Welcome to From the Front Porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South. One of the things that binds Ben and Me together is our love of stories.

We collect stories the way other people do Hummel dolls or Beershines.

We line them up on the shelves of our minds, hold them up in

varying lights, and see how they change. They are the bones of our family, the warm and

moving blood of our friendships, and the telling of them is an art of its

own. I had wanted to be a novelist my entire life, but those everyday stories were the closest I'd ever gotten. They were an outlet for narrative

when being an author still seemed so impossible that it felt like someone else's dream.

Erica Bowermeister, house lessons.

I'm Annie Jones, owner of the Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia and today I'm channeling my

inner Frazier Crane for another round of literary therapy. I've got five readerly

dilemmas I'll be working through today and if you've got your own bookish conundrum to share

you can visit from the front porch podcast.com forward slash contact to leave me a voicemail

we may feature your message in an upcoming episode. Now, without

further ado, some literary therapy.

Hi, excuse the quarantine sounds of my children who have been in the apartment for five weeks now.

My dilemma is I am a all over the place reader.

So looking at my Goodreads challenge from last year my five

star rated books was reading people by Ann Bogle, You and Me Forever, Francis Chan, garlic and sapphires, by Ruth Reichel and a woman is no man by

E.Tof Rum. And on my like bookstagram I see that there's a lot of different genres like

literary fiction and this type of fiction and this non-fiction and I just don't

know where my sweet spot is or where to hone in on what type of

reader I am. So that's my dilemma. Hi, Deja. It was nice to hear your family and your kids in the background because it was a reminder that so many of us are still,

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