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

For it turned out that Remych Uncle was right. We lived alongside the past.

It's our neighbor. We bump into it in the checkout line at the laundromat on the street.

Sanjana Safety Inn, Gold Diggers.

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 April.

So many books. And I am not a huge fan of April of whatever month that was we just we just lived through.

There were some real high points. But in general, it was also a month that was really full with challenges and hardships.

And yet somehow I managed to read a lot of books. So the first couple of books you're going to hear, I actually finished at the tail end of March, but I didn't want to leave them out because they were really good books.

And then I will let you know when I start the books I actually finished in April.

So these first couple of titles I finished at the tail end of March, after recording our March reading recap episodes.

So I'm playing a little bit of catch up. The first is 145th Street by Walter Dean Myers.

We read this. I read this as part of our I wanted that YA book club that we've been doing every month.

We are gathering virtually the last Friday of every month to talk through these kind of young adult classic works of why literature.

And it's supposed to kind of fill the void the babysitters club left in all of our lives.

And I think it's doing the trick because I loved 145th Street. I'm a little frustrated actually that I had never read it before and that teachers had not really introduced Walter Dean Myers to me.

I feel very behind and a little bit frustrated with my educators who I love in a door, but who left Walter Dean Myers out of my reading life.

And so thrilled to be introduced to him as an adult just feel slightly behind.

145th Street, if you are not familiar is a collection of short stories about a neighborhood in Harlem.

I love this format. It reminded me why I like short stories. These short stories in particular were all connected.

So it almost reminded me of Olive Kitridge or of the windowberry stories.

Just all of these kind of people living doing life together, working alongside one another, all these different personalities at work in this one neighborhood.

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