Welcome to “Read State,” a recurring TM Daily Post feature in which we ask noteworthy Texans—from writers and singers to athletes and politicians—what they’re reading. Today we bring you the reading habits of Kyrie O’Connor, interim editor of the San Antonio Express-News and a panelist on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!
If I’m not sleeping or driving, I’m reading. And that’s been the case since I was six. It has kept me out of a tremendous amount of trouble.
Every morning, I read at minimum three or four newspapers, at least two of them on newsprint. I then run down a roster of about — wait, let me count — about a dozen websites, ranging from the nice and responsible (Salon and Slate) to the not so much (Cracked and Videogum).
Oh, and magazines: The New Yorker, which I’ve been reading since before I could understand a single word, to Esquire, to Rolling Stone, to Bloomberg Businessweek and House Beautiful and beyond.
I don’t read much fiction because I like to pick my fiction calories carefully—stories haunt me and I need to be choosy about those ghosts. Most recently I became the last American to read Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, which has endured a bit of quite churlish backlash lately. Ignore that; it’s terrific. Ditto the hilarious/poignant memoir Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by the Hill Country’s own Jenny Lawson, who is a one-woman response to Christopher Hitchens’ contention that women aren’t funny.
I read books on my iPad, but if I like the book, I go out and buy the hardcover, because it seems like the right thing to do.
My latest unalloyed pleasure is the Esquire politics blog, written by my WWDTM buddy Charlie Pierce. Even if you don’t agree with his judgments, you at once recognize that you’ve come face to face with a dragon unleashed.
