Problems of a Subscriber
January 22, 2016 § Leave a comment
I have written before about my first-world trouble with keeping up with my New Yorker subscription, to the point of falling months behind. If you care to count, the debt is over six months, which was why, at the beginning of the new year, I made a tiny resolution to myself: instead of adding new issues to the pile when they arrived in the mail, I’d read those first, try to finish each in a week, and then use the remaining time before the next issue arrives to burn off the accumulated backlog from last year.
I’ve managed to keep up so far, while chipping away at issues from last June. The time-elapse can lead to some strange juxtapositions. There are a lot of blue-sky covers in the summer, for one thing. I am at the moment working on the Summer Fiction issue, featuring the usual New Yorker suspects: two Jonathans (Franzen and Foer), Russell, Lipsyte, Zadie Smith. Amy Davidson’s Talk of the Town comment happens to be about Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post journalist whose trial in Iran on charges of espionage and propaganda had just gotten under way. In real-time life, Rezaian and three other Americans had just been released in a prisoner swap.
It is nice to be reading up on events while they are still more or less current, for a change. The January 25 issue arrived in the mail today, so Franzen’s long story is going to have to wait.
Neil Serven 
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