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

This book held no miracles, no gods, no heroes. It told of nothing but quiet human problems. Yet it was more exciting and more unrealistic to me than bloody battles or powerful demons.

Every person and every situation in the first few pages were like nothing I'd ever seen or thought about before. But it also seemed just like the world where I lived.

S.J. Sindu, blue-skinned gods.

I'm Annie Jones, owner of the bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia, and this week I'm recapping the books I read in September.

Can you believe it is the end of September? I cannot. This month has absolutely flown by. It's also still quite warm here with some fall-ish temperatures on the horizon.

But I think that contributes to this idea that we're still living in August or July. And so to look at the calendar and realize we're at the end of September has been a bit of a rude awakening.

And we're fast approaching the last quarter of the year, which means I think lots of good reading happened this month. But I also am gearing up for slower reading months for me when the store picks up that generally means my reading life slows down.

So it was pleasant. A pleasant discovery to look and realize I actually read a lot of books in September and a lot of really good books.

So let's get started. The first book I finished in September was Matrix by Lauren Groff.

I had been sitting on my ARC of Matrix for nine months, like a baby, like a baby that book waited to get in my hands.

I don't know why I put it off except I really loved Fates and Furies. And I know people, that's a book where people have a lot of feelings about Fates and Furies, right? You either love that book or you hated it.

I don't know personally very many readers or customers who like felt ambivalent about that book.

That being said, because I loved it. And then because I knew Matrix was about a medieval nun, I think I just put it off because literary fiction has been hard for me in 2021.

I have not really devoured the literary fiction in the ways that I normally do. And I didn't want to do Matrix a disservice.

So in preparation for the bookshelves fall literary lunch, I finally picked up my copy, read a few pages and immediately became immersed.

And there are other readers I know where it took them 50 or 100 pages to get into this one, but truly for me it was immediate.

I immediately felt an interest in and a connection with Marie de France. She is a real life historical figure about whom not much is known.

And if you're like me, you will read this book and either when you're done or halfway through, you will immediately begin googling because you're just desperate to know, did Lauren graph come up with these things off the top of her head? Did she base it in historical research?

In fact, it is both. There is not much known about Marie de France. And so Lauren graph has created this really powerful, interesting, beautiful story that does not exist in historical record.

So that's fascinating. And the book also deals with the historical figure of Eleanor of Aquitaine about whom I also knew nothing. And there is plenty of historical record about her.

Truly, this era in history is something that missed me as a high school student, as a college student, as an adult person. And that is part of the reason I delayed picking this one up.

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