Wider Reading

Popped up to Holland Village this afternoon and picked up a couple of publications for dipping into over the super-busy weeks that are lined up to follow this one. Sadly they didn't have a copy of Philosophy Now, so it looks like the one I picked up there earlier in the year was a one-off. But they reliably stock The New York Review of Books, at a reasonable price, so I acquired the recent one featuring the ever-compelling Doc Oliver Sacks on memory, and I couldn't resist quite an expensive review of the career of The Kinks from Uncut magazine.

It occurs to me that a substantial portion of the reading I've done over a lifetime has involved this kind of stuff. I don't see it as primary reading, in a sense I think of it as quite lazy, but I've got a feeling that through an odd kind of osmosis I've become sort of well-informed in a very limited kind of way as a result of this splashing around.

It also occurs to me that I've been extremely lucky to have been exposed to such materials with reasonable regularity since my mid-teens. I have a horrible feeling that for a lot of youngsters in this Far Place this privilege has somehow been denied them, or, rather, they have denied it for themselves. To each his own, I suppose, but I must say I like what comes to me.