Table of Contents Bounty in the Penny Press!

Reading through a rich New Yorker on a warm morning

The New Yorker plops through the mail-slot every week, and for me it’s done that for a very long time (absent the occasional sabbatical, either because I was travelling or because I was briefly fed up), since the days when it came in a brown paper wrapper, periodically accumulating the same effect: a temptation to let a backlog develop. Each issue is a slim, dense block of prose (hence the oasis-in-a-desert love so many people feel for the interspersed cartoons), and there quickly grows an urge to pick and choose. You find yourself hunting through the Table of Contents not in search of wonder but in an attempt to ward off doorbell-ringing door-to-door pitch-people. Instead of thinking “Oooh, that sounds interesting,” you find yourself thinking, “Nope, don’t need to read that; Nope, nice try, Seymour, won’t be reading that.”