Episode 461 || January Reading Recap
This week on From the Front Porch, Annie recaps the books she read and loved in January. You get 10% off your books when you order your January Reading Recap bundle! Each month, we offer a Reading Recap bundle, which features Annie’s three favorite books she read that month.
To purchase the books mentioned in this episode, stop by The Bookshelf in Thomasville, visit our website (type “Episode 461” into the search bar and tap enter to find the books mentioned in this episode), or download and shop on The Bookshelf’s official app:
January Reading Recap Bundle - $78
Mother, Nature by Jedidiah Jenkins
Family Family by Laurie Frankel
Come & Get It by Kiley Reid
All books mentioned in this episode:
Mother, Nature by Jedidiah Jenkins
Dixon, Descending by Karen Outen
Family Family by Laurie Frankel
Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley
Come & Get It by Kiley Reid
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 reading Homestead by Melinda Moustakis.
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We’re so grateful for you, and we look forward to meeting back here next week.
Our Executive Producers are...Ashley Ferrell, Cammy Tidwell, Chanta Combs, Chantalle C, Kate O’Connell, Kristin May, Laurie Johnson, Linda Lee Drozt, Martha, Nicole Marsee, Stacy Laue, Stephanie Dean, Susan Hulings, and Wendi Jenkins.
Transcript:
Annie Jones [00:00:01] [squeaky porch swing] Welcome to From the Front Porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South.
[00:00:24] We transition from going to returning. Like the winter solstice, there is a moment where the whole Earth shifts, the planet turning its north pole back toward the sun. We cannot feel this, but many of the biggest changes in nature in life go unnoticed. They happen without the moment ever being named. -Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother Nature. [as music fades out]
[00:00:52] 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 January. It's not too late to join Annie's Five-Star Books on Instagram. For $50 a year, you can become a part of my bookish community online. Through the private Instagram account, you'll get access to my book reviews, backlist, and front list titles. I'll host monthly Instagram lives, hop on stories to chat books, and occasionally even share about the books I start but never finish. If you follow me personally on Instagram, you've seen my reviews for years. And, of course, From the Front Porch, listeners will always have access to these free monthly reading recap episodes. The private Instagram is just a place where I get to be more detailed with my reviews, and Five-Star Book Club members can also choose if they want to receive my five-star reads each month in the mail from the Bookshelf. For more information or to sign up for our 2024 group, visit https://anniebjoneswrites.com/fivestar-book-club. There's also a link in the show notes. I'd love to have you following along this year.
[00:01:59] Now back to the show! Hello everybody. We finished the first reading month of the year and the first month of the year. I feel like I'm an outlier, but I really love January and I think Olivia, Erin and I even talk a little bit on our upcoming new Release Roundup episode. Just the different rhythms that winter has for us at The Bookshelf after the excitement and the fast paced chaos of quarter four. Quarter one always just feels like a deep breath. Like I can feel myself releasing the tension on my shoulders. And even though January is not without its drama, we've already had to be closed a couple of days for weather. Multiple of our staff members have battled sickness and illness, I'm sure just like all of you. And we've had really cold temperatures, although not nearly as cold I think as many of our listeners have experienced. So it's been like a mixed bag of a month, and yet it still feels like, I don't know, an easier month or at least a month where we breathe and rest a little easier than in November and December. So I really love this time of year, and I love this time of year for my reading life. And I think this month in particular, I read a nice mix of books that I just wanted to read because I picked them up or books that I was reading for upcoming store events, upcoming shelf subscriptions. I never felt like all of it was Bookshelf work and all of it was personal. It was a nice, diverse mix. So I'm really grateful to kick off the reading month in this way, and I hope it means good things for my reading life in 2024.
