Ever wonder what your fellow commuters are reading? As someone intent on knowing the titles of my fellow subway riders’ books, this latest article from the Christian Science Monitor came as a boon. In it, reporter Matthew Shaer rides with the keeper of the website BookSpy. an anonymous young woman who spies on the reading habits of New York City subway riders and then writes about it.

Shaer reports:

On an unseasonably warm Saturday in January, I rode the N line with a woman I’ll call Parker Twain. Ms. Twain is 24. She has bright, restless eyes and brown hair, which she wears cut straight across her forehead. Twain lives in Brooklyn and works in the offices of a major publishing house in Manhattan. In her spare time, she is a spy. More specifically, she is the Book Spy, an anonymous blogger who spends between 12 and 14 hours on the subway every week, chronicling the reading habits – and sartorial predilections – of her fellow New York commuters.

The typical post on the Book Spy runs between 150 and 200 words. Twain begins by identifying the train where she spotted the book in question – usually a Q or R train, but sometimes an L train, and sometimes an N train. Next, she offers a pithy and colorful description of the reader. (One reader was recently described as “a woman with a friendly smile, mole-spangled cheeks, and excellent bone structure.”) Lastly, Twain will offer a couple of comments on the book in question. (On The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver: “So apparently it’s the story of a dude just sort of tumbling around North America in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, just kind of going wherever the wind takes him. Tumble tumble.”)

According to Shaer, “Her mission, as she saw it, was simple: Be a book evangelist. Draw attention to random acts of reading.” She explained her motivation to Shaer thusly, “In the publishing world, everyone is always freaking out – you know, ‘Why aren’t people buying books?’ and stuff like that,” she says. “But for all this talk about a dying industry, I see people reading all the time. I see tons of readers. And I find that to be uplifting and exciting.”

Even a brief glance at her site tells us she communicates that excitement wonderfully. Her posts are charming, funny and beautifully written. Here is a sample of what she spied on Valentine’s day:

Monday, February 14, 201

Spotted: Going Solo by Roald Dahl

Where: Q-train

Who was reading: A middle-aged man with thick lips pursed into a sausage-y frown. His heavy blonde eyebrows were a little too neat to be described as flyaway—more flyaway in the sense that a turkey “flies away”: There’s a great deal of noise and plenty of ruffled feathers but very little actual flying.

Out of Africa, Into the Wild Blue Yonder: Going Solo chronicles Dahl’s own adventures in Africa as an Oil Man, and in the sky as a pilot in the Royal Airforce. It’s a continuation of Boy, which was mainly about deadly Mamba snakes.

When it comes to Roald Dahl… It’s nearly impossible to agree on a favorite book, but it’s safe to assume that nobody chooses Going Solo. Not that it’s not well-written and all, it’s just… given the choice between a sequel to a memoir and something like Matilda, what would you choose?

In conclusion: Roald Dahl is pretty much the funniest author ever. He also came up with more ideas for candy than a stoner at a Hershey Food Corp. product development meeting. So what if he was slightly more bitter in person than the sweet, sweet candy stuck to every page of the Charlie Bucket books? He’s still my children’s book idol. So there.