An issue of Film Comment arrived in the mail yesterday. I ended my subscription to the magazine about four months ago because I find it a pain to have to wait to read certain articles because the movies that are being written about have not made their way up here yet (and sometimes never do). I wait until I've seen the film, but usually by the time I have seen it, another issue has arrived and my thoughts are diverted to different articles and waiting for different films so that I can read THOSE articles. Though I do dislike this never ending circle, it is an excellent magazine and I found myself forced to resubscribe.
My wife, on the other hand, will have a magazine arrive and will not touch anything else until that magazine is complete. She won't read any books until it is done. She won't read any short stories. The bottom line is, she is dedicated to her current reading and waits until that is done to start something else. She would never read a few articles, put the magazine down, and return to it next month. Whether it be a book, an anthology, or as discussed earlier, a magazine, she reads it to completion before going on to another work.
This thought brought about a list of books that I began reading and to this day have not finished. I made a list in hopes that I could get to revisit and finish some of these books, but came to the realization that I probably will not finish all of them. The books are...
Horns by Joe Hill
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carre
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
The Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard
The Wizard and the Glass by Stephen King
The list may not seem long to some, but there are others I'm positive I have missed. These are just from the past two years.
One of the difficulties that I have when reading is that my mind wanders. The books on the above list span different genres and authors, and ultimately it's the reason I have not finished these books yet. I plan to, but in order to completely enjoy a novel I have to be in the right mood. I read to enjoy, and if I'm not in the mood to enjoy, say, a science fiction novel, then what's the point in reading it at that moment? Or, in the case of Film Comment, if I haven't seen the films in discussion, then what is the point of reading it if I can't fully enjoy it?
I used to read film magazines, too, but stopes when I left New York. I was just thinking tonight how I used to go to the movies all the time when I lived in NYC - two to three times a week. Living in Maine and as a mom I almost never go now. I miss it. Have you ever been to the Portsmouth Music Hall? They show great independent and foreign films. They also host Telluride by the Sea with a selection of films from Telluride.
ReplyDeleteYour comment makes me think about how digital writing may be changing not just our use of print media but the interrelationship between the formats. I wonder if your use and attitude toward the film magazine would be different if it were an online magazine - not just articles on a website, but something that somehow connects with what our vision of "magazine" is...?
ReplyDeleteMy golf magazine also has a website and whenever I read the hard copy (which I do from cover-to-cover over about a week), I think how enriching the online pieces that they refer to would be...but, oh well, too lazy to go check them out!
I'm with your wife on trying to finish what I start before moving on. Maybe that's why I also don't go online to see the electronic additions to magazines I read in print.
ReplyDeletePerhaps we all have our own way of censoring how much stimuli our minds can hold- yours wanders while others zoom in. In either case it's self-selecting!