In which I begin...

I love to read. I read, items from several newspapers online daily, books from my local library (cheap bastard I am, but so what!) and occasionally magazines. In books, my usual fodder is Science Fiction. Mostly time passing entertainments that don't stick to the brain case very long. (but I do encourage you to look up Terry Pratchett, delightful!)

In the past couple of years I've been going to the local gym, and if I do nothing else I go 30 to 40 minutes on the elliptical. I never bonded with the ipod at the gym or plugging into the TV stations. Either too many distractions or those media aren't distracting enough - you decide. But I do like to read and I quickly discovered that someone leaves their New Yorker in the magazine rack on a regular basis. So I tried it and liked the variety of the stories and their length. Mostly I would read essays and profiles, not the fiction (however, I've become a fan of their fiction podcasts) I find the other news magazines' stories lacking in one of several areas. Top of the list for things they need to improve is quality of writing. Not that I'm the mavin here, but I know what I like. Next on the kvetch list is their break points. Some of these magazines would break the article halfway and send you to skinny hard to decipher columns at the end of the book. Lastly, most New Yorker articles are long enough that I need my entire exercise time to read the whole article and in several cases I've extended my session in order to finish. My doctor and my wife would both approve.

So, having had the above discussion with family and friends at least once or twice, my mother-in-law, a life-long New Yorker herself, bought me a subscription. This came at a time when I had been experiencing increasing difficulty finding library books that whet my appetite. I had on several occasions not gotten to page 50 before despairingly tossing a book aside.

As mentioned in my masthead, I, for most of my life, have been subscription averse - due primarily to cheapness. I feel that if I buy a subscription and don't read all of every issue then I've wasted my money and mourn not only it's passing but the loss of whatever reading benefit I wasn't keeping up with. So now we have the perfect storm of the only way this arrangement could work. I give up library books and only read my New Yorker. Truth be told, even then the reading time I have isn't enough to complete an issue before I receive the next. So in a fit of maturity, still a rare occurrence in my 52nd year, I decided that if I read 2 articles a week, dayenu!, it will be enough.

So here I go. You are welcome along for the ride. I encourage you to post back your impressions of my impressions as I gain a different insight on the world.

Dave