CDMX Reads

Never in my adult life have I experienced such a drought of buying and reading books.

I’m not buying because, well, I’ve run out of space.

I filled our bookshelves and then, by embracing perilously high top-shelf stacking, managed to squeeze another hundred or so books onto those shelves. Then I broke a longtime promise to my husband and bought another bookshelf. Now that one’s full too. There is, quite literally, nowhere else for the books to go.

I’m not reading, meanwhile, because my life is as full as my shelves are. I’m working. I’m teaching. I’m parenting. I’m second-screen TV-watching while I exercise and write emails. And, more than I care to admit, I’m doomscrolling. I reach the end of the day, exhausted, and am lucky if I can get through a chapter of whatever I’m reading before it falls to my chest. 

But there’s one book-related behavior I continue to enjoy unabated: browsing. 

And, in Mexico City a few weeks ago, I elevated browsing to an art form. Every day of my six-day trip involved at least one library or book store. Some days involved several. Alongside eating and aimless wandering, I know no better way to get a handle on the essential character of a city than to float, light as air, through one row of books after another, watching book clubs meet, locals debate fiction choices, and other tourists gawk alongside me. It’s a travel trick that works everywhere, but in Mexico City, a place blessed with a surplus of golden light and architecturally significant buildings, that browsing felt transcendent, borderline divine. It’s such an eye-wateringly beautiful city.

So where did I go?

First up was Under the Volcano Books, an English-language shop on the 2nd floor of the American Legion. Just a ten-minute walk from our Airbnb in Condesa and a two-minute walk from Odette, my new favorite bakery in the world, Under the Volcano was hushed, low-key, and comfortable. A great start, straight off the plane.

Later that day, I went to the first of several bookstores in Cafebreria en Pendulo’s mini-empire. With three stories, soaring ceilings, and a rooftop patio, I thought the Roma location was stunning – little did I know what the other locations had waiting for me.

The next morning, this time with Emmett in tow, I went to Pendulo’s Condesa location. While the Roma shop had been bright and modern, our local Pendulo was warmer – all terracottas and mosaics and lime-washed walls. We got coffee there and then headed south, to Coyoacan.

After doing the requisite stops at Frida Kahlo’s house – remarkable – and the Coyoacan market – the vibes were better than the cheap trinkets – we walked to the astounding Elena Garro Cultural Center. It’s a hundred-year-old mansion now enrobed in a modernist glass and concrete shell, and functions as a bookstore slash cafe slash community center (Mexico City really seems to excel at multi-purpose spaces). I’d never seen anything quite like it.

The next day we hit up Cafebreria el Pendulo Polanco, the consensus winner of the ‘if you visit only one Pendulo location, let it be this one’ contest. It was, indeed, incredible – combining the warmth and character of the Condesa location with the impressive scale of the Roma location. Though it pains me to agree with the crowd, it was, indeed my favorite Pendulo.

Another day, another new neighborhood, this time upscale El Pedregal, home of some of the city’s fanciest houses – and, notably, multi-hyphenate Tetetlan. While the Pendulo shops lead with books and the cafes play second-fiddle, the reverse is true at Tetetlan. It is, first and foremost, a restaurant, and the orbiting galleries, shops, yoga studio, and library just serve to enrich the experience. Built in a former horse stable, it felt like 1970s Pacific Northwest by way of Mexico City. 

It wasn’t our last bookstore cafe though. While walking through Chapultepec, CDMX’s equivalent of Central Park, we stumbled upon a location of Librería Porrúa that significantly outclassed the chain’s usually so-so stores. This outpost – WOW. Trees grew through it! It opened up onto a lake! It served delicious donuts! Plus, its mere existence is a testament to the incredible privilege of low humidity – you can run a bookstore outside, on a lake, without fear of rot or mold!

The next day we went to the coolest – and I know I’m getting girl-who-cried-wolf with the hyperbolic adjectives at this point, but stay with me! – library I’ve ever been to: Biblioteca Vasconcelos. It’s almost twenty years old but looks straight out of a futuristic sci-fi movie – rumor has it that it was the inspiration for the tesseract in Interstellar. Beyond defying convention, its design feels like it defies gravity too: the library contains a half million books and yet feels almost empty. One downside all the airy vastness? By the time I’d climbed all seven flights of stairs to the top, I had a serious bout of vertigo. 

Finally, on our last day, we went to the city’s historic center, which includes Donceles, a street with an unusual density of bookstores. In stark contract to the Instagram-bait of Pendulo’s locations, these bookstores had a comparatively humble charm – unassuming storefronts with teetering stacks of used books more reminiscent of my shelves at home than of a carefully curated emporium. It was the perfect comedown to my browsing bonanza.

Another upside of a browsing-only vacation? I didn’t have to bring a second suitcase for my book haul (used that space for a clothing haul instead :))