I have been reading (and am nearly finished with) A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. It’s been on my list for a while as one of the classics of the sci fi genre and as a book which has reached a bit beyond genre writing and touching onto ‘literature’ (not that I’m opening a discussion of that issue right now). I think I found it at a library sale or maybe it was at my neighborhood used bookstore.

While I was on the metro the other day, reading Canticle, a man, sitting perhaps ten feet away, asked me if I was indeed reading A Canticle for Leibowitz. He was a white man, in his fifties or sixties. I was struck by the fact that he reached across a fairly significant social space. It is not terribly uncommon on the metro for the person sitting next you (the seats are arranged in pairs) to comment on or ask about the book you are reading. But he was in a different social space and it is very uncommon to interact with someone on the metro at that distance.

Another day, not long after, I was reading it while waiting for some laundry to dry and another white man (I don’t know if his race is significant, but I’m just noting the similarities) in fifties or sixties walked over to tell me what a great book it is and also mentioned a radio teleplay done of it in the seventies.

Though a small sample size, I am very much struck by how these two men felt strongly enough about the book to approach a stranger and, in one case, push the envelope of social convention to make contact.

I am now wondering if A Canticle for Leibowitz is not some sort of shibboleth – a secret code to identify some fellow traveler on a road deeply loved. Having noted their age and race, I also wonder if this book isn’t also something that had an effect I am not aware of on people who read it in the sixties or seventies (when sci fi would have been primarily, though by no means exclusively, read by white males), such that it stuck with them for decades after?