The sun came out this afternoon and it stopped pouring for the first time in at least a week. The good thing about a break in the rain is that the subway was just about the emptiest it has ever been at rush hour. At 5pm, I was able to get a seat at Queen station. That has never happened to me before. I – and all the other like-booted commuters – got to sit today.

I have worn my rain boots more times in May than I have in the 1.5 years that I have owned them.

So while listening to my music and with my face buried deep inside my book on my iphone, the person sitting beside me started talking to me. Yes. I know. Nobody talks on the Subway unless it’s shouting expletives or, if you are like the girl who sat near me last week, unless you singing that Bruno Mars song on a loop for 8 stops straight.

“Hey! Are you Mormon too?”

It took me about 15 minutes of giving him my WTF face to realize he was asking because obviously he had been reading over my shoulder.

You see, I am currently reading The 19th Wife, which, ps, I am enjoying far more than I ever imagined. Because, you guys, I thought this book was just a fictional story about sister wives and murder mystery, which, in itself would have been enough to satisfy my reading needs. But then, there’s this whole historical fiction arc. It tells the story of Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of Brigham Young, and a crusader in the fight to end polygamy at the end of the 1800s. It uses actual excerpts from her 1876 biography Wife No. 19, and uses actual documents to tell the story of the life she was born into and how her mother came to become a Mormon.

To call it fascinating would be a sweeping understatement. Because I am both a lover of history and fascinated by religions in general, this book is one that I don’t want to put down. So I didn’t. I was reading it on the subway, and clearly so was the Mormon young man who was sitting to my left. I guess he had probably seen words like Prophet and Saint and Joseph Smith and probably assumed that I had been reading, I don’t know, scripture of some sort, because the look on his face was pure…I don’t know…delight.

I had to disappoint him.

“I’m Jewish,” I said, “But we can still be friends.”