[00:03:41] The first book I read in the new year was a book I picked up actually while we were celebrating Christmas with Jordan's family up in Alabama. We stopped at Auburn Oil Company booksellers or bookstore in Auburn, Alabama. It's a store I've been to a couple of times through various visits with Jordan's family. It's a little bookstore that I really liked, and they had a couple of books that I picked up there, but one of them was Mother Nature. This is by Jedidiah Jenkins, and I had never read Jedidiah Jenkins before. He wrote a book called To Shake the Sleeping Self that I think was relatively popular, especially maybe I'd seen it on Instagram. But he was not an author I was super familiar with. But I kept seeing this pop up a few different places, and maybe not in my normal Bookstagram wanderings, but in a couple of unusual places. So when I saw on the shelf at this bookstore, it felt serendipitous, which is what I'm always looking for when I go out of town and visit independent bookstores. I want to buy something, and I try to buy something at every indie bookstore I visit. But I also want to be smart about what I buy because I own a bookstore. So it's a conundrum. But this book felt like, okay, it's kind of calling to me from the shelf. It's what I've been interested in, and here it is on display. And so I picked it up. This is a memoir about Jedidiah and his mother, Barbara. There was a period in time where I felt like I was really keeping my eyes peeled and open for mother-son stories. I feel like we get a lot of mother-daughter stories, but we don't always get mother-son memoirs or mother-son books. I think we get a lot of father-son.
[00:05:17] But anyway, so I was keeping my eyes peeled for those and this certainly would qualify. Jedidiah is a member of the LGBTQ community and his mother is a deeply religious, I would say, evangelical Christian. And he's really close with his mom. His parents divorced when he was, I believe, a little bit younger and he was essentially raised by his mom, and he still keeps in touch with his dad. They're not estranged or anything like that. But he talks about and he writes about in this book how he loves his mom, he adores his mom, was primarily raised by her. And yet, there's this huge part of his identity that he really kept in the closet for years. He stayed in the closet and didn't come out to his mom. And then when he finally did come out to her, her reaction was not celebratory or welcoming or inviting. It was one of concern because of her religious beliefs. And that would probably be interesting enough on its own. But I think why I was drawn to this memoir in particular is for two reasons. One is that this is a travel story. This is a travel memoir. Barbara and her now ex-husband, Jedidiah Jenkins parents, participated and really did alone this walk across America. And they were featured in National Geographic. They wrote books. They were featured in articles, back in like the 70s, where they literally walked across the country. And so Jedidiah wanted to recreate or follow in his parents footsteps, particularly from, I believe, New Orleans out to the West Coast. And so he thought this could be a way that he and his mom could bond. He had discovered over the years that one way they could keep their relationship intact was through travel.
[00:07:06] And so it was partly a travel book, and so I found that premise really interesting. And also just the idea of like retracing the steps of your parents and doing something that they had done in their past lives and celebrating that and honoring that. So that was intriguing to me. And then the other reason I was kind of intrigued is because I really see a movement online about boundary setting and making sure we remove toxic people from our lives. And there are some parts of that movement or those ideas that I really agree with. I believe in boundary setting. I believe in being in careful relationship with people. I believe in guarding your heart. I'm laughing because I think that's a phrase from The Bachelor. But I like the idea of being careful with who you share yourself with. But perhaps it's because of my own Christian worldview, I also really struggle with who do you let walk out of your life? Who are you willingly estranged from, and who do you continue in relationship with and why? Why do you set those boundaries? When do you set those boundaries? And so this idea that Jedidiah Jenkins has to really protect himself from his relationship with his mom, from his mom, that he really has to guard this part of his identity from his mother, but also that he does not want to be estranged from her, that he really does love her and she really does love him. And so how can these two people who really do love each other but also deeply, deeply disagree with each other maintain relationship? And I just think this is interesting, and I think in what could potentially be another contentious, divisive election year where we're constantly asking ourselves, like, who do we maintain friendship with? Who do we maintain contact with?
[00:09:00] And this is something I think about all the time, because I myself have lost friendships and I've lost relationships because of my own boundaries. And so this is something I'm constantly thinking about. And I think Jedidiah Jenkins really does a beautiful-- his writing is really beautiful-- way of unpacking all of these things in a relatively short book. I mean, I suppose this could have just been a memoir where he talks about his mom and their relationship, but because of the travel component, that is really what propels the book. So it's not just think piece, it's not just something that easily could have been a New York Times editorial or a column in The Atlantic. Instead, there's story here about traveling across America, about watching your parent grow older, about trying to investigate who they were when they were younger and what they were like when they were idealistic and mission driven. And so, anyway, I just really wound up loving this book, and I particularly loved reading it when I read it. I think it's a really great winter book. I feel like Jedidiah and his mother took this road trip far later in the year, perhaps even during the summer. The book even opens with kind of a flashback set over New Year's Eve. And so I just read it around that same time, and it was just a quiet way to enter the new year and to really think about our relationships and who we share our lives with and what of our lives we share with people. Anyway, there's a lot here in this book. It's part travels with Charlie where it's a travel book, and it's mother-son memoir. And I think it's a really well done one. There were parts where I thought he could have gone deeper, where he could have maybe given us a little bit more. But I almost like the protective nature of this book, where he's sharing a lot, but he's also not sharing some things, which I actually really respect. So, anyway, this is Mother Nature by Jedidiah Jenkins. I may read some of his other books, but if you're like me and you've never read him before, I think this is a fine place to start and a really interesting book to kick off the year with. So that's Mother Nature by Jedidiah Jenkins.
