Episode 392 || September Reading Recap
This week on From the Front Porch, Annie recaps the books she read and loved in September. As always, we’re offering a September Reading Recap Bundle, which features Annie’s three favorite books from this month.
Get your September Reading Recap Bundle or your favorites of Annie’s September reads on our website:
September Reading Recap Bundle
Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette
The Revivalists by Christopher M. Hood
Directed by James Burrows by James Burrows
Sam by Allegra Goodman
River of the Gods by Candice Millard
The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
A Flaw in the Design by Nathan Oates
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz
From the Front Porch is a weekly podcast production of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in South Georgia. You can follow The Bookshelf’s daily happenings on Instagram at @bookshelftville, and all the books from today’s episode can be purchased online through our store website, www.bookshelfthomasville.com.
A full transcript of today’s episode can be found below.
Special thanks to Dylan and his team at Studio D Podcast Production for sound and editing and for our theme music, which sets the perfect warm and friendly tone for our Thursday conversations.
This week Annie is listening to Celebrities for Jesus by Katelyn Beaty.
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We’re so grateful for you, and we look forward to meeting back here next week.
Our Executive Producers are... Donna Hetchler, Angie Erickson, Cammy Tidwell, Chantalle C, Nicole Marsee, Wendi Jenkins, Laurie Johnson, and Kate Johnston Tucker.
Transcript:
Annie Jones [00:00:01] Welcome to From the Front Porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business and life in the South.
[00:00:25] "There was for me, during this time, a sense of being dazed. As though in a way I was not capable of taking in everything that was happening in this world. Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea.
[00:00:42] I'm Annie Jones, owner of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia. And this week, I'm recapping the books I read in September.
[00:00:53] I can hardly believe it, but we are fast approaching our 400th episode of From the Front Porch. (Please picture the wide-eyed emoji here). From the Front Porch has been plugging along since 2014. And thanks to listeners like you, the show has continued to grow and thrive. We would love to continue to grow the show (and, as a result, grow our indie bookstore in Thomasville, Georgia). One way we could do that is by reaching new-to-us listeners, and the best way to do that is with reviews. As of this recording, we are 832 reviews on Apple Podcasts. Here is one of my recent favorites from EFGirl.
[00:01:28] I love listening to this podcast. I live in Thomasville, so I find the discussions about local events very helpful. But I think anyone from the South or even a small town can identify with the topics discussed. With each new episode, I add a few new books to my list to read based on the recommendations of Annie and her guests. It feels like we're all just sitting around chatting with close friends.
[00:01:50] This makes me so happy because for a long time so many of our listeners were long distance, which was great. But I really love that we reach local and faraway audiences because that's what I want The Bookshelf to do. So that review made me very happy. If you have not left a review, all you have to do is open up the podcast app on your phone, look for From the Front Porch, scroll down until you see 'Write a Review' and then tell us what you think. We'd love to hear from you.
[00:02:17] Now, hurray! Here is what I read in September. September has been a good month. These episodes are a little bit odd because I record them ever so slightly before the end of the month. Not too much because I don't want to cheat. I really do want to tell you what I read this actual month. So the books I'm going to discuss here I have read. But I wind up recording a little bit before the month actually end. So I'm sitting here thinking, gosh, what was this month like? It just feels like I blinked and it's all of a sudden October. I don't really know what happened. I feel like August and September blurs honestly and I don't quite know what to blame that on. The good news is my reading life has been really lovely. I think I mentioned this in the August recap episode, I feel like I've gotten back into a rhythm of reading literary fiction, which is nice. That was kind of my go to genre pre-pandemic and then you know all what broke loose. And so anyway, I feel a little bit like I'm back in the swing. And audiobooks continue to help and aid my reading life. I hope you listen to last week's episode. My husband Jordan and I discussed audiobooks at length, and so that was kind of fun to uncover and to realize what a gift that audiobooks have been in the last couple of years, especially for me.
[00:03:33] So here is what I read in September. The first book is a backlist title, and here's what I did love about my early weeks in September. Reading throughout the month of August, I read a lot of ARCs. I was reading specifically for our Fall Literary Lunch, which we hosted mid-August, and that was great, and I love reading ARCs and I'm very grateful for them. I do sometimes feel like my reading life is missing backlist titles. And so kind of as a reward to myself, once I finished reading for literary lunch, I kind of told myself, you can read some backlist titles. So my family went to the beach over Labor Day weekend and I took a stack of books, many backlist, but one ARC that you're going to hear about. And one of those backlist titles was a little book called Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette. I read this on recommendation. I picked this up on recommendation of a reader retreat. So I believe Shane was who recommended this to me. Shane was so lovely. And I really appreciate when customers or reader retreaters recommend books. Olivia has mentioned this too, because there are a couple of in store customers who really read a lot like Olivia. And we really love this because we are trying so hard to read books in advance and to read books so that we can sell them to you. I mean, that's our literal jobs and we love doing it, but there is something really special and sweet about customers who know our reading tastes because they listen to this episode, because they talk to us in store, and they kind of sell us on books and that's really exciting. So that was the case with this. So Shane had come up to me after our live podcast recording and she had suggested a couple of titles, including this one. And one of the hard parts about getting a lot of reading recommendations is I kind of keep a going notes app list, but every so often a recommendation hits me like right when I need it. And I was headed to the beach and I was in Tallahassee and I decided to stop at Midtown Reader. I was in Tallahassee for an appointment. Midtown Reader is the independent bookstore in Tallahassee-- I actually think there's another new independent bookstore in Tallahassee.
