Reading more broadly in order to give better book recommendations

[00:00:00] JEFF WHEELDON: What I'm discovering is a new emerging subgenre of books about comfort. There's lots of cozy fantasy, cozy romance, cozy mysteries even. Even cozy horror is a new thing that's coming out now

ANNE BOGEL: Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogel, and this is What Should I Read Next?. Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader, what should I read next? We don't get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read or reads. Every week we talk all things books and reading, and do a little literary matchmaking with one guest.

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[00:01:41] Readers, today's guest is living out a reality I know many in our audience, including myself, have dreamed of, and some have even walked this road, or are doing so right now. Jeff Wheeldon is on the path to bookstore ownership. As of this coming February 1st, he will be the proud owner of Brighton, Ontario's Lighthouse Books. Jeff is thrilled about this new career path, but as an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, he is feeling a little bit nervous about recommending titles in other genres, the ones he doesn't often reach for.

Jeff's an involved member of his community and an active councilman in Brighton, where he lives with his librarian wife and two kids. Like many readers I've talked to, Jeff turned to comfort reading as a way to recover from burnout during the pandemic, and since then he's been hesitant to dip his toes back into the kinds of literary fiction that, as he wrote in his submission, just doesn't feel safe right now.

[00:02:37] As Jeff wrote, "The world is hard." He wants to read more broadly, but without making the world feel harder. But he also wants to be able to connect with readers who enter his bookstore about books that exist in other popular genres, not just the science fiction and fantasy he feels so at home with.

He especially wants to prioritize finding a few new right-for-him reads that might be categorized as literary, contemporary, or upmarket fiction. Jeff is thinking there must be a way to expand his reading into these genres in a way that still feels comfortable. Can I recommend specific titles that will help him do so? I hope so, and I'm so excited to dig in and speak with Jeff today. I have ideas for his reading life, and I can't wait to hear more about his bookstore endeavor. I know it's not just me. Let's get to it.

Jeff, welcome to the show.

JEFF: Thank you so much for having me, Anne. I'm excited to be here.

ANNE: Oh, the pleasure is mine. I'm so excited to hear more about your reading life and your bookstore very shortly. Jeff, we love to start by giving our readers a glimpse of who our guests are. Would you tell us a little about yourself?

[00:03:41] JEFF: Sure. I live in Brighton, Ontario, which is right on Lake Ontario, about 90 minutes east of Toronto. I am happily married. I've got two kids who are voracious readers, 9 and 12. They give me lots of insight into what's happening in middle-grade readers and graphic novels these days, which I love.

I sit on municipal council in Brighton, and so I'm really engaged in the community and current policy issues and things like that. And I currently work as a realtor, although I am just in the process of purchasing the local new bookstore. It's called Lighthouse Books on Main Street.

ANNE: How exciting! You know what? We are going to talk about that, so I will just bite my tongue on the bookstore questions. But first, tell us more about what you're doing when you're not in the process of buying a bookstore, if you don't mind.

[00:04:30] JEFF: Sure. I sit on 10 different boards and committees through my municipal council work, and so I have a very busy schedule most days. And that might have to change when I'm running a bookstore. So I'm really engaged in a lot of what would otherwise really be volunteering work, connecting with local nonprofits and community groups.

But I also try to make sure that I play Dungeons & Dragons at least every week, although getting the gang together is the hardest part. That's the real final boss of D&D is the schedule. I like to paint miniatures. It's very grounding to have to do something really fine motor skills-y. And of course, I like to read.

ANNE: About that. Tell us about your reading life.

JEFF: Sure. I've always been a reader. Early in the pandemic... I was frankly burning out before the pandemic started, and so I had very severe burnout in the early pandemic to the point where I felt like I couldn't read at all anymore, especially if it was anything related to issues that were really triggers for me, something like climate change or something like current political issues.

[00:05:37] I would read one or two sentences, and then I would feel like I needed a nap. I really felt like I was losing my capacity to read almost entirely. And so I spent a couple years just kind of turtling, sitting on my back deck and watching the flowers in the garden and not reading. And through a lot of time and effort and work on myself, I managed to get back to a place where I could read a book again, but I really needed to ease into it. So I found myself really gravitating to rereads of my favorites and comfort reads, really low-stakes stories.

