On Catching Up

I periodically get behind on some of my reading; this usually happens with newspapers and magazines. I love to read all kinds of journalism, from the very light Entertainment Weekly to the New York Review of Books. Of course, working in a library, I have access to many of these publications in print form at work.  Because of this, and my thrifty nature, I fluctuate between either 1) subscribing to a lot of magazines at any given time and 2) letting the subscriptions lapse while convincing myself that I will read them at work during my lunch hour. Of course, I never actually do that, so I go back to subscribing.

Right now I subscribe to these magazines and journals:

New York Review of Books
Publishers Weekly
Booklist
Library Journal
Martha Stewart Living
Country Living
Fitness
Entertainment Weekly
Chronicle of Higher Education
Information Today

This is much abbreviated since I'm in one of my cutting-back phases. Magazines that I would really like to subscribe to include The Economist, Rolling Stone, Vogue, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Time.

I read The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Daily Beast, and more online.

I also get a number of journals because of my professional memberships:

Library Resources & Technical Services
Library Administration & Management
Library & Information Technology
College & Research Libraries
College & Research Libraries Newsletter

And I get Cataloging & Classification Quarterly because I'm on the editorial board.

I don't read the professional journals cover-to-cover; there's not enough time and I'm not interested in every article. I'm much more likely to read the fun magazines and journals cover-to-cover. The question is when do I read them!

When we began to plan our move to Albany last year, I started to get behind on a number of my magazines and journals. I did my best to keep up, but getting the house ready to sell took up much of our weekends, prime reading time for me. I refused to toss months' worth of New York Review of Books, so I carefully packed them up and shipped them all to Albany. After the move, which took place on December 28 last year, it seemed like every weekend was taken up with stuff around the house, exploring the Albany region, and travelling to see family that we're now much further away from. It took until late summer before I was able to carve out time to catch up on them, and I plowed my way through well over a year's worth of NYRBs! Of course, I couldn't read them all cover-to-cover, so I focused only on the book reviews and essays that I was most interested in.

I recently uncovered another small stack of unread magazines that I had bought at the State College Barnes and Noble. I occasionally go to a bookstore and buy a bunch of magazines that I don't regularly read, just for variety. I can't blame this backlog of unread magazines on the move, though, since they're from October 2011. Mike refuses to read even a day-old newspaper, because "it's old news," he claims. I, however, enjoy reading older publications. This set of magazines was particularly fun, since they were published during President Obama's first term and the political coverage was interesting given how things turned out in the 2012 election. One item in particular was fascinating: a condemnation of President Obama's unwillingness to stand firm against the Republicans in the 2011 debt ceiling crisis. I couldn't read the whole article, since I found the recent related events too stressful. I'm glad he held firm this time around!