The New Yorker

Joe subscribes to The New Yorker and delighted me by bringing a stack of current back issues as an early Christmas surprise. It has been my favorite magazine since first finding out about it traveling on commercial airlines, what, fifty years ago? Every article is excellent if a bit lengthy, the fiction is invariably engaging, the cartoons are without equal, the poetry is good, especially when it’s elusive. Imaginative, artsy covers.

A relaxing airplane trip and a good visit to the doctor’s office are ones that yield a copy of The New Yorker in the magazine rack. Doesn’t matter about the age. My style typically is to read through start to finish except in a waiting room, when it’s a quick thumb through to catch all the cartoons, then start the fiction piece and try to speed read it before my name is called. 

Only one of the magazines Joe brought has been opened so far, August 29, 2011. Excellent: Letter from Damascus, telling first hand what's going on in Syria.The Life and Times of Rin Tin Tin, the cinema dog star my mother got me infatuated with as a small child. An intriguing piece about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia. An article about Charles Dickens that was so interesting it got me bogged down in downloading and plowing into two Dickens novels, Little Dorrit and Great Expectations. His novels are available on-line, just download the links and read, free.

Every year in California there’s a week long Dickens camp, to which Dickens fanatics come from all over the world. Each year they read one novel, which is assigned ahead of time, and there are discussions, lectures, seminars about it, with literary scholars, enthusiasts, teachers, professors, movie stars, ordinary folks, people from early teens to doddering. The most recent selection was Great Expectations, for which the camp apparently was thronged with people, including singles (?) who evidently also came with Great Sexpectations, as betrayed by the grass in their hair.    

Joe brought about a dozen issues, and they will be my reading dessert, stretched out for as long as possible. 

TW+