And it happens that my favorite genre anyway is fantasy, and I find that even though fantasy tends to be about the highest possible stakes, it's the end of the world, there's this epic showdown between good and evil, but it is so far removed from real life that I feel like I get to have the emotional rollercoaster, but it's still very low stakes for me. And so it can be quite comforting in that way.

[00:06:38] I also really like sci-fi. I find that sci-fi is really about giving you a new perspective on reality or on your life, changing something about the world and saying, "Well, what if the world was like this? How would we address this issue, or how would that change the way we interact with each other?" Or things like that, which is really helpful for then looking at the way things are and the way that I see the world and being like, "Oh, maybe my belief about that is wrong or arbitrary." So I really enjoy that, although I do find that sci-fi can be work in that regard because it's making you think differently about the world in a way that carries sometimes emotional or intellectual baggage.

Again, I like comfort reads, and I like broadening my perspective, and somewhere in between there is my comfort zone.

ANNE: Jeff, what brings you to the show right now?

[00:07:31] JEFF: Well, first of all, I started listening to your show because I knew that I was going to buy a bookstore, and I wanted to be able to answer this question for each and every one of my customers: "What should I read next?" I've started working in the shop already, just one day a week at this point, and I really, really love this part of being a bookstore owner is connecting with people from my community and learning enough about them to be able to know what book I have on the shelf that is just for them.

So I started listening to this podcast because I wanted to hear more people going through that process, and I wanted to develop my skill in that regard. But it also made me really acutely aware of how narrow my own tastes are. I have a shelf full of books that I want to read that are outside of my usual reading list, and I never get to that shelf because there's always a new book that is in my comfort zone that I can pick up.

[00:08:29] My wife is also a librarian, and so she brings books home from work for me all the time, and that's my usual TBR. And she's very good at knowing what I want to read next. My goal of expanding my palette so that I can really give good advice to my customers means that I need some help. I need a nudge to get me outside of that one narrow shelf of sci-fi and fantasy, although fantasy shelf is getting wider and wider these days. But I want to explore other genres. I want to get into more upmarket fiction and even literary works so that I can keep up with the prize shortlists and the book club reads and things like that, so that I can be a really good resource to all my customers.

ANNE: I love to hear it. This sounds incredible. Also, from the jump, I want to say how much I love encountering passionate readers in the bookstores I visit. Like, to know that someone knows what it's like to love not just a book, but a specific kind of book, even if that is not remotely the kind of book that I gravitate toward first or most often, still makes me feel known, seen, understood, and like I'm in good hands to be helped by that store. So I'm excited for you. I'm glad you're here today, and I'm really excited to talk about what branching out might look like.

[00:10:00] First, I'd love to hear a little more about the road you've been on in regards to the bookstore. So it sounds like you're purchasing an existing store. Tell me the story, Jeff.

JEFF: Sure. Brighton has two bookstores on Main Street. They're about five shops apart from each other. One is a new bookstore, and one is a used bookstore. And Lighthouse Books has been in Brighton for a long time. It's called Lighthouse Books because being a lakefront town, we do in fact have a lighthouse. People who are not from Brighton sometimes say, "Oh, is that a Christian bookstore?" Because there are a lot of Christian bookstores called Lighthouse Books. But ours is called that just because there's a lighthouse in town, and we've got half the things in town named after lighthouses.

But it's been there for a long time, and the current owners are just such absolutely lovely people. And they took over the store from the previous owners right around the same time we moved into town here, about a decade ago. One day I was chatting with Catherine, the current owner, and she was telling me the story about how she rescued this store. She had heard that the previous owners were going to close. They needed to retire, and they didn't have a buyer for the store. And Catherine, being a former teacher librarian herself, thought, "Well, maybe in my retirement, this is the way that I can contribute to our community. Rather than volunteering in a whole bunch of different places, maybe I'll spend my time at the bookstore."

[00:11:19] And it really has been volunteering for her. I don't know that they've ever made a lot of money from this bookstore. But when I think about the future of my community, especially as a counselor, I work on the strategic plan for the community and think about, well, if I imagine myself in Brighton in 2050, what does it look like? And trying to picture that without a bookstore just doesn't work. No, there has to be this bookstore here.

