Sunday, July 30, 2006

When Reading can be Bad for You

I felt terrible after the last post about the amount of time I spend TV gazing, so I thought I'd try to catch up on the Listener; this is a weekly NZ magazine that started out as a radio program guide some 75 years ago; now it covers just about anything under the Kiwi sun and beyond, and is the only magazine whose subscription we have not let lapse for over 10 years. (Yip, that includes Fiberarts and Handwoven...)

First off, it doesn't pay to pile up and then catch up on weekly magazines. With the world changing as rapidly as it does, even news from a week ago is history; when you pile them up for five months, even the recipes are out of season. And I don't want to know about movies I missed, or never came to Nelson.

Secondly, I get a bit sad when I read book reviews. It was only about two years ago that I realized I would most probably never read all the books that interest me, or ones I should read to remain a well-informed member of the global society. This was about the same time I hit a nine-month spell of picking up bad fiction. Uggh.

But most importantly, for me, for now, I sunk further into the Word World after an evening of semi-serious reading, and woke up this morning almost sea sick from the swirls of words. So for me, for now, maybe TV gazing, or magazine gazing without reading, is not such a bad thing.

*****

I still remain a hopeless book buyer, however, and today, I picked up 'A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage and the Quest for the Colour of Desire' by Amy Bulter Greenfield from Black Swan, a division of Random House. My favorite bookstore in Nelson, Page and Blackmore, has a little bit more info about it, and Amazon says the title is the same in the US except for Colour/Color. Perhaps of interest to some?

2 comments:

  1. I agree that there won't be enough time in my life to read everything that I think I would like to. But, my solution for the time being is to listen to Recorded Books while I warp and thread the loom. Things get too noisy when I'm weaving and besides, I need to pay attention to what is happening on the loom at that point!

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  2. Hi, Beryl. For the last couple of weeks I have been listening to "Dr. Phil's Ultimate Weight Solution"! I wished just listening to it did the trick, but not so far. I did 'read' "The House of Seven Gables" on the last long warp; one of those books I always intended to read but hadn't gotten around to doing so.

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