Welcome to From the Front Porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South. You're going to do. The sun crept across the sky as ever it had. They welcomed it, they worshipped it.

The prickle on the skin felt like punishment. The sweat felt like virtue.

Cups collected on the table. Towels were used and abandoned. There were sighs and

faints toward conversation. There was the clash and faints toward conversation.

There was the flash of water and the sound of the door opening and closing.

It was the kind of heat you could almost hear,

and in that kind of heat, what could you do but swim?

Ruman Alam leave the world behind.

I'm Annie Jones, owner of the Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown

Thomasville, Georgia, and today I'm recapping the books I read in August.

I cannot believe we are almost through my least favorite month of the year. This is infamously my least favorite month of the year, but I am pleased to tell you that I really have tried to make the best of it.

August in a pandemic turns out is quite a bit like March or April or May or June or July and so August

this year honestly hasn't been that bad in the grand scheme of things I think we're

all muddling through in the best ways we know how. I know many of you as

listeners are educators or parents and so I'm sure this has been an unusually trying

and difficult time for you. My brother is a teacher and so I am hearing

a lot from my friends who are parents, for my brother who's an educator and I know that so much is going on.

So I know August has not been an easy month really for anyone, but we are slowly

winding our way toward the fall. I really wanted to kick off this episode with that Ruman

alam quote because I felt like it was so applicable to what we are experiencing here in the

south as summer kind of dwindles to a close for a lot of maybe our northern relatives,

but here it's so very hot and we're just

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