What I Read, and Why, and How my Reading Impacts Me

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I remember the first book in my house: a children's story of a squirrel whose tail was cut off. I don't remember why he lost his tail. I remember the final drawing with a standing brown squirrel, no tail. I wonder why my parents purchased that book. I know that my parents had purchased the inexpensive Little Golden Books, known for their spine, not their quality. My family was a family of reading and my mother would take me and my brother to the Memphis Public Library regularly; my father was a compulsive reader, with his Louis L'Amour and his Golden Age Sci-Fi paperbacks. It was then that I got hooked with sci-fi, but less so with fantasy (my father had read all the Hobbit books; I couldn't make it past the first ten pages). I read all over Sci-Fi, and I endured Dune.

I'm not sure when newspapers were important for me. I know that my high school provided the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle for some classes. I know my family subscribed to one of those newspapers but I don't remember reading myself, except for the comics. But I do remember while I was at Texas A&M to read The Battalion the student paper and I realized that my student friends were also reading The Battalion and I could see the importance for the A&M community to have a journalism focus to learn, understand, discuss and debate, and respond to university politics, sports, culture, and current events. I read a lot of comics while a university student (DC and Indies, never Marvel, thankyouverymuch), but I realized that I didn't have the money to continue my collection, so I stopped and haven't followed Batman for many years. 

I started to subscribe to entrance new subscriptions with big magazines (usually the one year subscription which was cheap as cheap; once they increased the subscription price, I usually cancelled the account): Smithsonian, The Wilson Quarterly, Harpers, and some Sci-Fi fiction periodicals such as Asimov's Science Fiction. As a university student, I suppose I thought I had time. I was still reading my textbooks but I had more questions about how the bigger world was happening out there. I was raised in a poor working class family with their rather insular small exposure, and these contemporary periodicals showed that the world was more complex. 

Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash

Today, most of my reading is overwhelmingly three corpuses:

  1. Student writing (I enjoy student writing)
  2. My discipline's academic books and journals
  3. The general journalism, political, or otherwise politicized discussions. 
Since the pandemic, I had more time to read but 2021 has complicated my life and all my reading has declined a bit. Still, I include a list of what I'm reading in the #3 list. Most require subscriptions but some are free and even some of those free sources need financial support to make them successful (On the Media, for example). I also include multiple media: electronic (Web), radio, or old-school printed that delivers in my old-school USPS boxes. 

  1. The Houston Chronicle
  2. The New York Times
  3. The Intercept
  4. ProPublica
  5. The Atlantic
  6. Mother Jones
  7. Jacobin
  8. Houston Public Media (radio)
  9. Reveal (podcast)
  10. On the Media (podcast)
  11. APM Reports
  12. Nib Comics
  13. Bullseye with Jesse Thorn (podcast/ radio)
  14. Fresh Air (podcast/ radio)
  15. This American Life (podcast/ radio)
  16. Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me! (radio)
  17. TETYC (academic journal, 6x/year)
  18. CCC (academic journal, 4x/year)
  19. Composition Studies (academic journal, 2x/year)
  20. Composition Forum (academic journal, 2x/year)
  21. Praxis (academic)
  22. Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society (academic)
  23. Literacy in Composition Studies (academic)

Two explanations: 1) I don't read every page from each source. I have turned into selective about most essential for my research in those academic journals. As for news, I ignore whole selections such as anything related to celebrities and cooking discussions. But I do emphasize world news and I have been watching the tends of more commercialized journalism that responds to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation's cheapness of deep journalism (CNN has responded with shoddy web pages in response to Fox News's sensationalism, for example).
 
Two, I ignore most newsletters from my own employment, though I check the tables of contents or the headlines. I also scan some emails in my employment but I have seven (7!) filters that delete emails from email abusers from, especially, administrators and staff. Email is increasingly distraction and ineffective and attempts to reading institutional email is not useful nor worth my time.

I also want to apologize for this blog post's posture that I need to read all this. Some of this is a symptom of compulsion, right? I also realize that many students cannot afford either the money or time to read anything this close. I admire students who balance complex lives of family, work, college, recreation, and more. 

A final comment. Some readers here would think that most of the lists are "liberal" and my discourse is leftist, even singularly limited on the Left. I can see that trend, but my list is based on experience. I do skim rightest news sources but I have seen a history of incorrect, sloppy, and just dishonest approaches and I have "ghosted" them from my list. I am also very critical of some sources such as The New York Times -- though some would see the NYT as liberal and I strongly argue against that. NYT is centrist, very comfortable with conservative corporations, New York City conservative white culture (food, weddings, entertainment), but it is also a very broad review of international, national, scientific, and literature news. They have perhaps the globe's second largest bureau network (I would think the BBC is the globe's largest bureau network) and the NYT has been very assertive to correct errors they make. I have no patience with "news" forums who refuse to apologize for their errors and make errors. Yes, Jacobin is definitely leftist and rather idealistic, but I follow it because the majority of periodicals are so centrist or right-of-center and their histories have been erased from my conservative K-12 and university education. They are very critical of their own histories and the assumptions of American centrism and very critical of what some Americans call "liberals," but that's another discussion. 

In short, I admit that my reading is some compulsion and it's a safe house (Mary Louise Pratt) for my own brain. I prefer to be better informed than less informed. Notice that I'm not reading nearly enough fiction and that is the most concerning big whole in my habits and I need to return to fiction for multiple reasons. Another discussion.

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