Literary shabbos

As I've shared before, my shabbos observance has long dictated that I observe, to as great an extent possible, all matters financial on Saturdays, including all reading. Since so much is bound up with finance in my fevered brain, that has come to include also politics and even technology, so for instance an article about the AI scene in the Bay Area that my neighbor Russ recommended that I read. That is too close to work.

So I find myself on Saturdays driven to the arts and culture sections of magazines when I am reading or performing other tasks in the digestive cycle. These were of course very much my haunts back in my literary days. This strategy is bearing fruit already. This morning I started reading an interesting article on the writer Percival Everett in one magazine and the blockbuster tweens and up graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier in another. Both seem very interesting. Hearing about new writers naturally heightens my desire to push through the novel I'm currently reading so I can move on to something else. It's a very virtuous cycle.

For those who may wonder why someone like me who was raised Episcopalian which is -- in the estimation of some at least -- almost Christian, would choose Saturday as sabbath rather than Sunday, I can only say that after a full week of work I just can't wait that long. Plus on Sunday there is always the spectre of Monday just around the corner and the need to ramp up for it. So Saturday it is.