November 25, 2003

One Year, Five Months, and Four Days Behind

I'm not sure if this is admirable or compulsive: Irving Tobin reads the entire New York Times (minus the Sports, Escapes, and Circuit sections.)

[His wife] introduced him to the Times. Soon he had to cut out his other reading. Then tax season came along. Every year, he fell behind, losing almost two months in March and April. “I realize I’m not going to catch up, but I like to believe I will,” he said the other day. When the Times went on strike in 1978, he lagged by only nine days. By 1998, he was almost two years behind, even though he had quit reading the Sports section years before.

I stopped reading newspapers a while ago (I read them online) but I subscribe to quite a few magazines and the one magazine I can never catch up with is the New Yorker (even though I read some of the articles online.) Most of my mags are monthlies, and I can spend a couple of hours with each one and read them and be done, but the New Yorker gets me. I have a stack of at least five staring at me right now. I think I'm going to put them in the recycle bin.

posted by Laila Lalami at 07:12 AM