[00:05:32] So they are an independent bookstore in Tallahassee. And interestingly, they actually are at the location of where The Bookshelf used to have a location, and that's where I kind of got my start. So whenever I go to Midtown Reader, I always feel a little nostalgic, like a little bit weepy. But it's fine. It's a lovely store. And I stopped in and there on the shelf was this paperback edition of Agatha of Little Neon, and I felt like it was meant to be, so I picked it up. It's a debut novel by Claire Luchette, and it is about a nun in the 21st century. A young nun named Agatha and her sister, I believe about four of them, who are serving in the diocese in Buffalo, New York, and they work at the state care center. But the diocese is hemorrhaging money. And so they find out that they are being reassigned to a halfway house in Rhode Island. I'm not even going to attempt the name of the city in Rhode Island.
Annie Jones [00:06:29] But I will tell you that the setting plays a very deep and important relationship to the story. And that's something I love, because I actually think this could be true for everyone. But I find it especially true. My faith is deeply wrapped up in geography, for better and worse. Like, if you were raised in the deep South, your faith probably looks different than somebody living in the Northeast. And so, I don't know, maybe that's something I probably need to really dive into and investigate a little bit further. But if you can just bear with me, I just found the setting and where Agatha and her sisters were serving to be really integral to the story. And I thought Claire Luchette described that part of the country so well and really talked about the drug crisis and what was affecting this particular spot in Rhode Island is halfway house and the characters that live there. And so it's not only about the nuns, but it's about the people living in the halfway house and the people that Agatha encounters. And it's all a bit more gritty perhaps than their daycare center that they were kind of running and working out of in Buffalo. I fell in love with these nuns. That should not be surprising. I think-- gosh, when I think of my literary words, I keep going back to that kendra Adachi question. When I think about my literary words, I think nuns probably needs to be included. I really do like nun literature, but I like when nuns are treated with the respect they deserve. And I felt like Claire Luchette did a really beautiful job of that.
[00:07:58] I think this would be a lovely accompanying book to Millennial Nuns. That nonfiction work I read a couple of years ago that was just essays by modern millennial nuns. I really liked it. I believe I reviewed at the time that maybe it wasn't the best written book I'd ever read, but I found it to be really insightful and interesting and uncovering a totally different kind of life than I have ever lived, than I have really ever imagined. And Agatha of Little Neon did that as well. Obviously, there's a lot here about faith, particularly the Christian Catholic faith, but I also think it's just a lot about community and community building. I really do like books that kind of dive deeper into faith or into doubt-- whichever side of the coin you're on at that particular moment. I really do like reading about that. But what I thought was interesting about Agatha of Little Neon is there is a lot about faith and doubt, and kind of grappling with what you believe and why you believe it. But it's told not by showing us the interior of Agatha's head, although you get a little bit of Agatha thoughts and thought processes. It's really about the life she's living. And I found that to be so different and refreshing and interesting, and I just loved all these people a whole lot. I finished this in a day. I loved it. I highly recommend it. I'm sorry I missed it, but I'm so glad it met me when it did. So thank you to Shane for this recommendation. That was Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette.
[00:09:27] Then while at the beach, I also brought an ARC of the Revivalists. So this is a book by Christopher M. Hood. I feel like there are a lot of books actually with this title or a similar title. So but this is The Revivalists by Christopher Hood. It comes out on October 4th. This was a book that I had started reading as part of Fall Literary Lunch, but I had not had a chance to finish it. So I finally sat down at the beach and let me tell you, I devoured this. I really liked it. It is way outside my typical genre. Perhaps the way that it is similar to the books that I read is it feels slightly dysfunctional family. It is very well written. I found it to be a really well told story. But this is about Bill and Penelope. They are living in a post-apocalyptic world. I read a couple of pandemic books this month and I think they were very much worth it. But it's up to you as a reader what you're ready for. But this felt very timely because the book is set in the near future where there has been an outbreak of something called the shark flu. And it's very deadly, much more kind of dramatic perhaps even than the pandemic we all just lived through. More deadly than Covid, more deadly than the Spanish flu of 1918. Like this just killed people in droves. And so Bill and Penelope find themselves living in upstate New York-- maybe even not upstate New York, but a little bit outside of New York City. They're kind of in the country and they are some of the remaining survivors. Now, there are enough people living. I do not know the stats, this is a fictional pandemic. But there are enough people living where there are communities and there are people and they still know people in their community.
