I guess I knew it was coming for some time now. I was falling farther and farther behind...between commitments with kids, work projects, volunteering, and the everyday stuff that makes up life, I'm hopelessly backlogged.
It is now April 2012 and I am still reading a New Yorker from April 2011. I am officially a year behind on the New Yorker.
If we are going to be precise about it, I'm not technically a full year behind. This morning I just finished reading the "Journeys" issue of April 18, 2011 - a special issue which is always daunting because it's packed with more stories and articles that usual, almost all of which are unfortunately fascinating. I say "unfortunately" because I know when I get an issue like "Journeys," it will take me more than a week to get through it, and I will fall even further behind on my New Yorkers. It has taken me nearly a month to get through the issue of April 18, 2011.
I'm sure I'm not the only subscriber who has to live with the guilt and the suffering of this problem on an ongoing basis. Certainly there must be a significant percentage of subscribers who, like me, are chronically behind on their reading of their beloved magazine, not for any want of interest, but just because it is so difficult to find the time to read each issue to the degree we would like to in the short week before the next issue arrives.
Most of us, I'm sure, are a month or two behind in their reading. Nothing that a couple of weeks' vacation at the cottage or on the beach couldn't take care of. But how many of us are a full YEAR behind? And is there any hope of catching up at that point?
I have been a New Yorker subscriber since graduating from university, in 1993. There were times where I was one of those subscribers who was two, maybe three, months behind in reading the issues - a small backlog characterized by a short stack of magazines beside the bedside table. I had a rule to read every issue cover to cover, even if I thought an article might be boring, with the reasoning that I would learn something interesting from each story. Over the years, busy jobs, home improvement projects, events to plan, and later, children, got in the way of my enjoyment of the New Yorkers. I felt like they were another chore to get through, a sentencing away of my free time. I had also fallen more than a year behind.
So I relaxed my rule: I could skip some articles if they were a) about something that was really of no interest to me, or b) if they covered current world events that, by the time I got around to reading them, were of course no longer current. Who needs to read about the Democratic leadership race when Obama is already ensconced in the White House?
This new perspective allowed me to catch up a little on the backlog. More importantly, it restored my love and enjoyment of reading the New Yorker. Within a few months I was down to about nine months of back issues and I swore I would never allow myself to get more than a year behind ever again. If I did, I would throw out the now-towering pile of unread, unloved New Yorkers and start fresh.
But when it happened -- or when I could tell it was going to happen soon -- I knew I couldn't go through with it. Just as I could never throw out perfectly nutritious food, I could not throw out the pages of insightful, and often witty, articles and stories that nourished my intellect and understanding of our world. And so I came up with the idea of dedicating a year to getting through the backlog, to getting caught up on the issues that will continue to come in over the next year. By making it a project, a cause, with a blog holding me to account, perhaps I will once and for all conquer the pile of magazines beside the bed.
This blog is about my one-year effort to try to catch up on the New Yorker. I am giving myself one year to catch up on a year's worth of issues and be fully up-to-date; in other words, I'll be reading two years' worth of New Yorkers in the span of 12 months. By April 1, 2013, I will be happily reading the current issue.
I'll be posting random thoughts and comments on what I'm reading, as well as regular updates on my progress.
Kim Darlington
Montreal, Quebec, April 1, 2012
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