After finishing with Practical Intelligence, I decided that I’m going to hold back library book borrowing for a long time – at least long enough to finish up with what I’ve got back at home. A couple of weeks back, I bought a couple of ‘old magazines’ (Harvard Business Review, The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine; those published at the beginning of 2009) and I haven’t got to read them; then I found myself having to catch up with issues of Fortune and The Economist that I’ve been subscribing. It is only this experience that got me thinking about how much of my reading attention gets into magazines.
I used to think that magazines are non-intensive reads (maybe I was thinking along the lines of Seventeen, Men’s Health and 8 Days) that were mainly for bite-sized information of world affairs and commentary. Unfortunately for me, the magazines I read apparently were not. I were reading pretty academic stuff though they are not exactly the sort of magazines that our JCs told us to read. I avoided the typical GP staples of Singapore, Newsweek and TIME because they were always getting dramatic about Iran, Iraq, the Middle East and Campaigns in America; The Economist provided me with a great deal of continental content I’ll probably need when I pursue my undergraduates at London School of Economics. Recently my endeavour into Business Economics led me to read Fortune Magazine and my sudden interest in literary stuff led me to New Yorker (though I almost always end up reading James Surowiecki, who writes their Financial Page).
And if magazines are taking up so much of my time, where in my reading schedule can I allocate the books? I’ve done fine reading books on long journeys around the country but if there’s little traveling I usually stop with magazines and online journals (which means more magazines). I’ve thus decided to spend some time reading just books at home. I started Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan (finally!) today and I’m determined to finish it at home. When I’m done with that, I’ll be left with 2 books by Avinash Dixitt and Barry Nalebuff: The Art of Strategy and Thinking Strategically; both of them are heavy books I should expect to read alongside pen and paper (which means it’s good for me to do it at home).
The ‘old magazines’ will have to wait though I’m almost done with 20% of them by now. Meanwhile, I’ll be writing a entry with the same title on ERPZ about something different.
