Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote (@RandomHouseCa) #seenreadingTO

Northbound, Pape and Danforth

Caucasian woman, late 20s, with long curly brown hair, wearing glasses, red jacket, and sun-faded pink and white backpack.

Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote (Knopf Doubleday)

Page 47:

She sighed and picked up her knitting. "I must be madly in love. You saw us together. Do you think I'm madly in love?"

"Well. Does he bite?"

Mag dropped a stitch. "Bite?"

"You. In bed."

"Why, no. Should he?" Then she added, censoriously: "But he does laugh."

"Good. That's the right spirit. I like a man who sees the humor; most of them, they're all pant and puff."

The skin has never been broken, but when her lover comes she buries her snout into her shoulder, sniffing her hair for evidence of new secretions, recognizing her own scent before relaxing into a sleepy trance. Her eye lids flutter, a content growl resting at the back of her throat before curling into herself for a short nap. When she awakes minutes later it's with a playful alertness. Now they can go outside?

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff (@RandomHouseCa) #seenreadingTO

Eastbound, Queen and Laing

Asian female, 40s, with short black hair, wearing long tan coat, tweed cap and Hunter wellies.

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff (Random House)

Page 23:

She told me things I never knew like her sister was all set to go to university to study history when she fell in love with my father and decided not to go after all, which made their father furious. When she went away to live in America hardly any of the family was speaking to her. Then from the top of her desk Aunt Penn took down a framed picture of two young women looking almost the same, one of them laughing and one looking serious and holding on to the neck of a huge wild-looking gray dog Aunt Penn said was called Lady, as a joke because she had no manners at all, but look how your mother adored her. I’ve seen plenty of pictures of my mother at home, but almost always with my father and not a single one taken before he knew her, so this was strange because she looked so different, happy and young like someone you’ve known in another life. Aunt Penn said I could keep the photograph but I said No thank you because it seemed to belong to that desk and that room, and I didn’t want to drag it away to a foreign place.

The Zamboni circled the ice rink, starting at the outer edges, working its way closer to the centre, erasing the grooves left during the first period of open skate. She sat in the change room hugging a Styrofoam cup of vending machine hot chocolate, a square of sponge toffee balanced on her knee. The boy beside her fanned through a stack of hockey cards, showing them off to the other grade four students, tapping them carefully into a tidy block he wrapped in two thick elastic bands. He dropped the lot into the base of his boot, the pack bouncing gently before settling into the heel. He toed his way to the boards, first on the ice before the Zamboni had parked itself in the belly of the building, a smattering of applause fading into a new mix of 70s top hits. She peered into the boot, a full set of Ninja cards, and Welcome Back, Kotter, too, waiting at home, coated in a sheet of petrified bubble gum dust, no perceived value in the trade market that she knew of. She shuffled down the bench placing her feet into the boots of her classmate, signaling to their teacher a sudden need to use the washroom.

The Blue Light Project, by Timothy Taylor (@RandomHouseCa) #seenreadingTO

Westbound, King and Spadina

Caucasian male, mid 30s, with short blonde hair, wearing a green hooded jacket, brown leather shoes and deeply-creased black jeans.

The Blue Light Project, by Timothy Taylor (Doubleday Knopf)

Page 246:

Open planters and waterfalls. People everywhere: chanters and singers, placards angry and distraught. The seething tension of for and against. He saw people dancing in front of a boom box over to his left. We don’t need this fascist groove thang . . . And the idea came. Loftin was amazed that he hadn't seen it before: fault lines running through the crowd. The story was in the fault lines. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace. Everyone was adrift. The encircling authorities, the cameras, the grip of the hostage drama itself. Everyone living in fear about the end. The ending was the thing. And Loftin felt it in a flash, his own story arriving. There was a great war going on here about control over the ending. Each breath of this common air fully vested.

When you least expect it, he's been told. Stop looking and when you least expect it. He stares out the window counting house numbers, a game he's played since youth. Pick a number and imagine yourself as the home's owner, this future journey to be made by friends who will visit for the housewarming and secretly judge his taste and financial resources. 458. 460. 462. The streetcar rolls past a house with a worn couch on the front porch, not the homey kind, and a stack of soaked boxes leaning in the corner. He picks another number far ahead, time more to consider the woman who sits two seats ahead reading a new paperback, something with a mustard cover. He'll look out for it, the book with the mustard cover. He peers out the window. 1236. The house appears, it's tidy front lawn dotted with trees. Is that a Japanese maple, he wonders. What does he know about trees? He traces a reflection back to the reader who pulls a stray hair behind her ear her finger hovering by her lobe as if she's forgotten to lower her arm. Yes, he thinks, the trees could be her job. And the kids can rake the leaves.

Notes from a Small Island, by Bill Bryson (@McClellandBooks) #seenreadingTO

Southbound, Greenwood and Dundas

Caucasian female, early 60s, with short grey hair, wearing red-framed glasses, long black trench coat and green and red silk scarf.

Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson (McClelland & Stewart)

Page 72:

Knowing already of the town's carefully nurtured reputation for gentility, I moved there in 1977 with the idea that this was going to be a kind of English answer to Bad Ems or Baden-Baden - manicured parks, Palm Courts with Orchestras, swank hotels where men in white gloves kept the brass gleaming, bosomy ladies in mink coats walking those little dogs you ache to kick (not out of cruelty, you understand, but from a slmple, honest desire to see how far you can make them fly). Sadly, I have to report that almost none of this awaited me.

She was at the age now of the mother of that author, the one who wrote a family column on raising a son as a single mother, trying to date while starting a new novel and the recent addition of her mother living steps away in the converted garage. It had been her study for years, but now it housed the woman the author described "as alien to me as if she'd fallen from the stars, beyond the stars, far beyond the stars where it's common sense to wear a cable-knit sweater on a summer day, and, judge me if you will, all I could imagine in that moment was her head facedown in the sand, my hand holding her in place, catching just a few solitary moments of sunshine against my bare shoulders." At the time, it had horrified the woman. She'd always been coldblooded and dreaded the day her own child might resent her for needing to layer. But there was something to be said about these small dogs, their neighbour's in particular, no bigger than the base of a compost bin.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond (Penguin) #seenreadingTO

Northbound, University and Spadina

Caucasian male, late 50s, with short grey hair, wearing blue windbreaker, black dress pants and Blundstones.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond (Penguin) 

About halfway in:

But it needs to be said at the outset that an individual should not expect to make a difference through a single action, or even through a series of actions that will be completed within three weeks. Instead, if you do want to make a difference, plan to commit yourself to a consistent policy of actions over the duration of your life.

On his way to the Kiss and Ride, he listened to the morning DJs run over the day's entertainment, the most bizarre story about a Chilean newspaper vendor who had over 82 tattoos of Julia Roberts covering his torso. 82. Had Julia Roberts been in 82 movies? Was he choosing stills, promotional shots? Oh, maybe the one from that award show when she turned up with short, blonde hair. Did her appearance on Law and Order order count? Or Friends? Who would bother to know this much about Julia Roberts? He listened on. The tattoos started with Erin Brokovich. Really, he thought. Well, she did show more cleavage. And her hair was at its best. And there was the motorcycle guy. Huh, did the Chilean man envision himself as the motorcycle guy? And what about his wife? If he had a wife. How would she feel making love to Julia Roberts for the rest of her life? Or . . . what if it was her idea? He listened on, intrigued suddenly by man's commitment to the marital cause.