TLS
Time to read is at a premium in my life; has been for years, really. Whenever I've zipped back to University for a degree I've always found I do far more personal reading than that required for my school work. But in the workforce, reading for reading sake is among the first victims of loss of personal freedom that comes with a paycheque. Of course I'm always reading but that's reports and background and plans and journalism. But the real stuff I have and am eager to read I pick away at with only a couple of chapters a week, and the enjoyable fiction (literate or not), well I don't even think about reading that stuff any more--which is why I'm so insulted when I waste time on crap. This reading time crunch is why I tend to just grab a book of poetry from my shelves at bedtime and read some verse in the interim between back-to-mattress and book-to-face. However, I have just finished Hesse's “Narcissus and Goldmund” -- good gawd but what brilliance (and that in translation), and surprisingly (because the author and his commercial success and approach to the Buddha, I find flakey) I've just finished Chopra's fictionalized biography, "Buddha" and found it quite compelling (not as good by a long shot though as Hesse's "Siddhartha").
And here I've been on holidays for a week and didn't do any serious reading--the two books mentioned above finished in the week or two before taking time off. Which brings me to the Times Literary Supplement, the only "magazine" (it is tabloid in format and on newsprint) I continue to subscribe to, following a purging of such mailings. I do miss The Walrus, but can't even recall the few others that used to arrive, clutter for a few weeks and then get tossed in recycling without ever my generating enough time (or interest) to attend to them.
The TLS, on the other hand, is glorious. One would have to be a professional reader to even sniff at a fraction of the books reviewed in its pages every week. The majority of the reviews (and these are true literary critiques, not the stuff of the book sections of most every newspaper -- the reviewers, for example, almost always leading authorities on the topic tackled by the books under review) are of a length and depth from another time, really.
It's weekly, so sadly it can begin to stack up on my reading pile and is thus too often consumed in a piecemeal fashion. This is a shame for even the letters to the editor are entertaining with diplomatically veiled throat grabbing criticism of expert opinion versus expert opinion -- the de-credentializing character assassinations that can occur in the letters, or the overt condescension when one authority kindly points out errors in another's review--truly entertaining stuff.
The shame in not reading the majority of each TLS is that it matters little the topic under review, the writing is so delightful that one learns such remarkable things about things one would never otherwise have the time or inclination to even think about learning. I still usually begin each review skeptical I'll get very far into it, but wind up reading at length about things I thought I impossible to find interesting.
From the issue I went through this morning, I discovered: 1)Ronald Reagan was adamant, to his military's leaders' shock (and he was unable to tell anyone else, of course, for after all it would kibosh detente) that he would never give the okay to use nuclear weapons even if the U.S. were struck first. 2) There is a male earwig (two types, actually) with two penises ("one kept as a spare"). 3) Global warming (e.g., the phenomenon, not simply the current event/issue) variations are not incidentally influenced by the Milankovich Cycles -- Earth's eccentric elliptical orbit, Earth's precession, and the tilt of Earth's axis. 4) Ayn Rand was a "victim" of the Russian Revolution, was a friend of Cecil B De Mille, had a play on Broadway. 4) Charles Darwin once wrote to his wife that after awaking once amidst a beautiful rural scene, on the grass with birds singing, squirrels running about the trees, that he did "not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed." WAH!
Oh and the TLS also publishes a couple of poems each week and usually photos of art installations.
And here I've been on holidays for a week and didn't do any serious reading--the two books mentioned above finished in the week or two before taking time off. Which brings me to the Times Literary Supplement, the only "magazine" (it is tabloid in format and on newsprint) I continue to subscribe to, following a purging of such mailings. I do miss The Walrus, but can't even recall the few others that used to arrive, clutter for a few weeks and then get tossed in recycling without ever my generating enough time (or interest) to attend to them.
The TLS, on the other hand, is glorious. One would have to be a professional reader to even sniff at a fraction of the books reviewed in its pages every week. The majority of the reviews (and these are true literary critiques, not the stuff of the book sections of most every newspaper -- the reviewers, for example, almost always leading authorities on the topic tackled by the books under review) are of a length and depth from another time, really.
It's weekly, so sadly it can begin to stack up on my reading pile and is thus too often consumed in a piecemeal fashion. This is a shame for even the letters to the editor are entertaining with diplomatically veiled throat grabbing criticism of expert opinion versus expert opinion -- the de-credentializing character assassinations that can occur in the letters, or the overt condescension when one authority kindly points out errors in another's review--truly entertaining stuff.
The shame in not reading the majority of each TLS is that it matters little the topic under review, the writing is so delightful that one learns such remarkable things about things one would never otherwise have the time or inclination to even think about learning. I still usually begin each review skeptical I'll get very far into it, but wind up reading at length about things I thought I impossible to find interesting.
From the issue I went through this morning, I discovered: 1)Ronald Reagan was adamant, to his military's leaders' shock (and he was unable to tell anyone else, of course, for after all it would kibosh detente) that he would never give the okay to use nuclear weapons even if the U.S. were struck first. 2) There is a male earwig (two types, actually) with two penises ("one kept as a spare"). 3) Global warming (e.g., the phenomenon, not simply the current event/issue) variations are not incidentally influenced by the Milankovich Cycles -- Earth's eccentric elliptical orbit, Earth's precession, and the tilt of Earth's axis. 4) Ayn Rand was a "victim" of the Russian Revolution, was a friend of Cecil B De Mille, had a play on Broadway. 4) Charles Darwin once wrote to his wife that after awaking once amidst a beautiful rural scene, on the grass with birds singing, squirrels running about the trees, that he did "not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed." WAH!
Oh and the TLS also publishes a couple of poems each week and usually photos of art installations.
posted by Heipel at 7:51 AM
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