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What I’m Reading Now: Wick Allison

Wick Allison, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, D Magazine Partners

Books: Right now, I’m deep into Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall. Actually, I am past the midway point of this absorbing, marvelous character study of Thomas Cromwell, and I don’t yet know why it is titled Wolf Hall. I am also in the middle of the Everyman’s Library edition of Montaigne’s Essays, edited in 1943 by Donald Frame. As Hilary Mantel has become my new favorite author, Montaigne has become my new BFF. Jane Kramer wrote a piece in the New Yorker in September entitled “Me, Myself, and I” claiming that Montaigne was the first modern man. Certainly he was the first to explore so entertainingly the ins and outs of the human psyche, using as his touchstone his own. But I am reminded that I am also (on my IPhone Kindle app) in the middle of another book, Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country, which has made me never want to go to Australia, for the fear that it may not turn out to be as hilarious a continent as he makes it out to be. Then again, as one critic wrote, Bryson could make dryer lint funny. So you can imagine his recounting of a cricket match he listens to on the only radio station he can get as he drives 480 miles through an Australian desert without ever seeing another car.

Websites: Andrew Sullivan and Megan McArdle at The Atlantic are daily musts, along with HuffPost and Memeorandum.com. I regularly check in with economist Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution, for Texas news with The Quorum Report and Texas Tribune, for local art at Renegade Bus, and for industry news at Silicon Valley Insider and I Want Media. Of course, I check in with FrontBurner a couple of times a day and with our other D Magazine blogs at least daily.

Print: New York Times daily, usually when I get home from work. I tried reading it on Kindle, but hated the experience. The eye is a natural editor.  A digitized table of contents only makes me want to skip everything. Instead, with the print edition, I find myself stopping on page 17A and reading a story on a subject that up to that moment I didn’t know I cared about, say teenage ophan boys tending fish farms in Zambia. The combination of headline, subhead, photo, photo caption, and pull quote will attract me to things I otherwise could have cared less about, and that’s what I love about print — it allows me to suprise myself. I try to keep up with The New Yorker, but fail and end up stuffing a bunch into a knapsack when I’m going to be on a plane. I also subscribe to Conde Nast Traveler, for aspirational purposes only, and to The Week, for the book reviews. I would subscribe to D Magazine but I get it at the office. D Home, strangely, is one of my favorite magazines, and I love to learn from D CEO about my peers in business.