Welcome to From the Front porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South.

I want money and a house with a pool and a partner who loves me, and my own lab filled with only the most brilliant and strong women.

I want a dog and a Nobel Prize, and to find a cure to addiction and depression and everything else that bails us.

I want everything, and I want to want less.

Ya, Jessie, Transcendent Kingdom.

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 to dispense Bookish Wisdom to my fellow readers.

Hi, friends. I am very excited about this edition of Literary Therapy.

This is one of my new favorite shows that we do, and so I'm excited to get to dispense a little bit of advice and wisdom.

I feel like if you are like me, the pandemic has kind of gone in these ebbs and flows, and some weeks are better than others.

And last week for all kinds of reasons was a hard week, and so I think this is coming at a good time for me to kind of think about other people outside myself, and to try to offer a little bit of light and guidance as you all navigate literary

quantities, which may in the grand scheme feel small, but we all I think have been turning to literature to help inform us, to help comfort us.

And so in that sense, literary therapy matters. So we're going to get started. First up, let's give it a listen.

Hi, Annie. This is Tana. I'm from Clute, Texas. I just finished Transcendent Kingdom, and I loved it.

I picked up four books on hold from the library today, which one do you think I should follow it up with? House lessons by Erica Bauer, Master, Friends and Strangers by Jake Courtney Solman.

This must be the place, Maggie O'Farell, or the new Maryland Robinson Jack.

Please tell me one of these are worth pushing past the first chapter because that has been a bit of a problem for me lately.

Thank you so much.

I'm so curious to know if you wound up just diving in because you sent it your recording and obviously this is not an immediate response situation.

I am not really phrase your crane on a radio show.

So we've had a few days now where I'm curious if you went ahead and tried to read one of these, but Transcendent Kingdom, which I led with a quote from at the top of the episode is such a beautiful book, and it is hard to follow up.

I think some of my biggest reading routes have been created by beautiful life changing, earth shattering, gorgeous books that it just then is really hard to follow them up.

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