[00:11:13] Then I read what I would consider an equally quiet book, but this one is a novel called Dixon Descending. This is by Karen Outen. It releases on February 6th, so it releases in just a couple of weeks. I picked this one up because my rep-- I think it was a Penguin Random House rep-- really sold this one to me as an adventure story on mount Everest, about two black men attempting to summit Everest. And it is those things. But I found it also to be a really character-driven book about two brothers, and the book has a couple of different timelines. I was never confused by them. But there's Dixon, who is the younger brother. Dixon and Nate are the two brothers. Dixon is the younger brother. He's our main protagonist. And his older brother, Nate, really tries to convince him to be one of the first black American men to summit Mount Everest, and that this is something that they can tackle together. And Dixon is an athlete. He's a former runner. He was eliminated from the Olympic trials during a run where he was like two tens of a second shy of being in the Olympics. And you can feel that devastation. Shortly after reading this, Jordan and I went and saw The Iron Claw in theaters, which, wow, what a gut punch of a movie. But in that movie, one of the brothers does not get to compete in the Olympics because of Jimmy Carter's decision and America's decision to not participate in the Olympics that year. And so you just can feel this devastation of people who have worked so hard and built their lives around this once in a lifetime event. And what happens when that event doesn't happen? And so what happens with Dixon is that he has all of this athletic ambition, but he doesn't know where to put it. And he winds up becoming a school psychologist.
[00:13:05] And the book takes place both pre Everest, where you see Nate come and plead with Dixon and convince him to do this monumental thing. Then we get glimpses of Everest and summiting Everest and climbing Mount Everest, and then we also get Post Everest. So those are kind of the three timelines. And that Everest portion is much smaller, I think, than the rest of the book. And I found those parts to be really interesting. I knew very little. I think weirdly, back in the day, I may have seen an Everest documentary in Imax. So for some reason I feel like I just saw that in high school or something. And so those parts were really compelling to me and really interesting. It made me want to watch a lot of Everest documentaries. But the bulk of the book is really pre Everest and then post Everest. And really I think we are supposed to read this book as, yes, an adventure story. And I think fans of Peter Heller might enjoy this one. But also just who is Dixon, who is this character and what is his motivation? Why does he agree to summit? What is his relationship like with his brother? What is his relationship like with his work? He's a school psychologist and he has really wonderful, loving relationships with his students and in particular a student named Marcus. And how does Everest affect his relationship with these kids? All of that is really interesting. There's actually a lot going on in this novel that I think is really thoughtful. And she manages to balance, I think, several different emotional through lines throughout the book. This is her debut. I really, really liked it. I can't really name you anything else like it. The Peter Heller is the best comp, and yet it doesn't feel entirely accurate because I'm not sure. We've talked a lot in-store and then I think on some upcoming podcast episodes about, like, is this an Olivia book? Because there's parts of it that really sound like an Olivia book. And maybe I do think there are parts of it that she would really enjoy and she might enjoy the whole thing. But it doesn't immediately strike me as an Olivia-Annie crossover just because of the quiet nature of it. You think it's going to be really propulsive and bombastic and tense. You really think it's going to be tense. And there are moments of that. But it is mostly a quiet book about brothers, I think. So that is Dixon Descending by Karen, out on February 6th.
