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

For my family, the grief was ever present and all-encompassing, whereas for everyone else, it was a choice.

A choice to reach out, to comment, to think about it or not, to feel bad for a minute before turning to the silly, the trite and trivial. I wanted that.

Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

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.

This month has been a busy one for the Bookshelf and for Thomasville. In September, we've been helping the Thomas County Library relaunch our Area One Book Program.

For ten years, the Thomas County Public Library has hosted South Georgia's first and only One Book Program, where our entire community reads the same book together and celebrates that book with a variety of literary events.

This year we've been reading You're Not Listening, What You're Missing, and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy.

And our Celebration of Murphy's Book will culminate tonight in a visit from the author, so tonight to September 28th at the Thomas County Board of Education Auditorium, you can come here, Kate Murphy, talk about her book You're Not Listening.

Tickets are just $10 and can be found in store at the Bookshelf or online at OneBookThomasCounty.org.

If you're listening to this before 7pm, it's not too late. Visit OneBookThomasCounty.org for more details about this year's event. I would love to see you there.

I feel like once again, I do need to address that I am coming off of a cold and I don't know if I sound congested to you, the listener, but I do sound congested to my own potentially even clogged up ears. I am feeling better, but the episodes that we have recorded over the last two weeks, I feel like I sound a little different.

Maybe I don't, and if I don't, great. You can just ignore that I said that, but I do feel like my voice sounds a little deeper.

And so I wanted to get that out of the way so that you knew your mind wasn't playing tricks on you.

I'm here to recap the books that I read in September. September was a weird reading month for me. I look at my list and I'm really pleased with it. I'm really happy with the books that I read.

It definitely felt in some spots a little homeworky, a little bit like homework. People often ask that if reading books ever feels like homework because of book selling or because of podcasting.

And most often the answer is no. I still really love reading and I read what I like to read, but every so often because of shelf subscriptions or because of literary lunches or because of conquer a classic reading can feel a little bit like homework.

And that's okay. I like homework. And so a lot of this month, the reading felt necessary as I was trying to find books that I wanted to feature for our fall literary luncheon as I was reading for shelf subscriptions and things like that.

So this month I didn't have a lot of surprise books that just kind of took me by surprise or were books that I read kind of serendipitously.

Instead, these were books that I read very intentionally, very purposefully in preparation for some of these store events. So you'll hear me talk about that.

Before I get started, I did want to say that over the last couple of weeks, we have had the most wonderful visitors inside the bookshelf.

This isn't your typical call to action, but over really the last few years we've seen an uptick in podcast listeners coming to see the bookshelf in person.

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