There's nothing I love more than quietly reading. I love it alone. I love it in groups. But I especially love doing it in public, with the rest of the world buzzing around me, all absorbed in their own little worlds. What if the antidote to burnout, loneliness, and the attention economy was… sitting in a room with strangers and reading quietly?

This week, I’m talking to Guinevere de la Mare, the co-founder of Silent Book Club, a global movement that started with one exhausted mom who just wanted to read a single uninterrupted chapter and somehow turned into thousands of chapters in more than 60 countries.

We chat about why reading in public started to feel weirdly indulgent, how phones became the more “acceptable” way to check out, and why focusing on a book will actually bring us back to ourselves. There’s also detours into late-stage capitalism, wealth inequality, and why women keep finding themselves fixing broken systems on their own. Raises hand. Me, me, me.

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