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City secrets: reading at Sacramento's Tupelo Coffeehouse
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The view from my table in the corner of Tupelo Coffeehouse, Sacramento
Sacramento's Tupelo Coffeehouse is a great little book club secret. People do all kinds of reading. Study reading. Filling-the-hours reading. Pleasure reading. Work reading. Some things are written so well that you can read them while standing up on a bus full of 15-year-old girls just released from school. (One vivid memory: riding the Muni bus down 19th Avenue from San Francisco State to the Richmond District. Even the sound of twenty giggling teens boarding at the Mercy High School stop could not pull me from Middlemarch.)
But when book club members I know are obligated to read something, we like to take that reading to the streets, to elevate a required-reading experience by putting it into an inspirational place.
So here’s a little Sacramento book club secret: we have many warm, welcoming places to enjoy books in public, either to read alone, quiet and undisturbed, or to talk freely in a reading group.
The first place on my list is Tupelo Coffeehouse and Roasting Company. Part of the local Naked Lounge group, their business philosophy promises that “In a world increasingly dominated by bland, faceless strip malls, suburban sprawl, and corporate coffee,” they “don't want robots working with or for us, instead we try to promote creativity, dialogue, and individuality.” You feel this as you enter the store. Located on Elvas, between East Sac and Sac State, Tupelo’s atmosphere is warm, friendly, comfortable, bustling, but not noisy.
First off, their coffee products are perfect, little works of art. So expect to wait a bit for your cup. 
This is not a fast-food experience. But when your specialty coffee arrives at your table (they will deliver it to you without scribbling your name on a paper cup and bellowing it to the world), it will have an arty little swirl of caffeine drawn through the foam. This will make you feel special. It will make the book in your purse better, too. I suggest you try the bowl of soul, – chamomile tea, vanilla soy milk, honey and cinnamon. This will arrive at your table in a generous cup with a wooden stirrer balanced on top, dangling a teabag into the sweet mixture.
In a box-shaped space, Tupelo has several mini-rooms, chairs and tables grouped inside mock walls of willow branches. The floors are paint-peeling concrete and the walls are concrete brick, broken up by large windows. The seating is all upholstered in leather. In the middle of the room are a black leather couch and two leather chairs squared off around a coffee table, used this morning by a family of six: grandmother, grandfather, dad, mom, toddler and infant. They were the store’s de facto center of attention, children gurgling and giggling while their adults sipped and chatted.
A little closer to the counter, is a large, heavy table with bench seating. Though I have used that spot often for small meetings, today it hosted one solo reader, enjoying the skylight that shoots sunshine down onto the expansive table-top where he had spread a few newspapers.
On the periphery are many tables for two, mostly used by singles. This morning, seven people pecked away on laptops (power strips circle the room), three read newspapers and one elderly man settled in with a travel book and note-pad.
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Tupelo servers Rae Harris and Inge Skogberg
My seat this morning was in the corner of the store, near photos of Johnny Cash and Mohammed Ali. From this spot, I was able to read from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (which falls in the category of pleasure read, not required-read) without distraction. The conversations around me were low, muted by the Dave Brubeck Quartet and the like, at just the right volume to diffuse the details of other people’s conversation.
In this spot, I was able to read easily without interruption or awkwardness. When I looked up to sip or nibble, I enjoyed the view of other readers, other sippers, knowing the coffee servers this morning, Rae Harris and Inge Skogberg, were in no hurry to clear my spot. And I was in no hurry to leave.
Next Friday: Giovanni's Pizza, a great spot for casual book club meetings.
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