So I said to Catherine, "Well, if you ever find yourself in that position where you think the store might close, you let me know. We won't let this store close." And she must've written that down because that was a couple years ago. And this summer she gave me a call and said, "Hey, remember when you said that thing?" It's time.

ANNE: What happened next?

JEFF: Well, we talked about it, and we decided, yeah, we can't imagine not doing this. It's one of those opportunities. I really firmly believe that we build the future through our actions today. And so if I want a future where there's a bookstore on Main Street, and I have the ability to make that happen, then I have to do it. So it was a really easy decision to make.

[00:12:26] And of course, everybody we've talked to about it, it turns out that owning a bookstore is everybody's dream job. Of course, people also think that we sit around and read books all day, which is also definitely not the case.

ANNE: Oh, that was the laugh of recognition. So, now, gently please with what I'm about to say. But I mean, it is so many readers' romantic dream that, you know, just these sepia-tinted visions of a beverage and a book and sitting behind the coffee, where customers are browsing on their own and need no help. But disabuse us of our romanticized notions for a moment. What does getting ready to transfer ownership look like for you?

JEFF: Well, I mean, the main thing that I'm learning now is just the day-to-day running of the shop. I'll give you a rundown of what I did yesterday.

ANNE: Oh, yes, please.

JEFF: Because I was in for an afternoon shift yesterday. I came in, and Dan had already unpacked a whole bunch of boxes. Every day when I come in, there's a stack of about a dozen boxes of books on a chair somewhere next to the desk. And someone else had already opened them and checked off to make sure that everything that was on the invoice is, in fact, in the box.

[00:13:35] And then I get to try and enter all of that into our computer database while helping customers who are buying books, and every time someone comes in, I pop up and say, "Hi, how can I help you? Are you looking for anything in particular?" And sometimes that person wants no help, and for the most part that's wonderful, and we just say, "Browse away, take as much time as you like. What a lovely place to be, in a bookstore." But sometimes they really do need something very specific, and so I find myself searching through our catalog, and no, we don't actually have it. We're a very small store. It's one room. It's quite narrow. And so we can't stock every single book.

ANNE: Do you have any idea how many titles?

JEFF: We usually have somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000, depending on time of year and how jammed in they are.

ANNE: Oh, that's a big room. Okay.

[00:14:20] JEFF: Well, it sounds bigger than it looks. So we can't always have everything that we want to have. So very often we end up just doing special orders, and that's probably the majority of our business, honestly, is people who know what they want, and either they're pre-ordering a title that is about to come out and everybody's excited about it, or they're looking for something maybe that's self-published and obscure, and I have to try and find out which of our publishers or suppliers can get that to us in the shortest amount of time.

And so most of what we do, I would say, is logistics. It's figuring out, how do we get that book into your hands? And at what profit margin can we manage to do that with? Some of our suppliers offer us better margins than others, and some of them have shipping costs and some of them don't, and all of those things go into more or less a database or spreadsheet, both on my computer and in my head as I try and find the best way to get the best book to the best person as quickly as possible.

[00:15:21] ANNE: So what I'm hearing in the reality check is breaking down boxes, data entry, split attention. Nobody wants to think about profit margins.

JEFF: Yeah, especially not with books. Thinking about profits in relation to books feels icky.

ANNE: Those don't go together.

JEFF: That's right.

ANNE: I mean, every bookseller who's ever talked about their bookstore has used the words razor-thin next to profit margins.

JEFF: But the other side of it is that when I am interrupted by a customer, it's almost always because we're having the most wonderful conversation that is so revealing about a person, which is the same kind of conversation that you have here every week. So your listeners will understand how great that is. I get to do that all day.

ANNE: Because when you're talking about a book, you're never just talking about a book.

JEFF: That's right, yeah. Yesterday somebody came in to talk about quantum physics because they were reading a book that touched on it, so much so that he needed to dig into his old math and calculus textbooks from college. And we ended up going on this very wide-ranging conversation that it also included dragons. So, you know, it's good times.

[00:16:29] ANNE: I'm glad to hear it. So it's a tough business, and there's a lot of grunt work, and also, it'll be yours on February 1st.

JEFF: Yes. I am so excited for that. We've started the transition already, you know, with me working there one day a week, and Catherine makes sure to introduce me to all of the best customers and say, "Oh, I want you to know, while we're both here, that this is what's happening so that you don't show up in February and I'm gone." She's not dying or moving away. She's just going to take it a little slower.

