Hello, My name is Scott….

Ξ March 12th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Literature, Personal |

And I’m addicted to periodicals. The first step as I understand it is to admit you have a problem. The fact that I have a spreadsheet to track my periodical subscriptions so I know when they are up is probably a clear signal.

I was never a huge reader growing up. I rarely read books as a child right up through high school. I admit it.. I probably spent more effort ‘BS’ing my way through my book reports – usually with decent grade results – than it probably would have taken to just read the damn book. We didn’t have the Internets back then so it took much more effort to avoid reading the book! But, I was less than the model student even though I got pretty fair grades right up until graduation. After High School I read a few books here and there, but not a whole lot. It wasn’t until I was about 21 or 22 and after I started college that I really began to read more books whether it was great literature like The Once and Future King or a current non-fiction book about business and/or politics. But after graduating from college, my addiction to periodicals began. Oh sure, it probably started innocently enough with a subscription to Autoweek and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine, but it wasn’t long before my addiction lead me to read such material as Fortune, The Economist, and Car and Driver! It only progressed and got worse until I find myself here, today, 13 years removed from college graduation with subscriptions to the following (In no particular order):

• The Robb Report
• The Morning Call Newspaper (local)
• Fortune
• Fortune Small Business
• The Economist
• Car and Driver
• Autoweek
• RACER
• Vintage Motorsport
• Classic Motorsports
• Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine
• Smart Money
• Barron’s
• Layers Magazine
• Photoshop User Magazine
• Road and Track
• Maximum PC
• Eastern Pennsylvania Business Journal
• Entrepreneur Magazine
• Internet Retailer
• Now Defunct Business 2.0 and Cargo
• AND miscellaneous copies of other magazines I might pick up from a visit to Barnes & Noble

And I have the nerve to ask myself why I have unread books sitting in my library and why I don’t take the time to read them?! Oh sure, I read through recent books such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and The Digital Photography Book 1 & 2 by Scott Kelby… and they were fantastic and very informative and helpful – but I’m talking about books that make you examine and think about our great country and the world at large. Books that trigger thought processing that break the habits of listening to what I call the “30 second tag lines of ignorance” from the main stream media. But, like any good periodical junky, I’ll just let that thought pass and go back to reading one of the unread issues of one of the periodicals from above. Let’s see… an article in RACER about Juan Pablo Montoya, that will work.