Do you remember when you first realized you could read? I don’t. I have vivid memories of being read to as a small child (thank you, Dad, for doing all the voices) and how much I adored that. There must have been an aha! moment, or moments, when the sounds of the words aligned with the marks on the page and the shape of the story, but I don’t recall it. The closest I’ll ever get was watching my own kids learn to read—a process I found thrilling, fascinating, and still a bit mysterious.

Once I started reading, I didn’t stop. I was one of those kids with her nose always in a book. I didn’t really think about how I was reading or whether I could do it better. I just did more and more of it.

My friend Kate Marsh beautifully described her own omnivorous early reading in a 2023 essay in The Atlantic called “Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading” [update: thank you to Joanne for the gift link!]:

When I was in elementary school, I gobbled up everything: haunting classics such as The Witch of Blackbird Pond and gimmicky series such as the Choose Your Own Adventure books. By middle school, I was reading voluminous adult fiction like the works of Louisa May Alcott and J. R. R. Tolkien. Not every child is—or was—this kind of reader. But what parents today are picking up on is that a shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun.

[I’m grateful nobody tried to teach me to read using the three-cueing method. Hat tip to Sarah Jeong, features editor of The Verge; read her recent Bluesky thread about it here.]

As I moved through school and out into the world and became a professional reader, writer, and editor, my reading took on nuances and complexities that young-reader me would have found baffling. I think I assumed I would just get better and better at it.

That was before social media and the Trump era. I want to lose myself in a book now more than ever—take me away from all this!—but I have to work at it now. The hardest part comes before I even start, when I have to put away my damn phone or close the computer and settle myself down to focus on words on a page.

When I was younger, before smartphones and the internet, it was harder to pull myself out of a book than to get pulled in (sometimes to the annoyance of adults who wanted me to get on with homework or some other distraction). I want to be that kind of reader again.

So I’m working at it. I got a cute lil sleeping-bag thingy for my phone (not a lockbox but weirdly effective at helping me to ignore my device). I asked for a dedicated e-reader for Xmas. My spouse and I have taken to reading out loud on these dark fall evenings. We’re about a hundred pages into The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, a gothic classic that I picked up after listening to Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, which I loved and highly recommend. (I write and post capsule reviews on Instagram—although that does feed the social media habit, so I should be careful with that.)

[“How do you find books to read?” A fine question, asked and answered by Anne Trubek at Notes from a Small Press.]

And of course there’s always a stack of things to read nearby in my house. I do not lack for books to lose myself in, once I remember that I still know how to do that.

Happy reading,

Jen

She doesn’t know it, but my dog Allie made the New York Times Book Review this month. She features in the lede of my review of Kate DiCamillo’s classic and delightful novel Because of Winn-Dixie, reissued this fall in a 25th anniversary edition:

When I wake up in despair about the state of the world, there’s someone I turn to for solace. It’s not my spouse, lovely though he is, but our dog Allie, a rescue lab/beagle mix from North Carolina who sleeps curled up on the bed, a furry lump of reassurance.

Allie doesn’t know it, but she belongs to a fine tradition of real and fictional canine companions who give comfort when it’s most needed. A dog doesn’t judge, doesn’t offer advice, doesn’t say “Just get over it.”

It’s not a spoiler to say I loved Winn-Dixie, which I missed the first time around. My kids weren’t yet born when it first came out in 2000, and I hadn’t read much middle-grade fiction since I was a young’un myself. (If you’d described my favorite reads back in the day as “middle-grade books,” I would have had no clue what you were talking about. These distinctions did not exist then in the way they do now.) It’s been a treat to (re)discover books meant for young readers, and I’m grateful to my NYTBR editor, Jennifer Krauss, for giving me the chance to spend some time with them. Now if I can just work my other dog, Irene, my late mother’s one-eyed shih-tzu, into my next review.

Kate DiCamillo also reminded me, via a “What We’re Reading” convo with the New Yorker that hit my inbox this morning, that I need to get back to another genre close to my heart—fairy tales.

When the children’s author Kate DiCamillo was a girl, she would listen over and over to a record of the Brothers Grimm story “The Juniper Tree”—in which, among other terrors, a child is decapitated. “I was not a kid who liked to be frightened,” DiCamillo said recently. But, she added, stories like the Grimms’ taught her “how to be brave in the face of that terror—which is a terror we all feel, not just kids. To wit, here I am, at sixty-one, going back to these stories and finding more comfort, more terror, and ever more relevance.”

