What I Read

I love the Atlantic Wire’s “What I Read” series, and have been meaning to do one myself, just for shits and giggles.

During the week, our alarm typically goes off at 6am (I hate it.) I married a saint, and he’ll get up first to feed the cat and shower and let me have a few extra minutes in bed. I typically use this time to pull out my phone and catch up with email and twitter (periodically I’ll catch up on Facebook, but I’ve sort of fallen out of love with it and don’t see much value in checking it regularly.) Twitter is a way for me to keep up with my friends and family, and also a way for me to keep up with headlines that might be relevant for work. I follow Pew Trusts, Inside Higher Ed, Brookings, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Wire, Longform and MSNBC. (And maybe Emily Maynard from the Bachelorette. Let’s not judge, people…) Headlines are easy, and it takes very little time to check in periodically throughout the day.

When things get slow at work and on my lunch breaks, I head over to my google reader that usually always has something waiting for me. I subscribe to news sources (again, The Atlantic Wire and Longform), as well as a plethora of blogs, both of the healthy lifestyle and celebrity gossip persuasion.  I also use this as an opportunity to keep caught up with the Paris Review, which I shouldn’t do because I already have too much to read as it is. I probably only read about 2/3 of the articles in their entirety, and scan the rest.

As far as magazines are concerned, we get the Economist, which I admittedly hardly EVER read (mainly because I take my kindle with me on the metro—I should purposely leave it at home so I can keep up on current events, instead!), and the Atlantic, which usually has a few articles that pique my interest. (We also get Cooking Light, which I’m kind of obsessed with, but I’m not sure that actually counts.) I have the US News & World Report delivered to my inbox each Friday, which is a super quick way to get caught up on the week’s headlines (I think it only takes about 20 minutes to read), and I love the quizzes each week (nerd alert!)

And then of course there is my kindle, which is my ready companion on the metro, now that Neal and I no longer commute together. Currently, I’m reading Great Expectations, although after that I’m going to force myself to finish The Revenge of Geography, (which I actually have in hardback.)  I typically mainly use the kindle on my commute, so I don’t really read that many books on a regular basis. Because the trip is only 20 minutes each way, it takes a while to get through a novel.

So, that’s that. I’m guessing if I could ignore some all of my celebrity gossip blogs, I could be a bit better about things like the Economist, but I feel I keep a relatively decent balance, and I typically have just enough knowledge to not look stupid should someone ask my opinion on Chuck Hagel. A lot of this is just surface reading (but in this day and age where you have thousands upon thousands of articles at your finger tips, it’s hard to delve too deeply into too many of them. I pick a few long reads everyday, but it would be impossible to read every article in its entirety while maintaining a full-time job!) Although I love to read, there gets to be a certain point at night where I can’t read without falling asleep, so unfortunately not a lot of reading gets done past 7:30 or 8, unless the book is incredibly engaging.  We’re not really tied to any particular television series apart from Downton Abbey and, um, maybe the Bachelor (the girls this season are a whole new level of cray cray! I love it!), but we do enjoy sitting in the evenings with our feet up watching whatever strikes our fancy. I’m happy to say that I finally cut my addiction to true crime television, which has led to a decrease in my anxiety and an increase in my ability to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without pulling open the shower curtain first to make sure a psycho isn’t waiting to kill me. At one point, I’d like to cut ourselves off from television for a week or a month so I can worth through the backlog on my kindle, but it’s winter and it’s cold and it gets dark early, so the creature comfort will remain for now…

Your turn! What do you read? (Or watch, or listen to, as it were…)