[00:11:07] Here's what I found interesting. So the book opens with Bill and Penelope, you know that they have survived something horrific. And Bill has a hand radio and he is communicating with his daughter out in California. So this is kind of one of the last ways to communicate. And his daughter starts saying kind of erratic things and he's concerned that she has this shark flu. But instead, he realizes, no, she is living among a cult. And he and Penelope decide this is their one daughter and they feel like it's safe enough where they're going to try to travel by car from New York to California to more or less rescue their daughter out of this predicament, the situation that she has found herself in. So that's kind of the premise of the book. It's essentially a road trip book from New York to California. And it's all about Bill and Penelope. If you get into this book for the cult aspect of it, you may be a little disappointed. There is some culty stuff in here, but it is not maybe the driving force of the novel. The driving force of the novel is Bill and Penelope navigating life in a post-apocalyptic world and all of the consequences and roadblocks that exist. I found this to be fascinating. It reminded me, of course, of the post-apocalyptic nature of Station 11. This felt like a much more perhaps practical look at when you've survived a pandemic, what do you do? You stay in your house. Do you grow a garden? Where do you get your gas? How do you accumulate stuff that you need? What happens to the stores? It kind of answers all of those questions, I thought, in a really imaginative way. Now, I don't read a ton of post-apocalyptic lit, but I found this to be really satisfying.
[00:13:10] I felt like I was with Bill and Penelope. My heart was racing in parts. This is very much an adventure story about two parents trying to do the best by their daughter. And the pitfalls that they encounter between here and there, and there are a lot, and many of them felt very realistic given the current political climate we are living through. I just found it to be, yes, perhaps a little unsettling in its accuracy, but I really liked it. Like I found it to be very compelling. It's not a quiet story. Like a lot is happening. Like I said, palms sweaty, heart racing. I think Olivia would like this book. I think if you're an Olivia reader, you would like this book. If you liked Rumaan Alaam's Leave the World Behind, I think this would satisfy your reading tastes. I really like this. It's out on October 4th. It's got a really great cover. The writing is good. The Revivalists by Christopher M. Hood. Okay. And I'm just going to briefly mention this one. But speaking of kind of the time frame of these episodes, what often happens is I do wind up reading more after the month ends. And so a few episodes ago, I think maybe for the June or July reading recap, I mentioned that Jordan and I were listening to the audiobook Directed by James Burrows. I just wanted to say publicly, we finished it. You may not care, but I just wanted everyone to know we finished it in September. That has nothing to do with the audiobook itself and more to do with when Jordan and I are in the car together. And so that was kind of our audiobook of Choice for a few months, and we really liked it. Again, I think we mentioned this on the audiobook episode. James Burrows is not the most prolific audiobook reader I have ever heard. His gifting is not in narration, but his gifting is in direction. And I found it to be an incredibly helpful book about management as well. I really liked it. And if you like James Burrows shows or if you like Hollywood, if you're into pop culture, I think you could like this one. So that's Directed by James Burrows by James Burrow I've mentioned it on a few episodes, but I finally finished it and it was great.
[00:15:11] Then I picked up Sam. So after Literary Lunch, not only was I interested in backlist titles, but I was also interested in ARCs that don't come out for a really long time. Like books that I just was curious about that had come in from publishers that I hadn't had a chance to look at them yet. One of them is Sam by Allegra Goodman. So this book does not release until January 3rd. And I want you to know I'm very sorry about that, but this is my job. I'm sorry for you, but it's what I'm here to do. I'm here to tell you what books to look forward to. And so I'm sorry that this book is not out until January, but put it on your radar because I really, really, liked it. So Allegra Goodman has written several books. I was not familiar with her work, but you might be. This was my first one I had read and I don't know what the final cover will look like. The cover is not my favorite thing. I am very honest about covers and what I like and what I don't like, and I don't really love covers with photographs on the front or photography on the front. This has a beautiful image, a beautiful picture of a young girl. It's not my favorite cover. That being said, this book is really being billed, pushed, blurbed as a book about a girl who grows up. The end. That's the blurb. A book about a girl who grows up. Well, please sign me up because I was a girl who grew up and I love this. I absolutely love this because it's just a book about Sam, who is a young girl. She loves her dad. She loves her mom. They are getting a divorce. Now I'm trying to remember if they were ever married. But the point is they're living apart, they're living separated. And you get everything through Sam's eyes.
[00:16:52] So it takes a while to realize kind of why her parents are separated, why her relationship with her dad looks different, why her relationship with her mom is what it is. As an adult reader, you find yourself-- or at least I found myself, yes, of course because of nostalgia and because of who I once was, I found myself relating to Sam. But I also found myself relating very much to the mother and to her kind of struggles. And you kind of see what adulthood looks like through the eyes of a child. Sam falls in love with rock climbing and with the sport of climbing. I love a book that introduces me to a new hobby or a new thing. Don't get me wrong, I have not taken up rock climbing. Well, I'm sorry. That made it sound like I picked up rock climbing. No, no, no. But I became interested. My brother is a rock climber, and so I was very invested in those parts of the story. It's kind of the thing she became obsessed with as a kid, and I think we all have those things. Maybe mine was Dear America books and hers was rock climbing. It's fine. And so I loved reading about what it's like to be a kid and a girl who's falling in love with something and what that looks like. And then you get Sam as a pre-teen, and a teenager, and a young adult. And, gosh, I just love this book. And maybe you're listening to me going, yes, Annie, but what happens? That's what happens. A girl grows up. And there are some climactic moments. It's not boring. I think sometimes readers might affiliate character driven literature with boring literature. I did not think this was boring, and I hesitate to call it character driven. I mean, it certainly is about Sam, but it's also about what happens to her and how she reacts and responds and how it affects her life growing up and how it affects who she becomes.
