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

I have never in my life felt anything as powerful as whatever force was in that room while those women talked.

And I began to believe that it was the talking itself that did it.

That perhaps women's voices in harmony were like some sort of Flintstone sparking,

or like the hot burst of air that comes through a window,

billowing the curtains before rain.

Caitlin Greenwich Liberty

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 February.

February is a short month and it was a month in which I felt a little discombobulated in my reading life.

I felt like I read the best way I can describe it is in fits and starts.

I would binge a book in a day or take a book with me almost throughout the entire month.

Like it just felt like the books I was reading I either could finish in one sitting or I had to sit with them for weeks.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but it is a different kind of reading rhythm that I'm used to.

One of the things I found to be true for me in 2021 is that my attention span and my capacity for reading seemed to be diminished a little bit.

And I experienced that really kind of back in maybe March and April, like toward the beginning of this pandemic that we're still living through.

But I have found it to be true now too. And that has been odd and kind of hard to navigate as somebody reads partly for a living.

So that has been kind of difficult and it just feels like even though the want of reading is there, the capacity is not.

And yet then when I looked back at the month, I realized I had read seven books.

And I'm also finding I don't know if other people are the same way, but I am reading books in bits and pieces.

And so therefore I have a lot of books going at once and that is pretty unusual for me pre bookshelf.

I would read one nonfiction book and one fiction book at a time in my bookshelf life.

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