ANNE: What do you anticipate being your favorite parts of the job?

JEFF: Certainly the engagement, the reader advisory, or in the bookstore industry they call it hand-selling. But it's getting the right book into your hands.

ANNE: Oh, but you're married to a librarian, so reader advisory.

JEFF: Reader advisory is the library term. I really do enjoy that because that is the most relational aspect of it. You get to really know a person through what they love to read, and you find out something new about yourself in that conversation as well. So I really do love that part of it.

[00:17:32] My background before this was in higher education, and so I love talking about ideas, and I love the way that books open us up to all sorts of ideas. In that regard, this feels like it's very fulfilling. There are great aspects of just about any job, but I have felt like my day job for the last number of years has been as a realtor, and that has a lot of great points to it. Certainly gives me a loose schedule that lets me do all of the other municipal council-related stuff that I like to do, but it doesn't engage with ideas and stories in the same way.

ANNE: Jeff, hearing you speak with enthusiasm about putting the right book in the right reader's hands makes me think that that's an experience that is well-known to you, on the receiving end.

JEFF: On the receiving end, but also on the giving end. I've always been one to try and make recommendations to people.

ANNE: Oh, yeah?

[00:18:26] JEFF: Yeah. I love to recommend books that I love. And I've noticed as a parent now, my kids say this to me sometimes every day, because they read so many books. They're voracious. So they-

ANNE: You'd be really good at reader's advisory as a parent with a 9 or 12-year-old. They go through those things so fast.

JEFF: They do, but also they're doing the reader advisory. They're always saying, "Oh, Dad, I just finished this book. I think you'd really like it." "Oh yeah, buddy? Why do you think I would like that?" "Oh, well..." And they'll just get right into... And of course, they tell me the entire plot, which is not great reader advisory, but it does really tell me a lot about what they love and about what they think I love. So it's a good point of connection with another person. I love to see that reflected back to me through my kids.

ANNE: Okay. That's very exciting. Do you carry children's and adult titles at Lighthouse Books?

JEFF: We are a general bookstore, and so we've got everything. Things that I would never want to read myself and things that I know very well, and everything in between.

[00:19:26] ANNE: All right. Paint me a picture of what's on the shelves. I don't know how to ask this exact question, but what I'm wondering is, when I walk through the door, am I going to recognize a lot of titles? Are they going to be bestsellers? Are they g... how many are going to...

JEFF: Sure. When you walk in the front door, if you look to your right past the window displays, which are usually whatever is new and hot, we have a shelf that is all about current bestsellers and award finalists. And so we've got a shelf for the Giller Prize and a shelf for the Booker Prize, and we try and keep up with whatever is being longlisted and then shortlisted so that people who are coming in looking for the latest and greatest is going to see that there.

We also have a notable Canadian title section on that same shelf, making sure that we get those Canadian books that are doing really well and are critically acclaimed up there. We try and put books there also that highlight local authors. There are a number of big-name authors that I am learning all live in this region.

[00:20:30] ANNE: Oh, that were known to you but that detail wasn't known to you?

JEFF: That detail wasn't known to me.

ANNE: Oh, that's delightful.

JEFF: Sometimes Catherine will say, "Oh, well, we got to make sure that we put this one up near the front and faced outward, because if she walks in and doesn't see it on the shelf, we'll feel embarrassed," because we want to support our local authors, and we want to support these great Canadian voices.

ANNE: Well, you had me at the "If she walks in." That's so cool that that's a possibility.

JEFF: Absolutely. It's wonderful.

ANNE: Truly local to your community. Okay. How do you all decide what to carry? How will you decide what to carry? I think is actually what matters here.

JEFF: My podcast listening these days is overwhelmed by book podcasts. So I'm trying to keep up with what is new and interesting. But very often, how we decide what to carry is from our patrons themselves who say, "Hey, this book is coming out. I want to pre-order it," or, "My buddy just told me about this book. Can you get this in for me?" And then we take a look at it and say, "Yeah, absolutely. It'll be in for you next week, and I'm ordering two more for the store."

[00:21:34] ANNE: For all of our readers who wonder if it matters at all when you put in those pre-orders at local bookstores, this is a common story.

