I’ve been trying to read more non-current event stuff lately. For a while I was reading multiple weekly, bi-weekly and monthly magazines cover-to-cover to go along with my RSS feed, but over the last year or so I have cancelled most subscriptions and decided with another that I would just pick individual articles that looked interesting. The only magazine I still read cover-to-cover is National Geographic.

Part of the reason I did this was to clear space in the calendar for other things, like reading books. I have been reading a series of fiction and non-fiction books, some fluff stuff and other stuff with deep meaning. For instance, I read all three of the Nicki Heat books based on the TV show Castle right after finishing a 2000 page survey course on US history.

One of the books I started recently is Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, which I discussed yesterday a little. For whatever reason, crime novels/suspense novels always hook me right away. Each of the Castle books were started and completed in a day. But other non-fiction books always take me some time to get into. For instance I was about 20% of the way through Diamond Age, starting to think about dropping it and moving on to another book, when suddenly it clicked and I was engaged.

I had completely forgotten about this phenomena — the reading click point — since I hadn’t been reading a lot of books over the last few years. I’m glad it hit me before I turned back and hope I remember to give it time with the next book, too.