[00:18:42] Gosh, I hope I'm not underselling this because I loved it. I really loved it. But it is difficult to describe, I'm realizing as I'm talking about. Literally the only notes I had for this were about a girl who grows up. That's the note I had. I just fell in love with Sam and her family. My heart broke while reading it. I'll tell you what it did remind me of. A few years ago, I attended a women's leadership conference and one of the speakers-- I do not remember who-- was talking about confidence in young women. And this was horrific to me. Statistically, young women or girls their confidence begins diminishing at the age of ten. It like peaks, peaks, peaks, peaks and then at 10, it begins to deteriorate. And there's better language around that. But I literally saw a chart. A chart was shown to me and I've never forgotten it. I found it so distressing and it makes me want to cry just thinking about it. But I won't. But that kind of blip from that conference is what I thought about all while reading this book. I just kept cheering for Sam, and I just kept thinking, Keep going, Sam. Like, you can do it. You can grow up and you can be resilient and strong, and you can retain the spunk, and the brightness that you have as a kid. I didn't want her to lose it. I didn't want her to lose it. And I don't want to spoil anything, but I found it to be a really lovely book. I just loved it. It's out in January. It's called Sam by Allegra Goodman. Then a real hard right like it just a hard turn into nonfiction. I read River of the Gods by Candace Millard. I picked this one up for two reasons. So, first of all, you've heard me talk before about Sharon Says So America's Government Teacher, I've been following her for a long time. I do her semester classes that she offers.
[00:20:37] I attend her workshops and I try to follow along with her Book Club Picks. I don't always succeed. But this was a book that I saw listed in her book club, along with The Anthropocene Reviewed. Jordan and I read The Anthropocene Reviewed, and then I decided to pick up this one and I really liked it then. So I picked it up because I saw that it was being promoted as one of her book club selections. Then a local book club asked me to lead their conversation and I kind of had to pick a book on the fly. Like the woman who heads up the book club popped her head in the bookshelf and she just said, do you have a book that you think would be a good book club discussion in a couple of months? And I literally looked around and thought, River of the Gods because of what who this book club is. I just felt like that would be a good fit. And so I read this essentially for two book clubs as part of the Sharon Says So Long Distance Book Club and then as part of a local Thomasville book club, I chose to read and listen to this one. So I read my physical copy, but I also listened to a lot of the audiobook and I do highly recommend it. The audiobook was narrated by Paul Michael and I thought he was a really excellent narrator and I tend to like nonfiction, unless it's a book I'm taking notes in. I tend to like nonfiction in audiobook format. Now, I did both this time because I was also doing it as a book club, and so I wanted to take notes and things like that. But if you're into audiobooks, I think this would make a great selection if you're not familiar.
[00:22:02] Candice Millard has written a lot of historical nonfiction, a lot of biographies. She does not do so much the how did she term it? I heard her interview. She does not do like cradle to grave biographies. She does like snapshot biographies. And so she's written a few of those. Some of the book club locally was familiar with her because of those I have never read her. This is my first book by her and I was not disappointed. I was fascinated. So River of the Gods is about the exploration of the Nile River. This is never something I would have picked up. I need you all to know that you probably know that based on my reading tastes, this is not something I would have picked up on my own. This is why book clubs are important. And so I bought this book, picked it up and wound up really loving it. And also, as is the case with a lot of historical nonfiction, was also very frustrated by the things I did not learn in school. And this is again why reading is important. So book clubs are important and reading is important. Because you just learn so much that maybe your teachers either didn't have time for, maybe they didn't have the curriculum for it, maybe they didn't have the resources for it. And so I learned so much about colonialism, about exploration. I found it very interesting to be reading this at the same time as Queen Elizabeth's death was announced. And I've long been fascinated with the Royal Family. I'm pretty sure that's because my mom has long been fascinated with The Royal Family. It's kind of a mother daughter thing.
