What We're Reading

Reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey. Photo by Aaron Shepard.

Being an author and publisher as well as a photographer, one of my pet projects is to take candid shots of people reading books in public. Later, if you zoom into the cover, you can sometimes easily identify the book being read. Other times, you might see only bits of the title or author's name, and then identifying the book becomes a game. A little searching on Amazon is usually enough to find a match for the cover.

Here are some of the shots I've taken around the Port of Friday Harbor -- most of them in the past year -- with the books identified in the captions.

Reading A Summer Affair, by Elin Hilderbrand. Photo by Aaron Shepard.

Reading Read Between the Lines, by Jo Knowles. Photo by Aaron Shepard.

Reading The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger. Photo by Aaron Shepard.

Reading A Dog's Purpose, by W. Bruce Cameron. Photo by Aaron Shepard.

Reading The Plantagenets, by Bruce Jones. Photo by Aaron Shepard.

Reading The Miniaturist, by Jessie Burton. Photo by Aaron Shepard.

Reading All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. Photo by Aaron Shepard.

Wait! That last one doesn't show anything readable on the cover! Wondering how I identified it? By zooming in far enough, I was able to read text on the page, which I then Googled. Talk about reading over someone's shoulder!

Finally, here's a photo and close-up with a book I couldn't identify. If you can help, please tell me in the comments!

Photo by Aaron Shepard.