[00:15:41] Then I read Family Family by Laurie Frankel. Really one of the main reasons I was able to read so much this month was because we were without power, and therefore the bookstore was closed and I couldn't really go anywhere. The weather was not great and I was without power for 10 hours, and so I read three books in one day. And that is really part of the reason that I was even able to read anything this month, because despite being a quiet month it did feel like there was quite a lot to do. So on my power outage day, I read Family Family. Laurie Frankel is an author who I enjoy, though I have not read all of her books. So I've read This Is How It Always Is, which was her-- I don't know if that was her debut, but it was her first book that I came across, Laurie Frankel, and I believe it was chosen as a celebrity book club book when it first released. It's not really based on Laurie Frankel's family story, but it is a little bit about trans issues and particularly raising a trans child and what that experience might be like. And I remember it just opening my eyes to that population when it released, gosh, I want to say 2017. It may have even been before that. So I was curious about Family Family because it seemed like this was a bit of a return to form for Laurie Frankel, in that this is another book that is maybe loosely inspired by her own family experience. This book is about adoption, and her husband adopted their daughter, and she brings some of those personal feelings, I think, to this book. This is a hefty book in terms of length. it's a long book. And I had it on my shelf and really did want to read it, but hesitated because of its length, which you've heard me talk about before. I promise. I'm not afraid of big books. I'm really not. But when you're a bookseller, I do think you realize how valuable time is. And you're running a business and you're doing all these other things, and so a thick book like that can delay you a week and prevent you from reading a lot. But that's why I was grateful for really I read this, surprisingly, in about one sitting that day that we didn't have power.
[00:18:02] So this is about India Allwood. She is a mother who is also an actress and kind of a Hollywood star who has this great TV show. I almost pictured like a Game of Thrones-esque TV show, and she's just doing press for a new movie that she's in that is about a woman who gives up her children for adoption. Which is not even the phrase that is used over and over again in this book. Over and over again, Frankel makes the point that she places her children for adoption. So anyway, India Allwood her character places her children for adoption. And then as India Allwood the actress is giving interviews for this book or for this movie, she makes a couple of real PR blunders and she kind of goofs all over herself just repeatedly. She's says things that do not come across well in print, and she makes comments about adoption that immediately get her in trouble with various parts of that group, whether it's adoptees or adoptive parents or what have you. Anyway, she continues to get in trouble for these things that she said. And so her children who are adopted take it upon themselves to try to solve this for her. The story unspools in the most madcap, delightful of ways. There are lots of characters in this book. It reminded me a lot of The Sweet Spot by Amy Poeppel. Amy Poeppel is who I kept thinking up as I read this book. I just thought, oh my gosh, all of these characters, all of them coming together, I could very much see this book as a movie. It is a book about a movie, and I could see it becoming a movie.
[00:19:58] The characters are so interesting. Even there are lots of minor characters, children, teens, all of whom are interesting and funny and quirky. They're not too precocious or obnoxious. And then all the while, I think Laurie Frankel is trying to get us to think about how we think about adoption. I have dear, dear friends who are adoptive parents. I'd be so curious what they would think about this book. This is very much Jodi Picoult book club fodder, you know what I mean? This is the kind of book you want to read in a book club so that you can discuss it with your friends. I immediately finished and thought, well, who can I talk about this with? And I'm talking about it with you. I don't need to read a book that in which I agree with every character, with everything they say. In fact, I prefer not to. I like to read books about complicated people who have complicated feelings. Those are the kinds of books that make me think. Those are the kinds of books that are interesting. Also, those are the kinds of people I spend my time with. None of us is perfect. We're all thinking through things and trying to figure out what we think and how we feel about things in real time. And so I found all of these characters to be deeply refreshing and interesting. And this is the kind of book that you'll want to read in a book club. This is a new release. It just came out this week. I think if you liked This Is How It Always Is-- which if you haven't read that, I do think it's been a minute since read it so I'm not sure what it would look like in 2024, but I recall absolutely loving it. I think 4 or 5 stars easily for me when it released. And I think this was four and a half stars for me. I really liked this one. I suspect I'll be thinking about it for a while. That is Family Family by Laurie Frankel.
[00:21:44] Then I picked up Grief Is For People. This is by Sloane Crosley. It's the new book that releases February 27th, so you've got some time to think about this one. I love Sloane Crosley. If you have never read her, please, please, please do yourself a favor. She has written a couple of essay collections. I Was Told There'd Be Cake and Look Alive Out There, both just excellent, very memorable titles. And then she's written a couple of works of fiction, including Cult Classic and The Clasp. I needed to look up before I recorded. Probably she may have written other things. It feels like I've read all the things. It feels like I've done a pretty good job of almost being a completionist in terms of Sloane Crosley. So I was curious about this one. I definitely requested this from my publisher rep, but I admit I moved it to the top of my stack after I saw I-- believe it was the December issue, but it may have been the November issue-- of Vanity Fair featured a piece about Greta Gerwig, like a profile on Greta Gerwig, and Sloane Crosley wrote it. I love when stuff like that happens. When you see authors you love pop up in places you might not expect. So, anyway, after reading the Greta Gerwig profile, I immediately was like, oh, I actually have her book on the top of my stack. So I moved it and read it, and I loved it. This is Sloane Crosley's entrance into the grief memoir genre. She references Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking a lot in this book. And I think that's because Sloane Crosley knows when you write a book about grief, it's kind of in a category. It's almost its own genre in the memoir section. And certainly the Year of Magical Thinking is, I think, in the Mount Rushmore of those books.
