Marginal Notes: Nick Kent

And the sordid glamour of the New York Dolls

It takes me an embarrassingly long time to finish reading a book these days (unless I’m reading to a deadline for some reason, in which case I can blow through a whole book in one sitting, like I did last night with Chris Ott’s 33 1/3 entry on Unknown Pleasures). It’s another casualty of writing professionally I don’t see mentioned much. Ironically, when books are your business your workday is so full of reading that it’s tough to carve out time for pleasure reading or even research reading, and even then you might find yourself or your eyeballs so tired of starting at text on a page that you can’t actually open another book. Reading becomes an unknown pleasure indeed.

But there are certain voices that can yank me out of that slump by the collar and insist I make time to pay attention to what they have to say.