She recommends several books that are going straight on my TBR/Xmas list, including The Juniper Tree, a collection of tales by the Brothers Grimm, translated by Lore Segal and Randall Jarrell and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. DiCamillo’s observation about Hans Christian Andersen’s tales will stick with me, given as I am to animistic interpretations of the world: “His work convinced me that all things (matchsticks and tin soldiers, flowers and fir trees) are sentient, that every being has a heart, and that every heart can be broken.”

It broke my heart to see political violence strike Utah Valley University last month, with the public murder of a highly controversial conservative activist. I won’t mention his name here; I’d rather not pop up in search results about him, and I’ve already had one difficult exchange online with a dear relative who feels quite differently than I do about, well, almost everything that characterizes American life in 2025. Truly we live in different realities.

I was doubly sad to see UVU in the news because I had some inspiring conversations with folks there this summer. Why? I wrote for EdSurge about UVU’s Center for Constitutional Studies and its work to promote a better understanding of the constitutional tradition, including the compromises that led to the founding of the United States. The center embraces a “maniacally nonpartisan” approach, its director told me. It runs a summer institute for K-12 teachers to equip them with the knowledge and the tools to talk about and teach civics to their students. There’s a cool digital-humanities angle, too:

Enter the Quill Project, a digital research-and-education platform developed by Pembroke College, Oxford, in partnership with Utah Valley University. Quill’s research-rich, open-access resources, all available online, include a U.S. Federal Collection about the drafting of the Federal Constitution (1787), the Bill of Rights (1789), and the Reconstruction Amendments (1864-70). The Quill team has also been documenting the many conventions — more than 230 since 1776 — that led to the individual U.S. state constitutions.

One last thing before I sign off: My first book baby turned 5 last month! Thank you to everyone who’s read, bought, borrowed, listened to, shared, reviewed, posted about, or otherwise supported Clutter: An Untidy History. I love you all. And I love that I still get stopped on the street to talk about it. Nothing is certain in life except death, taxes, and the problem of what to do with all our stuff.

Thanks for reading!

Cheers,

Jen

News! My essay “Home Range” was named a finalist for the South 85 Journal Editor’s Choice Award. Thanks to Leslie Pietrzyk, Laura Platas Scott, and their colleagues for giving my college road trip/death of a parent/COVID lockdown ramblings such a good home. It’s in great company. The theme of the spring/summer issue is “borders | boundaries | lines." Read it here.

May or March? The calendar and the deepening green of the garden this week suggest May, but the thermometer says otherwise. A cold steady rain moved in earlier this week, tap-tap-tapping on the roof over my work space. I haven’t quite gotten over the pathetic fallacy of believing that weather mirrors mood. Here’s a rainy-day view from my writing chair:

As you can see, things around here—household organization, liberal democracy—have been in a state of semi-collapse lately. M. Gessen captured the general feeling in a May 28 op-ed in the NYT:

The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chain saw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms.

Unlike the Russian autocratic breakthrough (or, for that matter, the Hungarian one, which has apparently provided some of Donald Trump’s playbook), the transformation of American government and society hasn’t been spread out over decades or even years. It’s been everything everywhere all at once.

As Adrienne Matei explained in a May 22 essay in the Guardian, things have now reached a state of hypernormalization:

First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.

The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.

This month I’ve carried on in an effort to get some books read, pages written, and general living done in spite of [waves hands at everything]. The writing chair’s tucked into a corner of what my family persists in calling the playroom, though it’s been years since that was its primary function. It’s an old sleeping porch, enclosed to make an all-season room decades before we moved into this 1922 rowhouse.

Because it used to be open to the air, the playroom feels more connected to the outside in a way the other rooms in the house do not. It’s easier to sense the outside temperature here. The rain sounds a little closer on the thin roof. The boundary between the everyday and the dreamworld feels thinner. It’s a place to find some shelter from the calamities of the world, even if it’s not well insulated from the weather.

I can hear myself think here, and the ghosts are friendly. I am never lonely in this room. Two bookshelves filled with old friends from the kids’ childhoods and mine stand cozily at either end. The dog curls up in her bed next to the chair and sleeps while I work. She’d steal the chair in a heartbeat if I gave her the chance. She feels comfortable in this space too.

SkyNet lite

One intrusive presence will not leave me alone no matter where I park myself, and I don’t mean the dog. If I’m on one of my digital devices, some manifestation of AI tries to sneak through any digital crack it can find.

