Reading Without Actually Reading

Whenever we visit my father and stepmother I always think I’m going to get some reading done. And so I will bring a book and at least one or two New Yorkers that I am, as always, in the middle of reading. But this is just false optimism on my part. What inevitably happens is that I will gather up a huge stack of my stepmother’s past issues of Martha Stewart’s Living magazine and then I will spend the entire weekend flipping through them, but not exactly reading them.

Those magazines are bewitching. They are as bewitching as Seventeen magazine was for me when I was a young girl. It’s kind of like, here are people about my age but they are nothing like me at all. Not even remotely. And they all look so fancy! And there’s always the feature article where it’s like some family just happens to be hosting this fantastic dinner party either out on their fabulous back porch with gorgeously placed lighting or inside their regular old dining room with a stunning hand-planed oak farm table and they just happened to invite the camera crew from Living magazine along. Or maybe I’m not actually getting something about this. Maybe this is exactly what happens? Either way, I find myself flipping through those pages again and again.

Which is also what happens whenever the new Cook’s Illustrated arrives in the mail. Ever since we made our very first recipe from the magazine, salmon cakes I believe it was sometime in 1998, we have been subscribers. And if you’ve ever had dinner at our house, well, at least some of it came from some issue of Cook’s. You know that triple mousse cake? Exactly. But anyhow, whenever we get it in the mail, I usually flip through it over and over again, while giving a running narrative of pretty much everything to my husband, who is almost always otherwise engaged. Something like: Ooh, look, I can make this chocolate raspberry torte! But wait, they actually call it a showpiece. Why are they calling it a showpiece? It has to look that pretty? I guess I can't make it. Oh, but wait, here is another recipe for sugar cookies, even though they already have a perfectly good sugar cookie recipe. But this time they are adding cream cheese. They are running out of ideas, I think. And look, look at these mashed potatoes. Let's make these tonight! Etc.

And that I don't think counts as reading as just more of that frenetic flipping through pages thing, which I seem to have perfected over the years. And is also what I do with any set of complicated directions, like for a digital camera, say. I think if you flip through something long enough the information will somehow make it into your brain through a kind of osmosis, thereby sparing you the necessity of actually reading the overwhelmingly detailed and wordy words on the page.

Thus allowing you time for things you really want to be reading, which might actually be The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris and whatever's in the latest New Yorker.

Reading The New Yorker

If you read The New Yorker, that is, if you subscribe to it, then you most likely have the same love/hate relationship with it that I do. I'm not talking about the actual content, though there is that too. I'm talking about the strategy you have to employ so that you actually manage to read each one, while also reading books, while also not letting too many pile up alarmingly in your house, thereby forcing you to throw out the whole stack and start again.

I once worked with a woman who let her New Yorkers pile up and pile up and she would get around to them eventually, but she never seemed to mind that she might have ten of them sitting around at one time. Strangely she was a producer for a WNYC radio show that involved talking to tons of writers who actually appeared in The New Yorker and you'd think she'd have wanted to be a bit more on top of things. (One of the best moments of that job was hearing her on the phone say, "Oh, Spalding, could you hold on a second?") But anyhow, when I asked her if she minded that she had six-month-old New Yorkers just sitting in a stack in her apartment, she would say cheerfully, "Not at all. I'll get to them eventually." Such optimism she had.

When I lived in New York City, The New Yorker was perfect for the subway. After a couple of days the type would be all blurred and the pages all crumpled, but who cared! You just threw it out, since the next one would be arriving any minute. But then, when I turned 30, two things happened to make my New Yorker reading something of a challenge. One, we moved out of the city to a place where transportation was no longer a passive activity, allowing for leisurely reading, but rather one in which you actually had to pay attention. Two, we had a child.

So the magazines would come, as relentlessly as always, and I found that, on the one hand, they were sort of the perfect thing to read since a novel involved too much commitment at such an intense point of my life, but on the other hand, not surprisingly, I didn't really have the same amount of time for reading any more. In a way, the story of my life (from, say, age 26 on) could be told by just counting the number of New Yorkers in my house. Before the age of 30, you would only find a single one in my house at any point in time. In fact, sometimes there might not be any at all, if I'd managed to finish one before the next one arrived! But by the time my first daughter was born you might suddenly notice the appearance of two in the house, if not more, all turned to somewhere in the middle of an article, with the best of intentions that they'd get finished and thrown out finally. (Note: When I say "thrown out" I really mean "recycled." I don't mean to worry anyone.)

I managed to find a way to make reading The New Yorker easier, however. When my daughter took naps, I pushed her in a stroller while simultaneously reading the magazine. I do tend to like doing two things at once, and believe it or not, it was not at all hard to do. I'm sure I was known around town as that woman who pushes a stroller while reading every day, but I hardly cared. I was really on to something. In fact, my love for the author Alice Mattison began the moment I read the first line of her book The Book Borrower: "Though she was pushing a baby carriage, Toby Ruben began to read a book." This practically sent chills up my spine. Someone who understood!

There was also the problem of not being able to read any books while trying to keep up with The New Yorkers. I'm a fast reader, but come on. I was always relieved when one of those double issues would arrive during the summer or around Christmas. "Now I can read some books!" I'd think excitedly.

But then maybe in the past year or so, though, I started doing something that I really found luxurious: I allowed myself to read only the articles that truly interested me. Always the fiction and then maybe one or two others. And then? I'd just recycle the magazine and move on. I am free!