ANNE: Like, you influence the taste of your local booksellers when you do that.

JEFF: Absolutely. And then I just keep up with bestseller lists. And just because it's on a bestseller, just because Reese picks it for a book club or something like that, doesn't mean that it's going to be great for our store. And so knowing what's going to sell locally is not quite the same as just following what's on the bestseller lists. But we do try and keep both of those in tension.

ANNE: Okay. So this might feel a little unwieldy as a question, but if every bookstore has its own personality, how would you describe the personality of the Lighthouse Books you see yourself running?

[00:22:26] JEFF: Well, because we are such a small shop, and because Catherine is almost always there herself, it's difficult to distinguish between the store's personality and hers. Her warmth and her genuine interest in all of her customers is the personality of the shop, and I'm a little bit nervous to try and take that on. Those are big shoes to fill. But she's been talking me up to all of the customers to try and prepare them for that shift.

But I would say it's about discovery and connection because that reader advisory experience really is the heart of the shop. If someone comes in and they know exactly what they want, and they've maybe never shopped there before, then that's a quick transaction, and that's fine. We love that. But if someone comes in and they have an idea about something, but they're not quite sure, then maybe that's a half-hour-long transaction that makes our day. You know? That to me is the character of the store, and that's why I wanted to buy it. If it hadn't been like that, I wouldn't have bought it.

ANNE: I'm excited for you. How can I help?

[00:23:37] JEFF: I am somewhat stuck in my lane in sci-fi and fantasy, especially fantasy, and I'm stuck rereading my favorites. Now, being a fantasy reader, my favorites are a very long series. Rereading The Wheel of Time, it's a big project, you know? That's 14 books, each one over 800 pages. That might take me all year. And so if I'm doing that, then I'm not keeping up with what's new and interesting in the market these days. And I know Catherine, one of the things she tells people about retiring is that she will finally get to read books that she wants to read rather than ones she feels she should for the sake of the store.

So my challenge is that in the past when I have tried to expand outside of my comfort zone, I have come across so many books that are critically acclaimed, they're book club books, they're things people, everyone's talking about, and I'm sure they're absolutely wonderful, but I find that there's a tendency in a lot of books, maybe especially critically acclaimed ones, to have subject matter that is just so depressing to me.

[00:24:48] I remember probably the first upmarket fiction that I read was The Kite Runner, and I remember it being such a big deal. And I thought, "Oh, wow, this is so interesting. I'm learning about an era and a culture that are new to me." It was a phenomenal experience until I got to the horrific child abuse, and that's what I remember about that book.

I think about a book like, say, Room by Emma Donoghue, a phenomenal writer, or so I'm told, but gosh, I couldn't read that book. I know that even books that I really, really wanted to read, Ministry for the Future comes to mind, and it was too hard. I got halfway through, and I had to stop. And everyone told me, "Oh, it gets a lot more hopeful in the very next chapter." Well, too late, I'm done. So I want to be able to expand outward into all of the riches of the world of literature without killing myself in the process. You know what I mean?

[00:25:50] ANNE: I think I do. I'm very curious to hear what is on that shelf of branch-out books and also what your wife is bringing home from the library. But can we start with the books you love?

JEFF: Sure.

ANNE: Okay. I mean, I've been meaning to read The Wheel of Time for many years. Like, count me on it, Jeff. So you know how this works. You're going to tell me three books that you brought to the show today to talk about because you love them, also a book that wasn't right for you, although I appreciate the bonus couple you just gave me, and then maybe briefly what you've been reading lately as well. And then we'll see what kind of picture that pulls together. How did you choose these?

JEFF: Well, the first one was easy because it's easily the books I've read most. The Wheel of Time, I started reading that in the summer before grade seven. Hint.

ANNE: Wow. An ambitious youngster.

[00:26:44] JEFF: And I happened to have had a small injury that had my foot laid up, and so I read the first book of The Wheel of Time in just a few days, because I was sitting with my foot up. And loved it and dived in. And I think at that time there were only four books in that series available. So every time a new book would come out, I would start the series over again.

And there turned out to be 14 books, and so I have reread the first few books of that. I didn't reread the whole series every time a new book came out, but close. And so I've probably read the first half of The Wheel of Time maybe six or seven times. Again, this is a very large series, and so it takes a while. So it's easy to say, yeah, that's my comfort read.