[00:23:26] And so obviously I was following along with Queen Elizabeth's kind of the 10 days of mourning that her family and her country did. But of course, also reading and trying to pay attention to the negative aspects of her legacy and the negative aspects of monarchy. And so reading this book felt really timely and really interesting. Candice Millard explores three men affiliated with the exploration of the Nile. So Richard Burton is one, not the actor, the explorer, John Speke and then Sidi Mubarak Bombay. So those are three men. And she kind of tells the story of those three men. Now, admittedly, Bombay's story does not loom as large in the book. And when I heard Candice Millard interviewed, I felt like she had a pretty good answer for that, which is there was so little information about Sidi Bombay. So Richard Burton and John Speke are Englishmen who were explorers. They were very different from one another. That's part of the interesting part of the story. Sidi Bombay was an African man who was sold into slavery and was enslaved in India before ultimately returning to his home in Africa. When he returned home in Africa, he lent himself to these guides, or often acted as guides for English explorers, British explorers. So he becomes a guide for both Richard Burton and John Speke. Richard Burton is highly intellectual, knows lots of languages.
[00:24:54] John Speke is like an outdoorsman and a hunter, very different men. One kind of the more perhaps intellectual and one kind of the brash sportsman. I found them both to be very fascinating characters. Neither is likable. We talked about this a lot at Book Club. Like I wanted to be rooting for someone there. There really wasn't anybody to be rooting for what you were rooting for was the adventure and the exploration of this of this river. Of course, while Candice Millard opens our eyes to the fact that there is no discovery of something that already has been inhabited and discovered. And so just absolutely fascinating. It made me realize how much I probably need to be reading more historical nonfiction. It also made me really grateful for writers like Candice Millard, who write accessible nonfiction. Some nonfiction is just over my head, and that's all there is to it. And there's no shame in saying it. It's too boring or it's too dry or it's too academic. This, I thought, was extremely readable. Very interesting. I know I'm going to talk to my aunt about it because I know my Aunt Nina has probably read this and loved it. She's a former educator, and so I can't wait to talk to her about it. I really liked this book a lot, and I think if your hesitant or if you're like me and you want desperately to learn about things, but you just don't know always where to start. I do highly recommend Sharon Says So on Instagram, and then I do recommend River of the Gods by Candice Millard. And I think I'm going to do some investigating into her backlist as well. I heard that Paul Michael, who narrated this audiobook, also has narrated some of her other work.
[00:26:25] So I think I may be doing some deep diving into other things. I also like that I am attracted to certain kinds of nonfiction. I never would have been attracted to a book about the Nile River, like I would have been attracted to a book about American history, probably. And so that was also really refreshing, like to read something with a more global setting and to read something about a part of the world. Now all of a sudden I'm like, I think I would really like to go to East Africa. Like I'm very intrigued now. And so anyway, very grateful to Candice Millard and grateful to this book, River of the Gods. Candice Millard. Another just hard turn next for my other book club, I don't mean to be in a lot of book clubs, but I guess here we are. For my personal book club, we wanted to read a banned book for Banned Books Month. So we read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. This is by Sherman Alexie. Here's why this was interesting. I had never read this before. It came out in 2007. I think it kind of just missed me because it's young adult lit. It won the National Book Award for Young Adult Literature, and it's been banned really ever since. And I think I was explaining this to Jordan because perhaps you've just heard the term Banned Books Week and you've not really known what that means or what that is. So let me explain it to you. So when a book is banned, what that means is a book has been challenged in a school or library setting.
[00:27:48] So someone has come to the school board or they've come to the library and they've said, hey, I don't think this book is appropriate for X, Y, Z reasons. That's when a book is challenged. When a book is banned means the book has been removed from the classroom, from the library, and for the reasons kind of given. So you can do all kinds of research on banned books. I do find it really interesting. I have found it. I think I've always found it interesting, but perhaps even more so now as a bookseller. So when Sherman Alexie's book is published, she gets a lot of attention, a lot of buzz. That is for multiple reasons. Number one, it's very well written. Number two, Sherman Alexie is a Native American author, and the book is about a young man growing up on a reservation in Washington state. So we've got a protagonist that we don't often see in Kid Lit, particularly in 2007. It also gets a lot of attention for its sexual content or some of its language, some of the violence. And those are the reasons that it has been banned in different classrooms in schools across the country. We are a group of adult readers. Our book club is made up of adult women and we all loved it. Like universally loved the book, thought it was great. I do think that I would recommend for late high school and up like juniors and up. That would be my personal opinion and preference. I think it's entirely suitable perhaps for 16, 17 year olds and up. It was also interesting to read this in light of some of the allegations, many of which have been proven reported on.
[00:29:19] And Sherman Alexie himself has admitted wrongdoing. So some of the allegations against Sherman Alexie that came out a few years ago regarding sexual harassment and abuse of power. Again, Sherman Alexie has acknowledged wrongdoing in those areas. You can do more research. There's articles through NPR, different interviews anyway. And so my book club was not familiar with that and so that was also an interesting aspect to bring into our conversation. We have this conversation all the time at The Bookshelf. Is there a way to separate the art from the artist? What happens when we do that? Is it good to do that? What are the consequences of doing that? I am very glad that I read. Absolutely. Gosh. This is such a long book title. It reminds me of that Guernsey Potato Peel book. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I am very glad to have read that. Do I love Sherman Alexie and what he did? No, I really don't. And in fact, that made some of the parts of the book a little bit harder to read. The book is told from this 14 year old boy named Junior's perspective. It's his diary. And so the book is actually really wonderfully illustrated by Ellen Forni. It reminded me, I don't know, none of my book club members were familiar, but I read a few years, not a few years ago. As a kid, I grew up reading the Amelia stories, not Amelia Bedelia. They were like diaries, and I think she appeared first in American Girl magazine. That's the second American Girl reference.
