Stress reading
Shared spaces and good books
Greetings from the nation’s capital, where things are—well, TBH, they’re not good. If you want to know how many of us here are feeling, this guy captures the local mood pretty darn well.
I’m typing this at Quill & Crumb, the new cafe in the Great Hall of the renovated Folger Shakespeare Library. It’s a mere two blocks from the Capitol, where the fate of DC’s budget (and so much else) hangs by a thread. There’s a hell of a lot to be angry, upset, and worried about, close to home and far away. I could fill this newsletter about how hard the last six weeks have been for my Capitol Hill neighborhood, not to mention the rest of the world, and for so many people and institutions I care about.
But that doesn’t feel like the best use of my time or yours. When every news blast or social media post conveys yet another horror/outrage, you don’t need me adding to the psychic load. Not today, anyway.
So instead I’ll tell you how all around me in this beautiful space people are reading, catching up with friends, working on laptops, scribbling in notebooks. A handful in suits look like they might be here to hash out some political business, but this is not a space where DOGE boys or Muskovites would hang out. It’s too bookish, too convivial, too humane, too…shared.
I’ve sought out spaces like this all my life, but they’ve taken on new meaning for me amidst the current chaos. I often go work at a neighborhood branch of the DC Public Library—not as upscale as the Folger, and with fewer comfy places to read and no fancy coffee drinks to order, but accessible and welcoming. Good things both. Where do you go to think, read, reflect, and be alone together?
Is stress reading a thing? I’m already three books ahead on my Goodreads 2025 reading challenge, and I don’t see any reason to slow down. (I post mini-reviews on my Instagram account for now, until I figure out a better, less Meta-heavy platform I like.)
Last night I trekked across town to the flagship Politics & Prose on Connecticut Avenue NW to hear my friend Gary Krist talk about his new book, Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco. (PW called it “a masterful work of true crime….as edifying as it is exciting”—starred review.) Check it out. I’ll be reading it after my spouse is done with our copy. I loved seeing a lot of DC literary friends at the reading, too. As another pal said to me recently, “We’re all in this together.”
New writing: I got to escape 2025 Washington via some literary time travel when my editor at the New York Times Book Review asked me to review Linda Joan Smith’s The Peach Thief, a historical middle-grade novel set in 1850 in Lancashire, England. The book follows Scilla Brown, an unwanted workhouse girl who stumbles into a paradise of sorts when she steals into an earl’s garden in search of a peach.
Caught and mistaken for a boy, Scilla’s put to work scrubbing plant pots and in the process discovers her own version of paradise:
Every garden is a secret garden, revealing wonders, if you know how to look. Smith, an author of garden books and the former editor of Country Home magazine, writes with a hands-in-the-dirt affinity for the rhythms and needs of growing things. “The Peach Thief” bursts with sensory details: the sun-warmed velvet of a ripe peach, rhubarb plants with “stalks red as rubies must be,” “the hum of life” in the “tiny scrap of green” of a cauliflower seedling.
Is Scilla, lying about her identity and her background, the serpent in this eden? You’ll have to read the book to find out. :)
Keep reading—and keep on keeping on, because we are all in this together.
Cheers,
Jen
Is stress reading a thing?
Yes, for me it's almost a lifesaver!
Since I always read before going to sleep, I hope to "manipulate" my poor brain ;-)
I also always read on the train or in the waiting room - to prevent me from reading more news on my smartphone.
Thanks for your book tip today :-)