[00:27:31] I do love epic fantasy. As I said, it really deals with values issues, which I love because thinking about values is important to me. I ended up doing two degrees in theology, so those kinds of questions of what is good and what is true and what is worth fighting for or maybe non-violence and versus violence, those kinds of questions I really love to explore in a context that is so far removed from real life that it's low stakes for me, even if it's end of the world for them.

One of my favorite recent reads was Monk and Robot by Becky Chambers. This is a duology. It's sci-fi, but it's solarpunk, which is a new subgenre that I really love because it's a hopeful kind of sci-fi rather than the dystopian cyberpunk. Solarpunk is about, well, what if we figured out how to reconnect to nature and have a more sustainable life in a future world? But in this world, the robots became sentient, and they all quit. They walked off into the wilderness, and nobody's seen them for 100 years or something.

[00:28:39] The main character is a tea monk in service of the god of small comforts, and their service to the community is to take their little cart out to a new town out in the forest somewhere and set up shop and just offer people tea and hear their worries. And it was very comforting to read a book about somebody who's entirely oriented around comforting others but then still having problems of their own. And then out in the wilderness, they stumble into a robot who has come back to check on the humans and make sure that they're okay and ask them, "What is it that you need?"

This has really opened up what I'm discovering is a new emerging subgenre of books about comfort. There's lots of cozy fantasy, cozy romance, cozy mysteries even. Even cozy horror is a new thing that's coming out now, where these cozy books are really about relationships and finding care and comfort for each other, those kinds of things. They tend to be relatively low stakes, although not always.

[00:29:48] The fact that this is a rising new subgenre right now really, I think, says a lot about the world. But my first foray into it was with Monk and Robot, and I adore it.

ANNE: I'm unsurprised that Becky Chambers is really landing for you. I'm trying to think if she's the one who's called her work hope punk or if those are readers describing her work back to herself. But I know she said many a time that she wants to write futures that feel good, that people would actually want to live in. And yet her approach to addressing the collective angst so many of us feel right now as a writer isn't to write books in which nothing happens, but low stakes, high world building is one approach that some authors are taking, and that's not hers.

JEFF: No. No.

ANNE: And she's become beloved so quickly for the reasons you're describing now.

[00:30:50] JEFF: I would say even that as much as there is a wide background cast in The Monk and Robot duology, there's really only two characters, the monk and the robot, that are really fleshed out at all. All of the action takes place in the dialogue between the two of them, and then Dex's, the main character's inner monologue. So there's a lot going on even as they're just kind of wandering through the wilderness or going from town to town. So it's delightful.

ANNE: In a very philosophical way. Is that something you enjoy?

JEFF: I think so. And I guess my third one is going to draw this out as well. The third one that I picked surprised even me for picking it. I chose Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. And I chose this I think for a few reasons. I've been thinking about why I wanted to put this on the list, and I think it's because on the one hand, I do like the classics. I've read a handful of the classics, and I find that they can really inform not just my understanding of the literary world and not just enjoying the book for its own sake. I mean, classics are called classics for reasons. They're usually very good.

[00:32:01] But also understanding that almost every book is riffing off of someone else. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. I've been told that in order to understand literature, you need to understand the Bible. Well, I've got two degrees in theology to help me understand the Bible, but I heard you on a recent episode talking about Middlemarch and how much that informed your perspective on so many other books. Once you had read Middlemarch, you suddenly got all of these different allusions. And so now Middlemarch is on my list.

Frankenstein definitely was a pivotal work, not just for literature, but also... I read a critical edition of it, which I really loved. I read it in an academic setting. I was doing my master's degree, and I took a literature course. So, reading a critical edition, you know, all of those academic footnotes help you understand the context in which it was written, and I learned more about early feminism through Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft.

[00:33:02] That insight into the process of writing, but also just the context in which it was written really added so much depth to the story. I do love taking deep dives like that. I don't know that I'm going to have the time anytime in the near future, but I do love a good deep dive into another world, maybe from our past or maybe into a wholly imagined world. And so having a classic and having the reflections of others over the last couple centuries to really dig deeper into it I think is something I value.

ANNE: All right. That's good to know. And I'm going to be thinking about how perhaps we can find you that intellectual and readerly satisfaction, but in smaller bite-sized pieces.

