Hi, everybody. This is Joe Lampel, the Joe behind Joe Gardner, and welcome to the Joe Gardner show.

This is episode number 440. Man, we're getting up there. And this one is thanks to Amy Prentice, the name you hear every single week as my colleague and basically producer of this podcast, along with our team, Christine and Brendan.

But we were talking not too long

ago about what we were going to do for upcoming episodes. And when we got to this week's

podcast slot, she said, you know, one that you haven't done in a long time is a book review on

some of the books that you've read and you really like the ones that stood out. And maybe that would be a good one to talk about coming into the kind of the holiday season where we have a little more time to sit back and read. And I thought that was a brilliant idea. So I said, yeah, let's do that. So I went through, boy, I have so many books. Just to set the background of kind of how this works for me, I get sent books

all the time. People are pitching podcast topics. Many of them are authors. I love getting books,

but we don't say yes to everyone. It's the ones that seem to have promise that we say yes to.

And then I look at all the books and the ones that continue to show promise, I will read the book.

So on average, I read about three, I'll call it work-related, but they're pleasure books for me too.

Three books a month, and two of them generally will make it into a podcast episode.

So all that to say, for any podcast that you listen to or watch involves a author, I have read the book. No shortcuts there. I read the book. And I've accumulated a lot of books in the process and some really stand out. So I started my list. Before I went back to the previous episode that I did, which was, I think it was seven years ago that I last did this episode, this kind of episode. And I made my list not referring back to that because,

you know, there are certain books that really stick with you. And for me, that's been the

case. So I made my list for this episode. And I think seven of the 17 books on my list were

ones that I had already talked about in the

previous episodes. So they still, the point is they still stuck with me and really have a place

that has etched its place in my brain and my heart. But for this episode, I decided to not

reiterate those because you can go back and listen to that episode.

We'll have a link in the podcast on listening to that.

But that is a great foundation for books that have really been life-changing for me.

Real aha books, foundational books, really to how I think about gardening and ecological responsibility, et cetera.

So those are already there.

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