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WSIRN Ep 57: What’s your reading personality?

Dear readers, it’s Tuesday once again. Ready for a little literary matchmaking?

Today’s guest is Shaney Swift, a massage therapist and social justice advocate from Chicago, Illinois. If you’ve been around What Should I Read Next for a while, you know I can be a bit of a personality-type geek, and Shaney shares that enthusiasm — prepare for a lot of nerding out! Today we talk about scanning and deep-diving reading styles, books that help us understand our differences, and what to read next when you feel like your life is in limbo. 

What Should I Read Next #57: What's your reading personality? with Shaney Swift

You can connect with Shaney via Twitter and Instagram!

Books discussed in this episode: 

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StrengthsFinder 2.0, by Tom Rath
My Life in France, by Julie Child
Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table, w/Recipes, by Shauna Niequist
How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics, by Eugenia Cheng
• Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, by Julie Powell
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt
How to Be Black, by Baratunde Thurston
A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted & America in the 19th Century, Witold
Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town, by Witold Rybczynski
Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges, by Amy Cuddy
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, by Mason Currey

14 comments

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  1. Sarah Smith says:

    So good!!! I loved Bread & Wine for similar reasons Shaney mentioned. We just read it for my book club, so really fun to hear it mentioned in today’s episode. I want ALL.THE.BOOKS. you mentioned on this show, Anne, and am trying to manage my Amazon trigger finger! :).

  2. Susan in TX says:

    Well, I can’t wait to read Witold (loved the “what would Witold say?”). Also loved the mention of a possibility of doing an episode on the way readers keep records (be still my heart!). My kids think I’m the biggest book nerd alive with all of my records, and they could possibly be right…it would be good for them to hear there are others out there like me. 😉

  3. Sarah M says:

    Ooh, Righteous Minds has been on my TBR pile for at least a year–since I saw his excellent TED talk. I’ve read all the other books you enjoyed (and I also loved the Julia Child memoir!) and the one about the architect sounds amazing. Off to pin more books. Sigh. 🙂

  4. Stacey says:

    Because I am a big nerd, I had to come over here to comment as I was listening to this episode on the calculus thing – I had an awesome calculus teacher in HS (shoutout to Mrs Chen) who explained what we were doing in EXACTLY the way Shaney describes – which made it SO much easier to understand, and set me up so well for the math classes I took in college.

  5. Sandra mosolgo says:

    Also liked Julie and Julia movie much more than the book. Another movie I liked better than the book was The Hundred Foot Journey. Really want to read The Righteous Life.

  6. Laura Schwartz says:

    Added How to Bake Pi to my TBR, I thought it was a very interesting way to “understand” math, as I’ve always been terrible at it!

  7. Tam says:

    I meandered into My Life in France by Julia Child exactly the same way Shaney did (and felt the same way about the different versions). I’d recommend Julia Child’s letters to Avis DeVoto as an extension of her story. Avis was the wife of the writer Bernard DeVoto and through her connections helped her get that first cookbook published.

  8. Karen says:

    Julia Child – I had picked up My Life in France – who knows why other than I am drawn to stories about living in other places – and when I heard about the movie (Julie & Julia) I knew I wanted to read the book first. An amazing woman who lived an amazing life!

    How do I track my books? Master List of books read is on Good Reads (except for 2009 & 2010 when I joined a group on Ravelry.com called 52 Books in 52 weeks and in 2009 I somehow overshot that goal with 104). In Goodreads, I add a shelf each year “2017 – Books Read”, etc. and make sure I click “add bookshelf” and click on the current year. (This is because the “Challenges” doesn’t catch ALL of the books each year!)
    So, Books Read – Ravelry (2009, 2010) and Goodreads (2012-present) (Yes, I missed 2011 entirely. I don’t know why.)

    To read: I was tracking this in Goodreads (currently at 215), but I have another list from listening to this podcast in my Bullet Journal. (I just cut out last year’s list and put in the pocket of the new one. I do have one crossed off now: Dear Mr. Knightly. Yeah!)

    And now I have 3 more books to start the new year’s list….

  9. Christina says:

    so glad I listen every week… I knew I had heard about people who like information and collecting facts, etc but I could NOT recall which podcast! I found it! I am wholeheartedly an INPUT type personality. I feel so affirmed that my collections are for a purpose now! lol

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