First Monday Book Magazine Day - The Economist
I’ve been a subscriber to The Economist for many years. I like that it has kind of an external view of things (a different perspective than what I read in the daily online broadsheets). I also watch BBC World News.
I usually get it in the mail on Saturday, and a goal has been to get through the prior week’s version before the next one shows up (a goal often missed). In fact, one time I got so backed up that I cancelled the subscription, but then caved and re-upped. I’m at parity this week.
It’s where I often learn new words, like Iftar (first meal after Ramadan), bête noire (a person or thing that one dislikes), liguica (Portuguese smoked sausage with garlic), poisson d'avril (April fool), civvy street (civilian life).
I generally share the world views of The Economist editors (open markets, free trade, cultural liberalism).
I read The Economist from back to front (the obituary, world market charts, exotic job postings, book reviews, articles about natural selection (in markets, economies, insect-world, shopping behavior, etc.), then country-specific blats, and if I can’t get to the first part (recent news) that’s OK as I’ve heard all of that stuff on the Internet or radio.
They’ve got some standing opinion columns I enjoy – Johnson writes about language (e.g. Oxford comma – “We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin.” “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin.”) Schumpeter (business), Babbage (technology), Buttonwood (Finance), Lexington (US stuff), Charlemagne (EU stuff), Bagehot (British stuff).
As an analytics guy, I like their charts/graphs. Big Mac index is good. I find it interesting how they selectively pick which countries to include on their graphs. I’ve made several investment decisions based on their articles (SQM – huge win; NBG – win but right before Greece went kaput; and several disasters - genomics startups comes to mind).
So, WGOM peeps, what books/magazines are you reading?
I've had a Popular Science subscription for a long time. It lapsed a few years ago but I re-upped. More recently (five years?), I added Scientific American. I used to be able to get through both in about three or four weeks, so I didn't consider adding anything else. PopSci dropped to six issues a year though, so it's been slightly easier to finish each month. The bulk of the time is spent with SA. All those words!
I've had an Astronomy magazine subscription since the 80s, and lately I end up reading them on my Omaha business trips. I have an embarrassing stack of unread here currently, and don't know how that happened. Last time that occurred was when I was reading O'Brien's Aubrey and Maturin series and couldn't put them down.
Similarly, longtime Economist subscriber. I also start with the obit. But I try to resist reading the Science and Technology section and Books and the Arts section until after I have read everything else.
The Atlantic - I like the articles based on academic research mch better than their opinion pieces.
America Magazine - A more inclusive version of Catholicism.
Atlantic here too.
Gray's Sporting Journal - like Field & Stream for rich guys. Lots of interesting articles and some great fiction and poetry. Subscription lapsed about 18 months ago, but I'm still sitting on a half-dozen still wrapped in plastic (damn weiner kids).
Deadly Writers Patrol - h/t to CH here. I just picked up a bunch of the back issues ... I'm set for awhile.
At one time we had a subscription to Garden and Gun, but I found the content to be too bourgie for my tastes. The photos are pretty stellar, though.
I've not read much for myself lately, but Newbish is finally getting to the point where he likes having me read to him. In fact, it is easily his favorite activity. He's gotten to the point where he knows a lot of his favorites' contents and can "read" them without us (generally him sitting on the floor and making up gibberish, inflecting certain words that I put emphasis on when reading them to him).
His favorite author is "Sanna Bone Teen" (Sandra Boynton). We were at Barnes and Noble over the weekend and he found a collection of her books, which was basically heaven for him.
In keeping with the actual theme of this post, I'll note that I'm mostly done with magazines. The "unread" pile got too deep, and despite my best intentions, I'm not going to dive into it.
I do still get Game Informer and generally skim it the day that I get it.
Too much unread to keep paying for anything, for sure.
The New Republic was really the only one. I doubt I'd recognize it now.
I still get Scouting and some actuarial stuff, but I feel no obligation to read them: they just come because of other things.
HPR gets Boy's Life, which is good because we still keep everyone on a pretty light internet diet.
CER reads it just as much as he and has had at least two jokes published in them.
Aside of my own childhood subscriptions to Boy's Life, Ranger Rick, the two WWF magazines (the panda logo, not wrestling), Odyssey, etc., I used to read a lot of Reader's Digest as a kid. Mostly the jokes and "It Pays to Enhance Your Word Power" monthly vocab quiz.
I doubt I'd recognize it now.
My wife has been subscribing to the New Yorker for about 4-5 years. Her pile of un- or partially-read back issues isn't quite as deep as mine, but I watch more baseball at night. Tons of really good, long-format journalism in there (similar to the Atlantic).
I have a second-hand New Yorker subscription--my parents' neighbor gives them her magazines after she's read them, and they pass them along to me. It's perfect because I can read as much as I want but never feel guilty about what I don't get to. For reasons I don't really understand, I almost never read the fiction. (I just read this interview with the author of this week's fiction, so maybe I'll actually read that story.)
Question for anyone who has read A Brief History of Seven Killings: does the violence get less intense after the beginning? I picked it up on a whim from a display in the library and found that I had to read slowly to follow the dialect. But because of the need to go slowly, I wasn't able to skim through the violent passages the way I'd normally do. If the whole book is like this, I'm not sure I have it in me to keep going.
Dr. Chop gave up on that one and skimmed the rest after the first 100 or so pages. I haven't had time to start reading it yet, so this is a wasted comment.
Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama. Novel. I kind of feel like this qualifies as my own Reading without Walls book since I rarely read either mysteries or novels in translation. But the New York Times review intrigued me, so I figured I’d give it a try. And it turned out to be a cool book. The main character, Mikami, is a middle-aged detective who has been assigned to the Media Relations department at the police station and is none too pleased about it. The novel’s primary mystery is a case from more than a decade earlier, and the book is surprisingly compelling despite many pages of Mikami feeling both frustrated and ambivalent about what he’s doing. There were moments when I wondered whether the eventual payoff would be worth it, but once I got to it, it was absolutely worth it. When I was done, I really wished I had time to reread it and pick up on all the things I’d missed the first time through.
Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers by Deborah Heiligman. Young adult nonficiton. This is quite a good book. As the title indicates, it focuses on the relationship between Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo. I came into this book without much background knowledge, and I was fascinated by the story of how these two brothers supported each other through all kinds of difficulties. The author did extensive research and she quotes from the many letters the brothers wrote to each other and to friends and other family members. Heiligman’s portrayal of Vincent’s artistic development is quite compelling. Much of the book is told in present tense, which bothered me just a little, but the story is strong enough that I was willing to forgive it. I knew nothing of the role Theo’s wife, Johanna, played in bringing attention to Vincent’s work after both Vincent and Theo were dead (Theo died less than a year after his brother did). The book also addresses Vincent’s mental illness, and in the end I wished Heiligman had discussed her thoughts on the connection between mental illness and artistic creation. Maybe that’s not fair of me to want that, but particularly in a book for young adults, I felt like just a bit on that would have been meaningful given our culture’s association between madness and artistic genius.
i've been a subscriber to Esquire magazine for years and years and years. They've recently had a change in editorship, and I'm not sure I'm going to continue subscribing. What was a magazine with some fashion, some criticism, some pop culture, and some really, really engaging reporting has become more fluff than substance. I've also been a subscriber to fine woodworking for years. I devour that magazine the day it arrives, though it's really for a niche audience... We also get a copy of the week which make for some great toilet tank dust covers.
I doubt I'd recognize it now.