[00:30:43] You're welcome. And so anyway, the illustrations reminded me so much of that style where you're just kind of looking at the interior of a kid's notebook. And there was a great interview in my edition of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. A great interview with Ellen Forni and kind of why she illustrated and chose different illustration methods for this book. So Junior is kind of an aspiring artist, and the book is told entirely from his perspective, which is why some of the language, while yes, in my mind, a little foul, a little gross, he's a 14 year old boy. And so there's also, though, some descriptions that Junior gives of some of the young women in his class and in his grade. And that was really hard to read, quite frankly, in light of Sherman Alexie's wrongdoing. So that was-- it was just interesting. It's interesting. We don't read in a vacuum. We might try, but it's hard to do that. And so it was interesting to read in light of those allegations, I highly recommend first of all, I highly recommend this book. I really liked it, but I also highly recommend reading banned books in a group and really discussing together. Why do we think this was banned? What what what is the right of a parent? What is the right of a teacher. What belongs in classrooms. I found this book. This book would be very helpful I would think, in a classroom, particularly in a high school classroom, where maybe you have kids in the book. Junior lives on his reservation, but he ultimately winds up going to school at the white school, kind of outside the reservation.
[00:32:20] And so he's, it's a book about being a fish out of water. And he is poor and he talks about living in poverty and walking to school and what that looks like and how that makes him feel. The friends that he makes, there's a lot, obviously, about racism and how he's treated. And I found so much of it to be incredibly nuanced and thoughtful. It's also a great sportsbook, Junior is a basketball player. And so there's a lot in there about basketball and his coach and his team and a couple of really intense games that he plays, two of which are conducted against his reservation team. I really like this book and I'm really glad I read it in a group setting. I guess that's the point I'm trying to get. If you are reading some of these banned books in light of Banned Books Week in light of Banned Books Month or if you're paying attention to that, maybe you're watching the news like we all are and you're noticing, some books are being removed from classrooms. Why is that? I think we need to be paying attention. I think we need to understand that this isn't an exaggeration, that this is happening and it's happening more and with more regularity than before. Books have been banned for a long time. Censorship is not new, but it is happening with more regularity, I think, than before. And so I do think we need to be paying attention to that, particularly if we are educators, if we're parents.
[00:33:38] If you're educators, you're probably paying attention way more than you even want to be. But if you're a parent or if you are, if you have kids or you honestly, I don't have kids and I want to be paying attention. And so I loved reading this alongside other women and getting to talk about this together. So when you read books like this, I do think it's important to read them in a group to talk about why they're banned, to talk about authors and how we feel about authors when they do things that are wrong, things that we don't agree with, what do we do with their work? What's left of their legacy? I just loved having that conversation. I loved having that conversation with well-read, thoughtful, wise friends. And you probably would, too. So if you are like me and you somehow missed The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, I really, really enjoyed it. I highly recommend. I would love, I would think it'd be a great book to read alongside your kids again, particularly the main character is 14. But I and most of my book club, I think, kind of concurred. We kind of thought 17, 16, 17, and up depending on your kids maturity level, that's the other thing about books. Some of these banned books, they're banned for sexual content or language, and then you read them. And yes, there is some sexual content in this book that, raised my prudish eyebrows.
[00:34:51] But that was certainly not the point of the book. The point of the book is Junior and his growing up and where he lives and the grief that he experiences. There's a lot of death in his family and in his culture. And what does that look like for him and how does he cope and how does he cope when he's surrounded by white peers who haven't lost as much? That's what it's about. And so anyway, just very well worth your time. I'm so glad I read it. I'm so glad I read it this month. It just it felt good to participate in that. That's why it's the first year my book club has done something like that, and I'm glad we did. Then I picked up a book that again, I'm so sorry. It's not out until March of 2023. But it is called A Flaw In The Design by Nathan Oates. And I will tell you why I picked this up. I had the ARC in my office. It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood and I thought I would like to read outside while eating my lunch. And so I did not have any really any other books. And I also thought, I want to read something that I can finish fast. And so I found this book. It's called A Flaw in the Design by Nathan Oates. It comes out in March, and it is very much like an unreliable narrator, a thriller about Gil. Gil is a professor living in Vermont with his family. The book opens as he is at the airport in Vermont, greeting his nephew, Matthew, Matthew's parents. Gil's sister and brother in law have died in a car accident. And Matthew, those 17 kind of on the cusp of 18, Matthew is still technically a child. And so he comes to live with Gil and his family in Vermont. Tensions. There's so much tension in this book. There's so much tension.
