I say 'sort of' in regards to my 2021 subscription. While I have ten of the twelve books (plus the freebie they always send at the start of a new year), I have two more to go. Sadly, I have not actually finished any of these. I know I have mentioned how the last few years have been rocky reading years, and this (and my NYRBs in particular) are all par for the course it seems.
Another reading blip that is making me reassess where I am going and what I am doing and the choices I am making. I love NYRB Classics. I have a healthy stack of them and have been a subscriber since 2013. Rather than adding to the piles, I am going to be more selective next year. I am not going to re-subscribe for 2022. I will miss the monthly book mail (though I am still waiting on the November book and hope it is safely in transit and not lost), but some books appealed to me more than others this year. Better, I think, to cherry pick going forward. I can see on their website the forthcoming titles, so I will give order those that I want to mos read from my local indie. It is still a win-win.
This year's selections:
*Freebie: The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns
*January: The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
February: Germs: A Memoir of Childhood by Richard Wollheim
March: Little Snow Landscape by Robert Walser
*April: Other Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits, Saints by Teffi
*May: Good Behavior by Molly Keane
*June: The Dead Girls' Class Trip by Anna Seghers
July: The Stone Face by William Gardner Smith
August: Storm by George Stewart
September: Kapo by Aleksandar Tisma
October: The Open Road by Jean Giono
*November: Generations: A Memoir by Lucille Clifton (waiting on this one)
December: ??
The astericks show the books I would have purchased--the books that I most likely would have wanted had I not subscribed, so a little bit hit or missed this year. I love the idea of a monthly book subscription, and maybe someday I will return to this one or choose another publisher who offers the service. I have long been a subscriber, too, to The Ney York Book Review, but I am going to let that subscription lapse as well. It will be only the New Yorker, so perhaps that will free up more time (or less pressure to have so many things I feel bad at not keeping up with?) to spend time with one literary magazine?
What are your favorite magazines? Do you subscribe? Subscribe to any monthly book services? Unfortunately I no longer have a place where I can browse magazines save the very limited supermarket selection!