Not long ago, I spoke to the novelist Ethan Canin who, after teaching through May at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, moves back to San Francisco with his family for the summer. “One of my favorite things about being back here,” he told me, “is seeing people on the bus reading good books.” I nodded vigorously. Just that week, I had sat across the row from a German tourist reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (as was I at the time), behind a teenager reading Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (a selection of my last book club) and next to a curly-haired woman balancing a copy of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (which has been recommended to me 837 times at last count) between her knees.

I didn’t say anything to these people but I felt a bond. We’re part of the invisible network of public readers.

There’s something both comforting and subversive about reading in public (on trains, at bus stops, on park benches and street corners), the two main reasons I love doing it. Opening a book on an overcrowded subway train seals you in your own world, mentally switching you being accessible to others to unapologetic time with yourself. “When I open a book on the bus,” a friend once told me, “psychologically, I’m already home.” On the other hand, read in a restaurant and people may think you’re a friendless loser or they may admire your self-reliance. Their curiosity is as delicious as having a secret.

An average week will find me reading in public at least a half-dozen times but the reasons seem to change with my lifestyle. In graduate school, I could spend days in my apartment hacking through required texts and none of my classmates would blink since they all did it too. That drove me batty so I took to reading at a coffee shop near the campus library for some fresh air and a dose of sanity. My best friend arrived late to everything so I began stowing a book in the glove compartment to kill time while waiting outside movie theatres and restaurants. When I began working full time, a small library rested in a desk drawer and so I could read at lunch. I was too tired the end of the day to enjoy it.

Now I live in San Francisco, a dense, frenetic city and I spend most of my time in the whirlwind of it. I work long hours, ride subways and buses to get around and often have dinner with friends or run errands before heading home. The few hours before sleep belong to the dishes, the laundry and returning phone calls. Before I figured out otherwise, that gave me 10 minutes before I close my eyes to read a few pages and waiting until Saturday to give a book the attention it deserved. I hated it.

The answer came when I began slipping the private act of reading into the folds of my now very public life. I worried at first about shutting the world out in this way, beginning and ending my day with a word fog enveloping my head. I didn’t choose to live in a city to ignore it whizzing by. Yet I soon discovered that rather than feeling cut off, I had unconsciously joined a secret network of book lovers. Passersby would look over at my book and nod or squint quizzically. Many pleasant exchanges followed. I once spent about 10 days reading David Sedaris’s Naked in restaurants, the gym and the neighborhood pool. Sixteen people passed by and had something about to say about it (I made a checkmark on the back cover for each one). Many just said “what a funny book” but several others asked me about my favorite essays and had I heard Sedaris’s commentaries on the radio? The book had sent out a beacon to like-minded readers, drawing them in.

A few weeks ago, I confounded Ethan Canin’s theory by sitting on the bus with a thoroughly lousy book. A man one seat in front of me asked if I liked the book. When I told him no, he asked if I always read on the bus and I said yes, that it passed the time and made a hot, crowded ride more bearable. He nodded then saw a Borders Bookstore by the next stop and exited the bus quickly. Just before walking in, he waved at me and laughed. I waved back with my book. For a moment, I’m engaged in the world’s most private act, but don’t feel alone at all.