JEFF: Thank you.

ANNE: Since no big projects are on your horizon right now. Jeff, would you tell me a little bit about a book that was not right for you? And I'd love to hear where the bad fit arose from.

[00:34:02] JEFF: Sure. This one was also very easy for me to pick, and it was Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin. Now, sounds funny because I love fantasy, and these days if people talk about or think about fantasy, they usually go first to Game of Thrones. I tried really hard to like Game of Thrones, but I found very quickly that any characters that I actually liked or respected at all, by the end of the first book they're either dead or about to be, and I just lost interest in the story.

I found that I really need to actually like a protagonist. I need to respect them. I know a few people have told me about their favorite fantasy novels, and I've read them. There were two actually that I thought of. One was Thomas Covenant series, and another was one by Guy Gavriel Kay, and both very well-respected series or books. Both start with a sexual assault, and I just thought, "No, you're not the protagonist if you're doing that to somebody. You're not my guy." So if I don't respect the main character or if I find them just unlikable, I just lose interest really quickly.

[00:35:15] ANNE: Okay. That is good to know. And also, you can love fantasy without loving all fantasy. Like, it just doesn't work like that.

JEFF: Amen.

ANNE: Jeff, what have you been reading lately?

JEFF: There are two books that I've been reading lately that I have really enjoyed. One is A Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous, which is absolutely-

ANNE: What a title!

JEFF: Absolutely a comfort story. It's about someone who, it's a fantasy setting and they were a part of the cult of the Enchantrix, who was a villain who was eventually defeated by adventurers and now this person is trying to start a new life knowing that they still have the scars of their past as part of being part of this death cult and being a formerly villainous person. So it's very much a cozy fantasy about comfort and finding new starts and new friends. It was a balm to my soul.

[00:36:09] The other one that I'm really enjoying right now is by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It is called Green City Wars. It's almost like a noir detective novel, except it is in a solarpunk setting, a futuristic green city, being a sustainable city, where all of the works of the city, the pipes and electricity and all of the menial tasks are handled by genetically engineered animals.

And so you follow Scotch Raccoon, PI, as he looks for this mouse that everybody's looking for. And meanwhile, there's an entire animal economy behind the walls and under the streets of this city where the humans are oblivious to all of it, and there's wars between the gray squirrels and the red squirrels, and there's rat mafia. It's take a kind of a hard-boiled detective noir idea and make it fuzzy and cute in a really funny way that is still very much a good commentary on society. And this makes you think like, "Wow, yeah, we make humans do all of the stuff that they're showing is actually really hard work for rats and raccoons in real life."

[00:37:17] So I really enjoy that it is, again, very light stakes in that it's very removed from real life and yet at the same time shines such a light onto real life in a way that is provocative.

ANNE: I've heard a lot of Adrian Tchaikovsky just lately from the science fiction and fantasy readers in my life, but I've not read him before. So thanks for reminding me. Okay, Jeff, we've talked about what you want to happen next in your reading life, and... I mean, tell me what you would find most useful. A place my curiosity is going, as a starting point, is what is on that shelf of books that you have assembled for yourself in your quest to branch out that you haven't read? Is there anything there that we could talk about? And also, what is your favorite librarian bringing home with her? Are those landing? Are there some you're curious about or you're wondering where perhaps you could try first to get the most reward for your reading efforts?

[00:38:15] JEFF: Sure. I have been trying to branch out into romance, because that's been very hot right now. Especially the subgenre of hockey romance. But also romantasy. Right now we've got a romance shelf in the bookstore and a fantasy shelf in the bookstore, and most new books that come in we're not sure which one to put them on. But they're at opposite ends of the store, so we're going to have to rearrange some things, I think.

So I've been branching out a little bit into that, getting... I've tried some Ali Hazelwood, for example. That was okay, but it really is the upmarket fiction and sort of the book club stuff that's happening that I'm just completely oblivious to. I know that we're selling a lot of Theo of Golden. I don't even know what it's about, and I would love to be able to speak coherently about that or trying to think of... what it's called now? I'm so bad with names. I apologize.

ANNE: No, that's okay. So will a lot of your readers be?

JEFF: That's true.

[00:39:17] ANNE: It is what it's going to be like in the bookstore.

