Weekly Reader

^ This magazine has more sticky notes than as porcupine has quills. But I'm not complaining.

Maybe it happened decades ago when I found myself reading more board books and bedtime stories than anything else.

Or maybe the change came when my waking hours were consumed by overseeing my homeschooled daughters' essays on The Scarlet Letter and posters displaying the achievements of the Wright Brothers.

At the very latest, it happened in 2013 when I had eye surgery that vastly improved most of my vision but diminished my ability to read tiny, smudgy lines of magazine text.

But somewhere along the line, I fell out of my lifelong habit of reading a weekly news magazine.

Ever since I met him, my husband has faithfully read every word published in every week's edition of The Economist. He makes quite a ceremony of it, devoting his Saturday mornings to this festival of reading, complete with checklists where he ticks off each article completed. Occasionally, he sends me links to interesting stories.

And honestly, I've been pretty jealous. I'd really like to get back on the weekly news magazine train. 

Oh, sure, I've tried. Countless times over the years, I've picked up a weekly issue, flipped open the cover, and attempted to plow through from front to back. I start out with a full head of steam, raring to go. Then...between the articles on monetary policy in the EU and the latest on China's military prowess (snore and double snore) and my poor eyeballs' struggle to focus on the tiny letters, my determination disappears like a runaway train.

Ah well, try and try again. That's what I always say.

So last month, I came up with a new, never-been-tried-before plan. 

As my husband was stretched out on the couch enjoying his weekly read, I handed him a stack of sticky notes. "Pick two or three articles that you think I'd enjoy, and slap a sticky note on them."

That's exactly what he did.

I opened the magazine, flipped to the designated articles, and read them.

Interestingly, he has a pretty good sense of news topics that interest me.

Marketing strategies for Millennials and Gen Zers.

Teaching techniques for third-world countries.

How the new CEO at Microsoft may redefine the business.

The future of streaming.

I also doubled down on my desk lamp reading situation, and now I can actually read at any time of day or night. Miraculous!

We're now several weeks into the experiment and it's chugging along very nicely. As I read each week's specially selected articles, I pull off the sticky notes and stack them in a neat pile on the corner of my desk. My husband finds them there and uses them to highlight articles for me in the next week's issue. 

What started as two or three highlighted articles per issue has now blossomed into ten...or nearly twenty. Looks like my husband is enjoying my new weekly reading project just as much as I am.