[00:23:38] Sloane Crosley opens with this story about her apartment in New York being burglarized. One day she arrives home and she realized someone has come in through her window and stolen all of her jewelry. And some of the jewelry was expensive jewelry. But really, of course, it's the violation of the space itself and the taking of some of her more nostalgic and sentimental pieces. And so she immediately calls her best friend Russell, who is older than she is, an old gentleman who used to be her boss in publishing. They both work as publicists or as I think in Sloane Crosley's case, maybe a publicists assistant in publishing. So she calls Russell and she kind of tells him. And you realize just through this storytelling what good friends they are. And you would know this from the blurb, but it depends on how much you want to know when you go into reading a book. But really what Sloan Crosley is setting up is that one months after her apartment was burglarized, her best friend, Russell, died from suicide. And this book then deals a lot-- and obviously, there are content warnings around suicide, suicidal ideation, depression. Although I will say this, I'm not a particularly sensitive reader as you all know or if you've listened to this podcast for a long time. I found this book just deeply moving and also deeply funny. Some crazy is a very funny writer. It's just such a wonderful tribute to a friend. So even more, it is a grief memoir. But it's also a book about friendship, and it's kind of a look into what we're willing to forgive out of our friends and what makes us close to people, and what happens when someone you loves dies unceremoniously and you don't get to say goodbye. And where does the closure come from?
[00:25:38] And I just couldn't get over this book. So it's a grief memoir. It's a friendship memoir. Also I'd be remiss to not say this. It's a New York book. It's very much a tribute to New York, partly because a lot about her apartment being broken into and what it's like to to live in New York. And she's a single woman and she just writes so much about commuting and going back and forth to work and taking lunches and working in publishing. It's it's very much a book about publishing. I immediately kind of googled because I had forgotten that Sloane Crosley worked in publishing before she became a writer herself. It's just outstanding. It's an astounding work of nonfiction. I love well done memoirs. They're not always well done. This one is, and I really loved it. I suspect you all will, too. As I said, very moving. There is no denying that this is a sad book, but it's also very funny and sweet. And based on the profile that Sloane Crosley has done about Russell and based on her depictions and descriptions of him, I am sure he would roll his eyes and also be delighted at this thing that she's created really in tribute to their friendship. And I will also say this, she's not afraid of the complications of relationship and when our friends aren't perfect. And I appreciated that as well. She doesn't shy away from we're not all great all of the time, and I like a book that acknowledges that. So this is Grief Is For People by Sloane Crosley. It is out on February 27th.
[00:27:13] Maybe the key to a good reading month is just not reading as many books. Because I finished up the month with Come and Get It. This is by Kiley Reid. It releases next week on January 30th. So next Tuesday, if you're listening to this in real time. I loved Kiley Reid's first book, Such A Fun Age. I remember exactly where I was when I was reading it. I was in an airport. I am pretty sure I was traveling overseas, I think, and so I left. I just said I remembered exactly where it was and you all are like, "Do you really know? Because you don't even know if you were traveling overseas?" Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure I left my ARC in the airport. I do that on purpose sometimes to share the wealth. It's like an imaginary little free library. So I read Such A Fun Age in an airport and absolutely loved it, was blown away. I thought it was such a fun book about really complicated things, about class and race. And guess what? She's done it again. Come and Get It is a fantastic, I think, a fun, seemingly frothy book about non frothy things. And I think that takes a real skill to be able to write well about things that are complicated, but also to be able to write them in a way that is satire and it's funny. I was thinking a lot about Yellowface when I read this book. I think there is some crossover there; although, Kiley Reid is not dealing with publishing here, she's dealing with academia, but she is very much taking those issues she addressed in Such A Fun Age and bringing them here, and setting it on a campus.
