I’m in Denver, Colorado at Nafas Residency, working on my book about reading as a spiritual practice. (I despair of finding a good title—for a while I was thinking of it as The Angel and the Dragon, which makes sense to me, but feels a little crystal wizard, no?)

The big focus of my working time here (other than pausing to write a review of So Mayer’s Bad Language, which I’ll share when it’s published, but suffice to say: you should read it) has been the chapter called “Reading as Refuge.” As a w...