Monday, February 25, 2008

What are you reading?

Do you subscribe to any magazines or journals? Do you like them? What are they? I don't know how many responses I'll get to this, but I'm curious to see any and all.

As I've mentioned before, I do a lot of reading, and am not overly particular on what I read. Well, I am sort of particular, but I don't, for example, just read a single genre to the exclusion of all else. I don't read a lot of book-length nonfiction, but I won't say never.

On the subject of non-book-length nonfiction, my taste in magazines is all over the place too. Truthfully, except for a few cooking magazines, I should rephrase that to "my distaste in magazines is all over the place". Right now, we get Cooking Light and Cook's Illustrated, and I've had a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens forever, which isn't horrible (not great either, though--kind of unsatisfying in cooking, family life, decorating, and gardening all at the same time). We got Rolling Stone for about a year as a freebie with some concert tickets, and that was one of the more interesting subscriptions in recent years, but I felt too uneducated about the music and media business to follow anything but the long articles. We get Parenting (or is it Parents?) magazine, not because it's great, but because my daughter loves the Sesame Street kids mag that comes with it (and it's cheap). I used to subscribe to several sewing magazines (Burda, Threads..), but those became expensive eye candy (though I'm getting a decent amount back out of my Burda collection, thanks to Ebay....), and always made me annoyed about the time I don't have to spend creating some of the beautiful garments they would showcase. We have a handful of software journals, but I rarely read those (don't feel like reading about work once I'm gone, somehow).

I keep wondering if there is something out there that would be interesting to read for more than a year or so. The pop-culture mags don't seem to fit--Vogue, Glamour, Cosmo, etc. I rotate through various home-type ones (Traditional Home, Southern Living, etc), but they get kidn of repetitive after a while (and the rooms they feature are horrendously expensive). I keep tossing around the idea of National Geographic or Popular Science, or ? I just don't know. So, I'm curious to see what other people read. Maybe it'll spark some ideas...

5 comments:

HiddenChicken said...

I get Real Simple, SELF and The New Yorker. Real Simple is actually pretty helpful with ideas for reusing things (including making a new dish out of the odd bits of leftovers you might have from parties, other dinners, etc. plus new ways to use old things). SELF is one source of motivation for exercise and The New Yorker feeds my brain a bit, though it's kind of expensive. My mom signed me up for Southern Living and my sister got me Cooking Light, both of which have pretty good ideas.

Other than that, I read a ton of books about this, that and the other. I'm currently reading Rob Roy for a book group and on the side reading the Secret Magdalene, a fictional story about Mary Magdalene.

My husband gets The Economist and that's about it. He likes it for the global perspective on politics and finances, both large and small.

Amanda said...

No magazine subscriptions for me. Phil gets a Woodworking one that always has nice pictures. I used to subscribe to Silhouette Desire (Harlequin book club) and might do so again. I might start getting Writer's Digest as well. I used to read it when I was a kid (library copy). Otherwise, I'm little to no help on the magazine front.

Brian said...

I like Scientific American. Most of the stories have enough technical detail to be interesting, and not too much to understand. There's plenty of eye candy (if you're a nerd), what with artists' renderings of solar systems and CGI cellular biology and whatnot. I've no idea how much it costs, because I get the subscription as a birthday present every year.

I get Game Informer because it comes with my Gamestop discount card. I don't think I would pay for it by itself, because I'm not that excited by fancy screenshots of games I'll never take the time to play. Usually I just read the Wii section and skim the rest.

For a while we had a subscription to Wired that we got for free somehow. I found it too full of itself to read regularly, and all the new information was stuff I'd already read online. Not worth spending the money to renew.

I had subscriptions to Dragon and Dungeon for years. Unfortunately they're not published anymore. Supposedly there will be online versions once 4th Edition comes out, but I don't know the details of that.

bookworm-annie said...

I subscribe to Fine Gardening, Fine Cooking (both fabulous publications by Taunton Press), Mental Floss (hilarious), The Week (fills me in on what I should know without having to read the newspaper on a daily basis (which is quite depressing these days), Brain, Child (subtitled - the magazine for thinking mothers, but my husband devours it as well. It's also my absolute favorite magazine and will bring you to tears then make you laugh till you pee your pants - all in the same issues).

the squeaky mouse gets the cheese said...

We both like Gourmet - worth saving, browsing and it gives us good ideas. She reads Parenting, I'll occasionally read some of the articles in that too.
Tech-wise, I try to read Oracle or InfoWeek once in a while, but I agree with you, I don't really want to do much of that when not at work.
Mostly I read my news online-- I particularly like to read a lot of the articles on money.cnn.com.