Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Front to Back, Back to Front

If you're reading a magazine, do you read every article in it or just specific ones that seem interesting to you? I'm definitely a read-it-all kind of gal, which can make magazine reading a time-consuming process. We get a lot of magazines: The New Yorker, Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Budget Travel. None of which are particularly "light" reading, although only the New Yorker and Smithsonian are particularly heavy. Anyhow, I just can't retire a magazine until I know I've read every bit of it. I might not be especially interested in particle accelerators (the topic of a recent article in the New Yorker), but I read it anyway. I mean, if I only read articles about things that interest me, how would I ever learn anything new. Not to say I'm now an expert on particle accelerators or hedge funds or Richard Branson or glaciology or Alexandria, Egypt, but I do have a little tiny germ of knowledge and could say something semi-intelligent if any of the above ever came up in conversation. Or maybe by reading an article, I'll find out that I really am interested in the subject and seek out more information on it. Who knows?

Jeff, on the other hand, only reads select articles from each of the magazines. As I read (I almost always readthe magazines first), I turn down the corners to indicate articles that I think he might be interested in. Then he just peruses the contents page and my marked pages and picks out what he wants to read and reads only that. I think he's missing out, but considering he doesn't read as much as I do, he'd have huge piles of to-be-read magazines if he didn't. So I guess it works out, but now who am I going to discuss glacioloy with?

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