Why I read
My subscription to The New Yorker runs out in April and I don't expect to renew. The fifty percent price increase has something to do with it. I also have limited interest in restaurant reviews of that Cambodian-Peruvian fusion place under the Brooklyn Bridge that's accessible only at low tide, but don't bother calling because you can't get a table until September anyway. (The jasmine rice with queso fresco is amazing, I understand.) Mostly, it's time. I have no time to read.
Why do I buy so many books? I'm surrounded by piles of them, lists of them. I subscribe to two book reviews which advise me about more, and friends threaten to send me theirs. Realistically, I won't get through these, much less the ones I borrow from the library. It's a life-long problem, from when we could buy paperbacks from Scholastic Book Club and get them delivered right to the classroom -- this must have started in junior high. They hook you early. I can still remember my first: Fun With Chemistry. It wasn't, but it belonged to me, unlike the complete Dickens my mother must have bought when she was a kid. (I started on A Christmas Carol because it promised ghosts.)
Now, of course, it's far too easy. Three clicks, literally, and that wicked corporation delivers it in two damn days. Oh, they know me. I do my best to screw with their algorithm by mixing up my purchases so that one day it will say "People who bought The Souls of Black Folk also bought A Fistful of Fig Newtons." Well, one of us did. And now they're both on the pile with The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and The Rest Is Noise. I can't help it if I'm eclectic.
I got some insight into this condition from, you will have guessed, The New Yorker. In the January 13 issue, John McPhee recounts a meeting with Thornton Wilder when he was thirty and Wilder was sixty-six. Wilder told the young writer that he was engaged in cataloguing the 431 surviving plays of the Spanish writer Lope de Vega (1562-1635). McPhee asked, "Why would anyone want to do that?" and got the scorching reply, "Young man, do not ever question the purpose of scholarship." Almost six decades later, McPhee explained:
"I am eighty-eight years old at this writing, and I know that those four hundred and thirty-one plays were serving to extend Thornton Wilder's life. Reading them and cataloguing them was something to do, and do, and do. It beat dying. It was a project meant not to end. I could use one of my own."
Thornton Wilder lived to be 78. I don't know if he finished that catalogue, but he woke up every day with a sense of purpose. Perhaps he suspected he no longer had an Our Town or Bridge of San Luis Rey to write, but he got out of bed and went to his desk (I'm assuming) for twelve more years. We could all use a project meant not to end, and I guess mine is reading all these books. Who knows? I may get all the way through the Commedia next time. If people would just stop writing for a while...
I will miss The New Yorker.
Why do I buy so many books? I'm surrounded by piles of them, lists of them. I subscribe to two book reviews which advise me about more, and friends threaten to send me theirs. Realistically, I won't get through these, much less the ones I borrow from the library. It's a life-long problem, from when we could buy paperbacks from Scholastic Book Club and get them delivered right to the classroom -- this must have started in junior high. They hook you early. I can still remember my first: Fun With Chemistry. It wasn't, but it belonged to me, unlike the complete Dickens my mother must have bought when she was a kid. (I started on A Christmas Carol because it promised ghosts.)
Now, of course, it's far too easy. Three clicks, literally, and that wicked corporation delivers it in two damn days. Oh, they know me. I do my best to screw with their algorithm by mixing up my purchases so that one day it will say "People who bought The Souls of Black Folk also bought A Fistful of Fig Newtons." Well, one of us did. And now they're both on the pile with The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and The Rest Is Noise. I can't help it if I'm eclectic.
I got some insight into this condition from, you will have guessed, The New Yorker. In the January 13 issue, John McPhee recounts a meeting with Thornton Wilder when he was thirty and Wilder was sixty-six. Wilder told the young writer that he was engaged in cataloguing the 431 surviving plays of the Spanish writer Lope de Vega (1562-1635). McPhee asked, "Why would anyone want to do that?" and got the scorching reply, "Young man, do not ever question the purpose of scholarship." Almost six decades later, McPhee explained:
"I am eighty-eight years old at this writing, and I know that those four hundred and thirty-one plays were serving to extend Thornton Wilder's life. Reading them and cataloguing them was something to do, and do, and do. It beat dying. It was a project meant not to end. I could use one of my own."
Thornton Wilder lived to be 78. I don't know if he finished that catalogue, but he woke up every day with a sense of purpose. Perhaps he suspected he no longer had an Our Town or Bridge of San Luis Rey to write, but he got out of bed and went to his desk (I'm assuming) for twelve more years. We could all use a project meant not to end, and I guess mine is reading all these books. Who knows? I may get all the way through the Commedia next time. If people would just stop writing for a while...
I will miss The New Yorker.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 12:06 PM
1 Comments:
Resubscribe. Find a student price. It's the best bathtub read you'll find.
I paper my walls with NY covers, and it's a real treat to look at the prices in the old days.
Best,
Jenny James
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