This magazine makes me feel dumb - I could never get into it despite many attempts. It takes me a while to get into a book, and jumping into one snippet after another never felt right to me.
There's always (insert city) review of each other's books to make everyone else seem unhip, unenlightened, and uneducated because they didn't osmote obscurant works 10-50 years sooner.
A healthy perspective is to look at the potential wells of knowledge and experience as infinite, and to sip the firehoses no more than one can handle and without going down every rabbit hole, but do explore a few every now and then. Read and live enough, the archetypes and patterns tend to fold insouciantly into similar themes seen before. In my view, it's the novelty of unusual idiocracies and tangential minutia that develops plot and characters.
