Daily patterns: Fall books: Reading habits
My daily reading is tethered to the rhythms of the sun. In the evening, there is the slow burn of the substantial book beside the easy chair, which I savor in small portions. These days, I lean toward nonfiction—history, cultural analysis and theology mostly—with the occasional novel tossed in as a digestif. Right now David C. Holly’s absorbing account of 19th-century Baltimore paddle wheelers, Steamboat on the Chesapeake, which I picked up in a used bookstore, keeps the television turned off. Matthew Bowman’s The Mormon People is next on the stack.
Early mornings are marked by a different pattern, acquired years ago when I was a young pastor desperately scavenging for sermon material as the Sabbath relentlessly approached. Sipping a first cup of coffee, I operate like a pickpocket working a crowd, quickly scanning a multitude of possibilities, looking for the profitable takeaways. I gambol rapidly over a number of online newspapers—the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution. I never miss the op-ed pieces of Eugene Robinson, Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman, and I watch for the bylines of sharp and provocative critics like Janet Maslin, James Wood, Leon Wieseltier and Stanley Fish.
I also dip into a few print magazines. My favorites are the New Republic, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. In the latter, I turn eagerly to the letters to the editor in the back pages, which almost unfailingly feature highly entertaining and usually informative academic slugfests between offended authors and their offending reviewers.
