NEW YORKER THURSDAY IN THE MAIL, A LESSON IN READING

The New Yorker magazine is my only subscription and I’m surprised how much fun it is.

I actually look forward to it, which has been a surprise over the past year.

I know what I’m doing on New Yorker Day:

Get everything settled in the house, like dishes and laundry and the other adulting activities, and going to bed early to tuck in with the latest issue.

How to read it? Start at the back and page to the front.

Here’s how:

Skip the crossword puzzle and come back to it later. It’s a big one.

Turn the page and find the winner of the cartoon caption contest every week.

It shows the winning caption for a cartoon, another cartoon with three potential winners along with their names and locations, and a new cartoon for new captions.

Keep moving along past two page reviews of The Current Cinema,  On Television, The Theater, and Books, to Briefly Noted.

That’s where you find four paragraph sized reviews of current books if you’re looking for something to read.

After that comes page after page of three column print with cartoons in one corner or another.

If you like cartoons as much as I do, this is the sweet spot.

Thumb past everything for the cartoons, everything except the poems. Give them a read before turning the page.

Next stop, The Mail, where readers find letters to the editor, letters from people with impressive titles beside their names.

You don’t have to read the letters, just the letter writers’ names and credentials.

On the opposite page of The Mail is Contributors, the people published that week.

Finally, turn the page to find the Table of Contents.

 

This is the best part. Why?

Because, since you paged through in reverse, read the resume of the contributors, you can now pick one piece to read in its entirety, which is important to subscribers.

This is important because the fun part is over. Now you have to focus.

After that you can give it a toss.

But, don’t do that. However if you do recycle at that moment, you’ve done yours literary duty.

You read the New Yorker, sort of. Call it New Yorker light.

Take a look at the crossword puzzle, read the fiction, check out the reviews.

 

Going To School With The New Yorker

Every time it shows up it feels like college English classes.

Everything in the magazine feels like a reference to books and authors a select few get.

Not me, but I check out interesting references.

After I finished with the Army I went back to school as an English major.

That lasted two years before I dropped out and moved to NYC.

Makes sense?

It did to me, sort of. But I quit New York and moved back to Oregon for a better life.

Doing that meant finishing my degree, a history degree, which isn’t that much different than an English degree in my case.

Lots of reading and writing for each. Lots. Luckily I was a speed reader at the time.

I went from an English program and fiction writing, to the history department and non-fiction and news writing.

It’s a great set-up for a blogger.

And perfect for reading The New Yorker.

I’ve got context, I tell ya, context.