A young person just asked me what I read. Interesting question.
I rotate through a variety of different magazines. Favorites include First Things, Touchstone, Christianity Today, Fortune, BusinessWeek, The New Atlantis, The City, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, National Review, and Kiplingers. A publication I would like to read, but haven’t gotten around to other than the occasional web read is City Journal.
With regard to books, my favorite author of fiction is Walker Percy. I am also very fond of Lars Walker’s work. My tastes are eclectic, but I tend to gravitate toward mysteries and the old pulp action stuff, like from Robert E. Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs. My son has gotten me back into comic books. We’ve been reading through huge sections of the Avengers series.
On the non-fiction side, Whittaker Chambers’ Witness may be the best single book I ever read. I have a mini-obsession with Peter Drucker’s books. I am currently reading through the volumes I think of as having to do with social thought, but he was mostly associated with management. I love lots of different political thinkers: Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Locke, Rousseau, Paine, de Tocqueville, Sandel, Nozick, MacIntyre. Hadley Arkes is really great, too.
I used to be a great reader of many websites. You could count on me reading American Spectator, National Review, Weekly Standard, and Christianity Today online with great regularity. With the popularization of Facebook and Twitter, I find that I spend a lot more time reading things other people point out to me. I have come to count on Real Clear Politics a lot more, though.
UPDATE: I should add that I read the Bible, too. In recent years, I have felt much more strongly that is important to do so. Before, I felt secure in my sense that I understood the basic message and what it is all about, but I came under conviction that it makes no sense to examine all kinds of other texts closely and not to spend more time on the single most important text.