[00:36:31] Tensions arise because Gil has two daughters and Matthew and his parents have been estranged from Gil and his family for a long time. I don't want to spoil anything, but so I will just tell you what the blurb tells us, which is that an incident occurred when Matthew was about 11 that put Gil's daughters in danger. And as a result, Gil and his family kind of set a boundary, a hard boundary between their family and Matthew's family. And so to now have Matthew in their home brings up a lot of feelings and a lot of old awful memories. And yet while you're reading, you don't know if you trust Gil or Matthew. That's really what it boils down to. Do you trust Gil, the uncle, the professor living in Vermont, or do you trust Matthew, the 17 year old who's come to live with his aunt and uncle who you trust? The setting is great. I loved the Vermont setting. If you do not like unreliable narrator stories, you will not like this one, my friend. Kimberly, you will not like this book. I still don't know how I feel about it. I'm literally taking it back to the store so that Olivia can read it. Because I told Olivia, I said. You'll fly through it, and I just need to know, is this good or not? Because I don't know. I don't know. I flew through it. So it did what I needed it to do. I wanted it to be fast. I hated everyone. I hated everyone.
[00:37:57] I didn't like Gil, I didn't like Matthew. I didn't really like the family. And so but the thing is, I can't help but wonder if that was Nathan's point. That was Nathan. It was his point. Which if so, he did a fabulous job. And so I'm just dying to hear another person's perspective. If you like books like The Silent Patient, I suspect you will really like this one. Very fast paced, very easy to read. I liked the professor like the fact that he's a professor on this college campus in Vermont. Like all of that, I really liked man. It was just one of those books where you were like, I don't know who I believe which find that's the point of unreliable narrators. But I also didn't really like anybody. And so I'm giving it to Olivia. I will report back on what Olivia thought, but that is what I read next. Those are my thoughts and feelings. It's A Flaw In The Design by Nathan Oates out in March. Then I picked up Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout. Can you hear the smile in my voice? I love this book. I loved this book so much. It came out this month. I don't know that I needed or would have asked for more Lucy and more of Elizabeth Strout's world, but she just keeps doing it. And I think we should just keep letting her because I love these people and this place. It reminds me a lot of Marilynne Robinson and kind of the world that she built. We talked a while ago what book were we referencing?
[00:39:24] We were referencing Easter eggs in the Marvel Universe and we were referencing Easter eggs in Taylor Jenkins Ried's books. That's what we were doing. And I said, I don't really pay attention to that. Like, I don't always pick up on that. I am not good at that. Turns out I am good at Elizabeth Strout Easter Eggs. I love seeing characters pop up where I'm like, there she is. There are a couple of brief references to Olive Kitteridge in this book, and I was like, there she is. I missed her. Bob Burgess shows up in this book like, if you have been reading Elizabeth Strout a long time. Those little moments are so special. And then if you are new to Elizabeth Strout, I don't think it takes away from these stories at all. Everyone always asks. I say everyone, but I really do mean a lot of people ask like, where should I start with Elizabeth Strout? And I weirdly say Olive Again. That I say weirdly, because that's technically the sequel to Olive Kitteridge, but I find it more accessible than Olive Kitteridge. And I loved it so very, very much. And so that's kind of where I recommend people start. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean, maybe other people have differing opinions. I just feel like you could read any of these. I just think they're just character studies. They're just lovely little character studies. This one happens to be about Lucy Barton. If you've read the book, My Name is Lucy Barton, or if you've read Oh William!, these characters will be very familiar to you.
[00:40:52] This is the story of how Lucy and William leave New York City during the pandemic, right at the beginning of the pandemic, to live in a house on the coast of Maine. And Lucy, who is very accustomed to live in New York, doesn't really like it. William feels like he's kind of saving her because he is a scientist. And so he kind of sees the writing on the wall of the pandemic. This is definitely a pandemic book. I've been thinking, and maybe it'll be a podcast episode. I don't know, but I've been thinking about what books would I put in like a pandemic time capsule. Like if there were books that I wanted my kids to read later to get a sense of what it was like to live in 2020, 2021 and 2022. This would be one of them. I found it gut wrenching in parts. Erin, on staff at The Bookshelf, she had read this book. And in fact, this is a great example. I don't think she's read Elizabeth Strout's other books, but she read this one. And again, it just depends on how timely you like your literature. Maybe for you, the pandemic feels like a trigger and it feels like something you don't really want to read about. I find it if done well, to be really comforting, and I found this to be comforting. There were parts of it that felt very familiar. There's also parts, Elizabeth Strout, and she's writing these characters who live in the Northeast. They're references to people in the South and the decisions that they were making through the pandemic. And I find all of that really interesting and somewhat accurate, if not entirely right. Probably a lot accurate.
