Reading Time

"You look like someone who's looking for a good book." I turned around and saw the old man who works at New England Mobile Book Fair walking towards me with the friendly expression he always wears. As it was, I was indeed in the market for a good book, though that goes without saying as buying books is like heroin for me. "I think I can help you there. Do you like tennis?"

I don't really like tennis much and told him so with a polite smile. He agreed, neither did he. He then asked me if I had heard of Andre Agassi and his new autobiography Open. I had, but wasn't really planning on buying it and felt slightly disappointed that this was the book he had in mind for me. Fortunately, Andre Agassi was just his hook, and he started telling me about the writer who helped Agassi with his memoir, J.R. Moehringer. Moehringer has written a memoir of his own, The Tender Bar, and it was this that the man was trying to introduce me to. "Andre Agassi was looking to write an autobiography but needed a real writer to help him out with it." (Sports stars often enlist the help of established writers to translate their grunting, monosyllabic vocabulary into readable English.) "He read The Tender Bar and said that Moehringer was the man he wanted to write with." After buying it and reading just the first couple chapters, I can easily see why. Dude can write. The old man went on to tell me how he was reading Agassi's book solely because Moehringer cowrote it, and how Agassi became a tennis star not by accident but because his father forced him to. Apparently Papa Agassi would make little Andre spend hours and hours facing a machine that shot tennis balls at him at ridiculous speeds, starting at a very young age. "You see, when you're watching a star athlete perform, there's always a story behind it. There's a reason he's so good at what he's doing."

I picked up a copy of Time magazine yesterday. I was reading it in the waiting room at the doctor's office and decided that it might be a good thing for me to start reading. The issue I bought is actually a bit outdated, it's for the week of December 28, but it happened to be the magazine's annual Person of the Year issue. This year, the Person of the Year was a man named Ben Bernanke. Some of you may recognize him as the chairman of the Federal Reserve. He was chosen as the Person of the Year because he almost singlehandedly prevented the recession that we recently experienced from becoming a full-blown Depression of the 1930's variety. Instead of tightening funds and reducing spending, like the Federal Reserve bankers did in the 30's, and which caused the Depression to be even worse than it had to be, Bernanke adopted a policy of aggressive spending and economic stimulus to try to boost the failing economy. There's more than that to his strategy and accomplishments, but there's my limited knowledge Sparknotes version. How did he know that expanding rather than tightening of funds would prevent the recession from being worse than it should have? He was an economic scholar before being hired into Washington. More specifically, he was a scholar of the Great Depression, which allowed him to understand the mistakes of his predecessors and to avoid making the same mistakes. When you see someone who is succeeding, there is a very good reason for it.

Explanation of Title: The title refers to the fact that I was reading Time (magazine) and that it was reading time (time for me to read). Hope you enjoyed the post. If I misused monosyllabic or if it doesn't make sense let me know please. It popped into my head as I was writing and I decided to go with it.