[00:28:51] So the book is set on the University of Arkansas campus. So I also like a book that is set in the South. Even though I have not spent a lot of time in Arkansas, I have family that lives there so it is interesting. And good friends live there. So it's very fun to read a book where you're like, oh yes, I know the setting, I am familiar with this. And so it's a campus book. It's a campus novel but with Kiley Reid's unique twist, where Agatha is a researcher and writer who is on campus to be like a visiting professor. And then she also is doing research for her next book. And at first, that research is about weddings. And we don't really know much more than that. We just know that she's researching weddings. And so she has been given permission to interview some of the students in this dorm. And the dorm RA is a young woman named Emily, who is back on campus after taking a year off to take care of her sick mother, and she is back and trying to save money for her first home. So already we get some issues of class dynamics here. And then Emily is one of the few black students in this particular dorm on the University of Arkansas campus. And then the co-eds that Agatha interviews, man, they are just pitch perfect. Almost caricatures of southern college co-eds, but at the same time they're not. I say they're almost caricatures because they're just so spot on, but they're also really interesting young women. I will say this. I did not receive an ARC of this book, which did irritate me because I loved Such A Fine Age so much, and I felt like I was very clear about my love and appreciation for that book.
[00:30:47] And so I did not receive a physical copy of this. So I downloaded it on audiobook in audiobook format, where it is narrated by Nicole Lewis. Let me tell you who deserves an award for audiobook narration for Come and Get It by Kiley Reid, it is Nicole Lewis. She is doing the most. She's doing all the accents, but it's never overkill. Instead, I was laughing, I was smiling. I can't wait to get my hands on a physical copy, because I do want to see how Kiley Reid wrote the southern accent. Because Nicole Lewis leaned in and did a beautiful job. I think part of my enjoyment from this book definitely came from the audiobook. So if you're an audiobook listener and you were considering this one, I would encourage you to do so. I really liked the audiobook narration. Anyway, if you like such a fun age, enjoy. I was nervous. I'm always nervous about a sophomore book, and I felt like I hadn't seen a ton of buzz about this. It may just be because it's not out yet, but I really liked it. I read it and thought, yeah, if you liked the first book, if you liked her first book, you would certainly enjoy this. It's a very different plot. She's writing about a very different part of the country. I think that's what's really interesting. She's writing about a very different part of the country from, the one in the first book. She's writing a book about a very different class of people. If you did not read Such A Fun Age, you can certainly start here. But you can tell what Kiley Reid likes writing about, and then she plays with it in different places.
[00:32:20] And just keep in mind, this is a campus novel. If you love reading books set in academia or on a campus, you will like this book. It's not the typical campus novel, because I can't even tell you the last time I read a campus novel that was set somewhere other than New England. So kudos to Kiley Reid for representing the South a little bit, and for giving Southerners an interesting story and a complicated one about relationships on a college campus and the tensions that are there that have to do with race and class and identity, while also just being a wildly entertaining story. This book is wildly entertaining, and I think you will like it particularly if you are a Southerner-- but even if you are not.
[00:33:00] So those are the books I read in January. As usual with our Reading Recap episodes, we are offering a Reading Recap bundle for the month. Our January Reading Recap bundle is $78 and includes three hardback books: Mother Nature, Family Family, and Come and Get It. You can find more details and the January bundle online through the link in our show notes. Or you can just go to bookshelfthomasville.com and type today's episode number, that's 461, into the search bar. Again, the reading recap includes Mother Nature, that's the memoir. Family Family, the new novel by Laurie Frankel. And Come and Get It by Kiley Reid. Look, these are all really great books. This was a really good reading month for me. I hope it was for you too. And I hope it has set the bar for the rest of 2024. This week I am reading Homestead by Melinda Moustakis.
[00:34:02] Annie Jones: 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 A full transcript of today’s episode can be found at:
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.
Our Executive Producers of today’s episode are…
Cammy Tidwell, Chantalle Carl, Kate O'Connell, Kristin May, Linda Lee Drozt, Martha, Stacy Laue, Chanta Combs, Stephanie Dean, Ashley Ferrell.
Executive Producers (Read Their Own Names): Nicole Marsee, Wendi Jenkins, Laurie Johnson, Susan Hulings
Annie Jones: 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. Or, if you’re so inclined, support us over on Patreon, where we have 3 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.