Welcome to From the Front Porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South. You're going to do. So much of becoming an adult was distancing yourself from your childhood experiences

and pretending they didn't matter, then growing to realize they were all that mattered and composed 90% of your entire

being. If you didn't remember how you felt during that one game of truth or dare

when you were a sophomore in high school, who were you? Emma Strob, all adults here. 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 January.

From the coffee table book that was all over Instagram to two five-star books I cannot

wait to put in readers hands. Let's get started. So I spent much of January trying to get out of a pretty

significant reading slump and I don't think I'm alone in this. I feel like there were a lot of listeners and fellow readers who I think just

post holidays it's hard to get back into a reading rhythm I know it was certainly difficult for me and so finding books that could hold my attention that sounds terrible but I just had a really hard time with it and then to kind of add insult to injury I spent about a week at a book selling

conference in Baltimore and even though that very phrase book selling conference

makes it seem like surely surely there there would be time to

read or to get out of a reading slump I didn't find that to be true at all we had

conferences and panel discussions and meetings from about 7.30 in the morning to 7.30 at night

and I think anybody who has been to any kind of conference knows that then you

know going back to your hotel room and doing anything other than sleeping is

pretty much miraculous so January was just kind of an odd month and yet when it

was all said and done I read, I think about seven books, and two of them were five star

books, so I want to go ahead and dive right in.

The first book I read in January and finished was We Wish You Luck by Caroline

Zancan. Caroline Zancan wrote local girls or the local girls a couple of years

ago I want to say and that one looked interesting but I did not pick it up.

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