Recommended with reservations.

In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Ward Just’s Exiles in the Garden.

On WHYY’s Fresh Air Terry Gross interviews Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

Salon’s Literary Guide to the World has an entry on Washington, D. C.

Maud Newton has a series of posts on independent bookstores in Washington.

Christopher Byrd at the Washington Post reviews Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

A new book by two Beltway veterans laments a sidetracked Congress. The Washington Post’s review succinctly summarizes the authors’ approach:

The authors are members of what, sadly, may be a disappearing breed in Washington: independent-minded, knowledgeable experts whose concern for process is stronger than their desires for particular outcomes. They are means guys in an age dominated by ends. And they most emphatically do not believe that any particular end justifies craven or extra-legal means.

I am passionate about public transportation in general and subway systems in particular. I do not feel that I have a handle on either the layout or the character of a city until I have ridden its subway (and if it doesn’t have one, then where the hell am I?). It was therefore with great pleasure that I discovered a new book about Washington’s Metro.

Not surprisingly, writers have greeted these measures with a mixture of enthusiasm and dread. The dread was perhaps most eloquently crystallized last month in Washington at BookExpo, the publishing industry’s annual convention, when the novelist John Updike forcefully decried a digital future composed of free downloads of books and the mixing and matching of “snippets” of text, calling it a “grisly scenario.”

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.