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

Sylvie had read somewhere that the more times a story was told, the less accurate it became. Humans were prone to exaggeration. They leaned away from the parts of the narrative they found boring and leaned into the exciting spots.

Details and timelines changed over years of repetition. The story became more myth and less true. Sylvie thought about how she and William rarely told their story and felt pleased. By not being shared, their love story remained intact.

Anne Napolitano. Hello, beautiful. I'm Annie Jones, owner of the bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia. And this week, I'm joined by my friend Hunter McClendon to talk about our favorite books of 2023.

If you love hearing from Hunter, you might consider joining From the Front porch on Patreon in 2024. There, Hunter and I will be sharing our monthly recaps of our conquering of the modern American classic Lensum Dove.

Episodes will air on the last Friday of each month, which means you've got plenty of time to join or to cajole friends and families into joining us too.

I think ShopMom and ShopDad are actually going to follow along in 2024. To join Patreon, just visit patreon.com forward slash From the Front porch.

Three tiers are available there, but the $5 a month tier will give you access to our conquer a classic episodes, and we hope you'll join us.

Now, back to the task at hand. Hi Hunter. Hello. Welcome back. Thank you for having me as always. I love to be here.

This is a fun. I feel like it's become an annual tradition at this point.

Yeah, we've done this for like how many, I mean, it's been four or five more people. I don't know.

I think at least four years is what it feels like.

And we, you know, we back in June, actually listeners back in June, Hunter and I discussed our favorite books of the year so far.

So we always, I think for the past two or three years, we've evaluated at the midway point. So you can go back and listen to episode 430.

If you want to hear our full conversation about what our reading life looked like back in June, which now feels feels just forever ago.

But now we're back in the year to kind of see how our picks held up. So have you looked at your June list?

Yeah, I looked at it and I don't even, it's so funny because I think that I think that one, two, three, three of the books are the same, I think.

Okay. Wow. Okay. I'm looking at mine. Okay. So how should we do this?

Well, my list, my top, this is not surprising. My top couple, my top few changed a little bit, but it is amazing what the back half of the year holds.

The back half of the year held a lot of really good books and I'm going to need your help. I'm struggling, I'm struggling with my number 10 spot, my number 10 slot.

Are you? Yes. I really am. Okay. So back in June, I'm just going to run through mine really quickly.

My top 10 from 10 to one. So my number 10 book back in June was how far to the promised land by Esomakali.

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