Hapworth 3, 2007

I've never really been a newspaper reader, a fact that has brought me varying levels of embarrassment over the years. Now that I listen to NPR for hours every day, I have no problem with my non-newspaper habits. I also have never subscribed to the New Yorker, although I spent many years living with various people who did, so I got to read it a lot. Now I subscribe to Harper's Magazine, and that's enough for me, thank you; it's monthly and it's dense, and if I attempted to read a weekly or a daily or probably even an additional monthly, I'd never read anything else. I much prefer to continue my book habit as it currently stands.

Anyway, so since I've never read any newspaper regularly, I've of course never read The New York Times regularly, though I've also lived with subscribers to that on and off for many years. For a while, I was very into the Sunday New York Times Magazine, and a lazy Sunday morning spent reading it. I used to joke that I didn't have to read the whole thing; the game was to find the inevitable reference to J D Salinger and then I could stop. Honestly, it was *always* there. Always. Once it was on the very last page, in the crossword puzzle, but it was there.

So, a friend of mine has read New York magazine for years, and every time I look at that one, I sort of sigh and wish that I read it (and that I still lived in New York). It seems to be just my flavor of humor and pseudo-intellectualness and snarkiness and artsiness and well, perhaps if I did live in NY, I'd subscribe. This friend visited me here in LA recently and left behind a few issues for me to read. I was just now finishing up one of them, having enjoyed it but still feeling relieved that I didn't have to do it every week. I felt a sense of total freedom to page very quickly through and past all the "this week in NY" listings, since a) it's from about two months ago and b) I'm not in NY... and then there it was: a call-out box entitled "A Perfect Day for Bananafish". Do *all* publications with NY in their names have to contain a Salinger reference?? Does this really happen every week in this one too? Do I get to play the game again with the other three issues she left me? Oh, the joy :)