My generation imprinted as kids and teens on movies like “The Terminator” and “WarGames.” Early in life we were primed to brace for sentient-computer dystopias in which intelligent SkyNets come after humanity. I didn’t expect the rise of the machines to be so damned annoying.

On top of the multitude of social, cultural, environmental, ethical, IP/copyright, and business questions and problems the rapid deployment of AI has created, it rudely insists on grabbing my attention even if I don’t want to use it. Talk about everything everywhere all at once.

[Lest you think I hate all things machine-related, here’s an AI application dreamed up by my friend Mike Witmore that looks kind of cool: BitBard, “a performance platform for AI-generated Shakespearean characters. The troupe—Falstaff, Lady Macbeth, Iago, Miranda, and Sir Andrew—interact with audiences, each other, and Shakespeare’s texts. Digital artifacts from their performances and interactions are archived, annotated, and bound to the blockchain.”]

I’ve come to dread seeing the telltale sparkles emoji on my screen. My hometown newspaper, The Washington Post, flogs AI recaps of readers’ comments and tries to serve up AI-generated summaries of articles. The settings for the Chrome browser now include “AI innovations” with a default “Help me write” option. (Hell no.) I open Gmail and Google wants me to take Gemini AI for a spin. Even my meditation app offers up an “empathetic AI companion,” a feature not designed to create a Zen-like calm in this particular user. I block, disable, opt out, repeat. It gets tiresome. (My nose for chirpy-stilted ChatGPT-generated prose, however, gets stronger every day.)

A sampler of screenshots from my daily digital rounds:

I promise you that this newsletter, like everything I write, is 100% the work of my overtaxed, imperfect, un-AI-assisted human brain.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,

Jen

Happy Earth Day! As you’ve probably noticed, the planet needs some TLC now more than ever. (Check out this BBC story about images from space that capture how 50 years of climate change has affected our beloved planet.)

I’m not a Catholic, but I appreciated climate activist Bill McKibben’s tribute to the late Pope Francis as a champion of the earth and its inhabitants:

I think Francis’s project for the earth—a recovery of fellow feeling, with a special attention to the poor—is the only thing that can save us over time.

Worth a read this Earth Day. I hope you’ll be kind to yourselves, each other, and the planet today and every day.

New writing: I’m so pleased to have an essay, “Home Range,” out in the world this month. It’s about a college road trip I took to California with my son in the pandemic summer of 2021, soon after my mother died, with lockdown and the J6 insurrection casting long shadows. Birds (hummingbirds and swallows) make an appearance too.

I haven’t written such a personal piece before, and I’m grateful to the editors of South 85 Journal for giving it such a good home. If you’ve lost a parent and/or launched a kid into the world, you’ll probably recognize some of the feelings I describe. Here’s a taste:

For a long time, I thought of home as a place that does not change. But the comings and goings of that summer reminded me that home reshapes itself into something new, over and over. Even if you never leave, it will change around you, as the people who made it familiar make their exits. My mother has left for good. My children now come and go, each return a little more fleeting than the last. I’m still here, for now.

This morning I went over to the Supreme Court for a rally in support of inclusive education, organized by a coalition that includes Authors Against Book Bans. (I’m a member; if you’re an author, please consider signing up.) Why today? The court was hearing arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case that could have significant implications for what books—whose stories—are deemed acceptable for school kids.

SCOTUSblog explains:

“In Mahmoud v. Taylor a coalition of parents from Montgomery County, Md., contend that requiring their children to participate in instruction that includes LGBTQ+ themes violates their religious beliefs and thus their First Amendment right to freely exercise their religion.”

This afternoon I’m going over to my neighborhood indie bookstore to pick up a copy of Jacob’s Room to Choose, one of the books cited by the plaintiffs. It’s published by Magination Press, the publishing arm of the American Psychological Association, which filed an amicus brief in the case:

A substantial body of research indicates that inclusive instructional materials that acknowledge LGBTQ+ people and stories as part of the general curriculum reduce student victimization in schools and ameliorate associated mental health issues for student populations. As the largest professional association of psychologists in the United States, the APA is deeply concerned about the mental health effects on students of limiting instruction using books that feature LGBTQ+ characters.

Hats off to the APA, the AABB, and everyone else standing up for inclusivity and diverse stories. Let the kids read.

Cheers,

Jen

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