizing the readers by age and gender to see if we could spot any patterns. This is what we came up with. Any comments?

Teenagers
William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom!

20-Something Casually Dressed Women
Raymond Chandler – The Long Goodbye
Junot Diaz – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Timothy Ferriss – The 4-Hour Workweek
Laurie Notaro – There’s a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell: A Novel of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, and Big Trouble
James Patterson – Third Degree
Jeffrey Sachs – The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
Tom Stoppard – The Real Thing
Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now

20-Something Professionally Dressed Women
Kim Edwards – The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
Malcolm Gladwell – Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Debbie Macomber – Country Brides
Ian McEwan – Atonement
Marion Nestle – What to Eat
Jodi Picoult – My Sister’s Keeper
Ayn Rand – The Fountainhead

20-Something Casually Dressed Men
Paulo Coelho – The Alchemist
Robert Greene – The Art of Seduction
Robert E. Howard – Kull: Exile of Atlantis
Cormac McCarthy – Outer Dark
Bill and Carol McGann – The Story of the Tour de France
Ben Mezrich – Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai

20-Something Professionally Dressed Men
Dee Brown – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
Robert Jordan – New Spring
Will North – The Long Walk Home

30-Something Casually Dressed Women
Ayn Rand – The Fountainhead

30-Something Professionally Dressed Women
Bernard Cornwell – Sword Song
John Grisham – The Appeal

30-Something Casually Dressed Men
Mark Bowden – Killing Pablo: the Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw
Stephen King – The Dark Half
Eduardo Mendoza – El Misterio de La Cripta Embrujada
Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged

30-Something Professionally Dressed Men
Philippa Gregory – The Other Boleyn Girl
Garth Nix – The Keys to the Kingdom, Book 3: Drowned Wednesday
James Redfield – The Celestine Prophecy

Middle-Aged Casually Dressed Women
Joe Hill – Heart-Shaped Box
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird

Middle-Aged Professionally Dressed Women
Clive Cussler and Jack Du Brul – Plague Ship
Philippa Gregory – The Boleyn Inheritance
Linda Howard – Son of the Morning
Joseph O’Neill – Netherland
Zadie Smith – White Teeth

Middle-Aged Casually Dressed Men
Deepak Chopra – Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old
Lorna Freeman – The King’s Own
Steven Millhauser – Dangerous Laughter
Haruki Murakami – The Elephant Vanishes

Middle-Aged Professionally Dressed Men
Steve Berry – The Alexandria Link
Lee Child – Nothing to Lose
Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams – Tunnels
David Halberstam – The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
Sue Monk Kidd – The Secret Life of Bees
William Martin – The Lost Constitution
Joseph McBride – What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?

If you spot a title or two as you travel around, please share and we’ll include them in the column. Just send them to raoblog@lu.com.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 at 9:30 am and is filed under Tips and Fun Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.