The Reader on the 6.27

Guylain Vignolles lives alone with a goldfish and dislikes nearly everything about his days. He works at a factory that pulps unsold books, a job he finds tedious, under a boss and an assistant he cannot stand. The one bright spot there is the factory guard, an eccentric who loves classical literature.

Every morning Guylain takes the 6.27 train to work. On the ride he reads aloud to the other commuters from loose pages he has pulled out of the pulping machine before it can destroy them. The pages are random scraps, so what the passengers hear depends on what he managed to save.

One morning he finds a USB stick on the train. It holds the diary of a young woman. As he reads her entries, he begins to fall in love with the person who wrote them.

This is a fable with a warm, funny tone, and its subject is what literature can do for a monotonous life. It treats a man others overlook as someone with dignity and a streak of poetry in him.