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Credit...Andrea Wyner for The New York Times

By Leah Greenblatt

Leah Greenblatt is a writer and critic living in Brooklyn. Her most recent review for the Book Review was of “The Woman in Me,” by Britney Spears.

Dear readers,

I have always loved the idea of a sanitarium: Swaddle me in blankets like a chic burrito, please, and tilt my deck chair toward the Swiss Alps or whatever hills you’ve got.

Because I am neither an exhausted starlet nor an heiress blessed with endless rehabilitative funds, alas, the reality of respite rarely involves an upscale wellness resort and a passport. But a trip as brief as a day or two can still trigger the kind of brain-and-body reset that travel at its best is designed to invoke. Even the blustery arrival of an unexpected guest, tropical storm Ophelia, could not ruin the curative gifts of a recent long weekend at friends’ woodsy, social-media-free outpost in rural North Carolina. Who is to say that marathon viewings of “Naked Attraction,” accompanied by much communal shrieking, don’t count as group therapy?

I like it too when novelists we tend to keep in certain boxes turn out to have taken their own furloughs in less familiar lands: memoir, short story. And while any book worth its print run should lift you to another place — what else is reading for? — the works showcased in this week’s edition feel somehow both transporting and restorative, a med-spa of the mind. In whatever brief hours pass between their pages, there is a sense of being really truly there and not here. And for these last precious days before the 5 p.m. darkness, a.k.a. daylight saving time, descends, that is good enough for me (though the dream of Swiss burritos endures).

—Leah

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