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

She had made space for discovery in the midst of a most contained life, the life that the world seemed bent on handing her.

Natalie Jenner, the Jane Austen Society.

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 and conducting a session of literary therapy.

Today's bookish dilemmas were submitted by listeners and readers. If you have your own literary conundrum you'd like resolved, just go to from thefrontportchpodcast.com forward slash contact, scroll to the middle of the page, and leave me a voicemail. No microphone required.

Each month I'll pick a handful of voicemails to work through during a literary therapy episode. Now on to our September dilemmas. First up is Jennifer.

Hi Annie, this is Jennifer, and I'm from the Kansas City Missouri area. Okay, so my question for you is, how do I deal with my snobbish version to books that are picked for certain monthly book clubs?

You know the ones with the stickers imprinted on the front that you can't actually take off. I will have a book on my TBR list for months, and then the second that it's announced as a book club pick, I just roll my eyes and cross it off the list.

And I know this is ridiculous and snobby and I'm missing some Greek books. I mean the paper palace I did read and it was my favorite book this year so far. So any advice you have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Jennifer, first as with most of the literary therapy conundrums I receive I want to tell you you are not alone. Those stickers drive you crazy. They really bother booksellers and books or owners too.

We will frequently get a book that we have ordered and it will arrive with the sticker already kind of imprinted right on the book cover like they are not removable and we also are bothered by that.

So this I think is actually a pretty common problem. It reminds me of my own personal bookish pet peeve which is I hate movie cover tie-ins.

Is that the right word I hate movie tie-in covers. I hate when a book that I really like has been turned into a movie. I don't mind a re-released or redesigned cover, but I hate when the cover.

Like now has the actor and actress on it instead of just some beautiful artwork or something like that. So this isn't that you aren't alone in this literary conundrum.

What I do want to resolve for you is your avoidance of the book entirely right because you mentioned yourself that the paper palace is one of your favorite books you read this year. Well that's a race with their spin pick.

So I want you to know you're not alone, but we do need to move past it. Right. We need to move past the sticker on the cover of the book and and I say this to because when we I'll give you an example for us at the bookshelf when we are picking our shelf subscription selections.

We nine times out of 10 do not know what book is going to be a either a book of the month pick or a Jenna Bush Hager pick or a good morning America book club pick or Reese with her spin pick or an opa pick we don't know occasionally we will get a heads up particularly for an opa book will get like a heads up.

But generally speaking we don't know and the paper palace is a great example of this because I also loved that book and I loved it so much I made it a shelf subscription selection.

I ordered a lot of copies and then they came to us and they all had the Reese with her spin pick and that was my first bit of knowledge that it was a Reese with her spin selection which was a bummer to me because even though I like Reese with her spin and I think she does a fine job picking books.

It was a bummer to me because I like there to be a sense of discovery when I've selected a shelf subscription book and you can kind of feel like oh no Reese beat me to it.

Or or oh no should I picked a different book like is this one too popular because Reese picked it and so I want us to move beyond those ideologies and those viewpoints because Reese with her spin selecting it shouldn't deter from us reading it.

And I think for some people it encourages reading of it but it sounds like maybe you and I Jennifer have similar personality quirks which are then it kind of it kind of does the opposite thing that it's supposed to do right instead kind of pushes us away from the book maybe because we think it's going to be too popular.

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