My friend Win T. (now, there's a winning combination!) tells me of his friend who refuses to engage in the typical conversational gambit of "what do you do?" as in, what is your work, your job.
Won't do it.
Win's friend, I'm told, says: "What are you reading?"
I like that, and not just because I myself am an avid or at least an ardent reader, though not as voracious a reader as is Bill S., who logged something like 87 books last year. (As an engineer, he of course has a spreadsheet and grades and categorizes his reading.)
I like "what are you reading?" as a conversational opener because a) yes, it plays to something I enjoy b) it tells you much more than someone's quotidian [mea culpa, forgive insertion of Latinate word] job and c) it is almost certain to be, well, conversational.
For the record, I am reading scroogenomics and the January 4, 2010, edition of The New Yorker magazine.
What are you reading?
3 comments:
Here's the essential truth about my friend's approach: it re-jiggers the whole self-defining nature of casual conversation. All too often we are what we do. He has chosen to abandon that tiresome paradigm. The question "what are you reading?" (in lieu of "what do you do?") creates a connection between the asker and the asked. It says "tell me something about you" in a way that asking about a person's job never could.
As for me, I'm going through a short story/essay phase. I'm reading "What the Dog Saw" by Malcolm Gladwell, "Up in the Old Hotel" by Joseph Mitchell and I am re-reading "Last Words," a great collection of obituaries from the New York Times
I'm reading "The Red Hot Typewriter," by Hugh Merrill. It's a biography of John D. MacDonald.
Every few days, I also read a few more pages of "Playback," Raymond Chandler's last completed novel. Hmm, do I detect a trend?
Sometimes I also dip into "Robert Benchley's Wayward Press." In the 1920s and 1930s, Benchley, under the pseudonym Guy Fawkes, wrote a column of press criticism for The New Yorker. In later years, A.J. Liebling took over the column and is more famous for doing it, though I prefer Benchley. Although he's more noted as a humorist, Benchley's press columns are often quite pointed and, in some cases, show that journalistic hype and hoaxes didn't begin with Entertainment Tonight and Balloon Boy.
Winthrop, Marcus,
I salute you both, erudite readers that you are. Thanks for commenting.
PK
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