Doomscrolling! It’s real, right? Like – it seems – everyone else, I have fallen victim to the practice of scrolling Facebook and my Washington Post app (fortunately, I don’t have Twitter – I deleted it several years ago and haven’t looked back). Relaxing, this is not. And I’m in good company; I have lost count of the number of readers that have bemoaned the siren call of the phone in these stressful election days. Jessica Howard, a Shelf Awareness contributor and sometime book blogger that I have been following on social media for years, had a proposal to deal with the doomscrolling: a #VotedEarlyReadathon.

The basic idea: if you’ve already voted, instead of following the news about the candidates, polls, all of it – put the phone in another room and read a book. Seemed like good advice. And I got some good pages in.

First up was Poems Bewitched and Haunted, which was on my Halloween reading list (self-imposed, of course). A re-read (this was my third – or fourth? – time through the collection), so that seemed like a good place to start. Nice and comforting, no surprises.

Next was another re-read, and another Halloween favorite: Hallowe’en Party, by Agatha Christie. It’s not one of Christie’s most earth-shattering mysteries; it’s no Roger Ackroyd or Orient Express or even Murder at the Vicarage. But it’s fun, especially around Halloween. And knowing “whodunit” doesn’t spoil the book for me – I like to try to solve it myself the first time, but I’m happy to re-read a well-written mystery, and the Queen of Crime always delivers with sparkling dialogue and captivating settings.

Next, after finishing up with Poirot & co. on Halloween night, I grabbed the fall issue of Slightly Foxed – trying to stay on top of those. The winter issue should arrive next month, so now I’ll be ready for it when it comes.

Finished the readathon with another novel – Dorothy Whipple’s High Wages. It actually opens on a cold January day, but I felt like a story about a shopgirl in a dress boutique would be the perfect beginning to the holiday shopping season.

One stressful week, made less stressful by four good reads! I am always slow to start the week these days; Monday evenings I’m basically out of commission for books, because after I put the kids to bed that’s my day to drive down to Wegmans and pick up the week’s groceries (I’ve been doing curbside lately) – between the drive there and back, and then wiping everything down and putting it away, I don’t crash on the couch with my book until 9:30 at the earliest, and that’s almost my bedtime. So I was still clutching High Wages by the time I turned on CNN’s Election Night coverage. But you know what? Dorothy Whipple, with her detailed settings and descriptions and her fully realized characters, is the perfect antidote to 2020 political stress.

I’m glad that Jessica hosted this readathon! It definitely gave me the spark I needed to back away from the phone, stop the doomscrolling, and take care of my own mental health.

What have you been reading to take your mind off election stress?