[00:42:26] Despite my desperate wishes. But I just I think it really captured a cultural moment specifically for America as it related to the pandemic. And at the same time, it's just a lovely look at a marriage. It's about Lucy and William and how they coped, holed up in a house together in Maine during two, two and a half really hard years. It's about their relationship. It's about their relationship with their daughters. I really like this book as a daughter myself. I really loved it. I just love her. Before sitting down to record, I picked the book up to find a quote, and I just kind of caressed the pages and thought, I just want you to keep writing forever. I just want you to keep writing forever because I love these books so much. So that's Lucy By the Sea by Elizabeth Strout. The last book I read this month has also been absolutely delightful. This is another Erin recommendation. Erin recommended this audiobook. It's called How Not to Drown in the Glass of Water by Angie Cruz. I'm doing both, so I'm listening to the audiobook, which is narrated by Kimberlee Weatherall and Rosemary Almonte. The audiobook is fabulous, like absolutely fabulous. I also like the written format, but man, if you're only going to choose one, I would do the audiobook. So this is a book about a woman named Cara Romero. This is fiction, but this is what I love. So Cara Romero tells the audiobook, pronounces it I think Cara. Cara Romero is living in Washington Heights during the Great Recession. So 2008 ish, 2009 maybe. And she's lost her job because of the Great Recession. She is in her, I believe, maybe early sixties, maybe mid-sixties, and she has to find a job. And so she sits down for these 12 sessions with I'm trying to think of the best way to describe it.
[00:44:20] Not a career counselor, but basically someone to help her find work to assign her to work almost like a temp agency or something like that. A workforce agency. Maybe that's the word I'm looking for. And we, the reader, are only given these 12 sessions, in Cara's words, like we're only given her perspective and spliced throughout. We are given like resumés, job applications, that kind of thing. I love the audiobook honestly reads like a radio show. It's fabulous. I love the sound effects, the acting. It's beautifully done. And then the physical copy is fun because you get to see the physical resumé, the job applications, whatever. It's a lot about Cara and her relationship with her family, with her sister, with her neighborhood. It's a lot about Washington Heights and gentrification. It's about her identity as a woman from the Dominican Republic and what it's like to be an immigrant in the U.S.. It's a lot about her relationship with her son, which I found to be really lovely and sad. She's lost touch with her son. He's left home. He doesn't communicate with her. And you as the reader, begin to find out why. We've talked before about protagonists who just are going to stick with me a long time. So we've talked about Elizabeth Zott lessons in chemistry.
[00:45:38] We talk about Maeve from the Dutch House, these women who just like embed themselves in my soul. And Cara Romero, I think is going to do that for me. Like, I just love listening to her. I love hearing her perspective. She's funny. She's poignant. She's salty. She's savvy. I just really I have absolutely loved this book. So maybe you are familiar with Angie Cruz. She's the writer of Dominicana, but this is her latest. The cover is great. The storytelling is outstanding. The audiobook narration is really wonderful. How Not To Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz. I just really like this book. And those are the books I read in September. I really liked those. Now that I'm looking back. I hope I did them all justice. I love that I read some really dear to me books. I also love that I read some books in group settings like to share. I love that I read River of the Gods, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. I love that I read those and could talk about them with fellow readers. That was really special this month.
Annie Jones [00:46:46] As usual with our reading recap episodes, we're offering a reading recap bundle for September. This month's bundle is going to be $66, and it includes How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz, Agatha of Little Neon and Lucy by the Sea. Three of my absolute favorites this month. So it's $66. You can find the September bundle online through the link in our show notes or go to bookshelfthomasville.com. Click or tap podcasts and shop From The Front Porch. Our From The Porch Picks. If you don't want to shop the bundle, that's totally fine. Our books are featured weekly on our stores home page. So if you go to bookshelfthomasville.com, you should see the books that I read this month listed there. Thank you guys so much. I hope you had a wonderful reading month too.
[00:47:30] This week, I'm listening to Celebrities for Jesus by Katelyn Beaty.
[00:47:37] From the Front Porch is a weekly podcast production of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in Thomasville, Georgia. You can follow The Bookshelf’s daily happenings on Instagram at @bookshelftville and all the books from today's episode can be purchased online through our store website bookshelfthomasville.com.
[00:47:53] A full transcript of today's episode can be found at fromthefrontporchpodcast.com. Special thanks to Studio D Podcast Production for production of From the Front Porch and for our theme music which sets the perfect, warm and friendly tone for our Thursday conversations.
[00:48:08] Our executive producers of today's episode are Donna Hetchler, Cammy Tidwell. Chantalle Carl.
Executive Producers (Read their own names) [00:48:14] Nicole Marsee. Wendi Jenkins. Laurie Johnson. Kate Johnston Tucker.
Annie Jones [00:48:20] Thank you all for your support. From the Front Porch. If you'd like to support From The Front Porch, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Your input helps us make the show even better and reach new listeners. All you have to do is open up the podcast app on your phone, look for From The Front Porch. Scroll down until you see, "Write a Review" and tell us what you think.
[00:48:38] Or, if you're so inclined, you can support us over on Patreon, where we have three levels of support. Front Porch Friends, Book Club Companions and Bookshelf Benefactors. Each level has an amazing number of benefits, like bonus content, access to live events, discounts and giveaways. Just go to patreon.com/fromthefrontporch. We're so grateful for you, and we look forward to meeting back here next week.