THE NEW YORKER

Is there a finer magazine in all the world? Not for me. I am an avid magazine reader, we subscribe to many, but the one that brings me most pleasure is The New Yorker.
My daughter and her family live in New York and whenever they are home, like this past Christmas, they kindly bring back for me a huge bundle of copies of The New Yorker. They subscribe to it and knowing my penchant for it repatriate to me the copies they have read.

From their covers to their cartoons to the advertisements and all the marvellous stories and reviews they contain I am in heaven with a pile of them.
Among this last batch - all copies from August 7 to November 20 - was this wonderful cover on the issue of November 6.It seems so appropriate as the New Yorker always has provided a vehicle for extensive and thoughtful book reviews as well as giving many interesting author interviews.





Some of my favourite pieces from these copies which might give you some idea why I get so much pleasure from this gem of a magazine included many book reviews by John Updike; a long piece on Samuel Beckett; a double page ad for Portland,Oregon promoting itself as a place to visit and for which the principal attraction was Powell's City of Books, claimed to be the world's largest bookstore; a critical story on the USA defense budget which made the point that the US now spends more on defense than every other country in the world combined (!); lots of excellent short fiction including pieces by Richard Ford and Roddy Doyle; and of course extensive listings for art and other events in New York as well as movie and CD reviews, comment on current affairs; a 24 page profile of Bill Clinton; Milan Kundera on what makes a novelist; a fascinating story on cyclists in New York - more than 120,000 ride bicycles every day with a smaller proportion of New Yorkers owning cars compared with any other large city in the western world; a long story on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; six pages on Leonard Woolf;and the last one I'll mention for now this piece on President Bush at his press conference the day after the mid-term elections in November when his Republican Party got thumped:

"Impressions are inherently subjective, of course, but he looked like a man who at that moment would much prefer to be commissioner of baseball, the job he longed for in 1993 before falling back on running for governor of Texas. It has been obvious for some time that , as President of the US, George W Bush is in very far over his head. He does not know how to use power wisely. He will now have a Democratic Congress to restrain him, and perhaps, to protect him - and us - from his unfettered impulses. This may not be the Thanksgiving he was looking forward to, but the rest of us have reasons to be grateful.

Yes indeed, this is my kind of magazine.

And as if all those back copies were not enough I arrived back from holiday to find a package from Amazon Books awaiting me. I thought this rather odd as I hadn't ordered anything from them in recent months.

When I opened it I found to my delight and astonishment that it contained THE COMPLETE NEW YORKER - a six CD rom set containing every issue of the New Yorker, more than 4000 issues from the very first issue in February 1925 through to April 2006. I thought I had died and gone to heaven!
I immediately contacted my New York family and they conceded that they had indeed arranged for its delivery. How wonderful. How spoilt am I? The ultimate gift.