JEFF: Absolutely is, yeah. And then I can picture titles. And this is a thing I've noticed is that very often finding the right book is about remembering physically where in the shop it is and having a general sense of what color.

ANNE: That is my brain.

JEFF: There is one right now that is a critically acclaimed book about gay men in Jamaica.

ANNE: The Disappearers.

JEFF: The Disappearers. I've been hearing about this. I know we have it on the shelf in a few different places. We've sold a few of those. And I read the synopsis and thought, "Oh, gosh, that sounds like it's a book about oppression. I don't know if I have the heart right now." And yet I know that there are people who are going to come into my store who are looking for books that are going to be maybe adjacent to that, and I don't know what to tell them. I would love to be able to find something that is in maybe the same category as that or John of John or Theo of Golden or other books along those lines that maybe I'm not going to feel burnt out after reading. Do you know what I mean?

[00:40:27] ANNE: I think so. Another question I have is the titles available, and I imagine to some extent the titles readers are asking for are constantly changing. So I'm wondering how much it matters what's on the shelves now versus February. Are you thinking backlist? Are you thinking futures?

JEFF: I'm thinking...

ANNE: I mean, we definitely have enough to go on, but I'm just really looking to hone it in here.

JEFF: I don't know that it necessarily matters right now versus February. What I'm looking for is to have a touchstone in every shelf of the bookstore so that I can say, "Oh, we put this next to this for a reason. I don't know this one, but I've read this one, and I understand what it is you're looking for." I know that that means that I'm going to need to read widely and diversely because a lot of the titles that we have coming in that are growing in appreciation in our culture are from different cultures. You know, we've got a number of Japanese books on our shelf right now. That's lovely to see that coming in.

ANNE: I have one in mind for you, actually.

[00:41:35] JEFF: A lot of books are about immigrants to North America and bringing their cultural experience, and that's stuff that I'm not terribly aware of. So I know that I could probably throw darts from one side of the store to the other and just pick up books and get a sense of it, but I'm trying to get a sense of, okay, how do I narrow this down so that I'm not just reading something random but that I'm reading something that's going to be an important touchstone for me to be able to say, "Oh, you loved this book. Now I can use that as a basis for... Because I understand this one book that I know that you loved, how do I then take that and say, 'Okay, well, these other books that have come out since then, I haven't read them yet, but I understand that this is what you're looking for?'"

ANNE: That's helpful, which means if it's a bestseller now and not quite as popular come February, that's fine. You'll still have the understanding you need.

[00:42:30] Okay, so you are looking to branch out, especially to upmarket and literary, and are at a loss. Oh, here, we will recap for our listeners. The books you loved were The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, Monk and Robot by Becky Chambers, and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Not for you was Game of Thrones series by George R.R. Martin, although I'm staying away from science fiction and fantasy because you have your touchstones on those shelves of the bookstore. And it sounds like identifying books about comfort, the cozy, cozy, cozy, finding care and community, that that is serving as a selector for you that can function well in genres like romance and mystery. And those aren't the only genres you can find that, but that gives you a nice foothold.

I have some ideas in no particular order. Thinking about what doesn't feel terribly far removed from science fiction and fantasy, and yet would not be shelved there in the bookstore, I'm thinking about the works of American author Kevin Wilson. Have you read anything by him?

JEFF: I have not.

[00:43:47] ANNE: Okay, I am not sad to hear that. And something else I like about Kevin is I believe that his books sell well consistently, and he is a working writer who's putting out a book every couple of years, and I imagine that readers will still be coming to him to find what they want to read next.

The one I want to start with is maybe two books back. It might even have come out pre-pandemic, but it's called Nothing to See Here. And I think it has a couple elements that may appeal to you personally, and also it definitely, like, is that upmarket branching out. I'm not sure if he would be shelved as upmarket or literary, but we are operating in that space.

Kevin happens to teach creative writing in the university setting, in case that matters as you envision him and your kinship with him. But this is a story that definitely has a zany element. Like Kevin says, like, he's weird. His books are weird. He can't help it. He decided to try to make it his superpower.

[00:44:47] But this book is about a politician. There's this powerful political family in the American South who have this problem that they can't let anybody know about. When their kids get angry, they spontaneously combust. This would be a career-ender for the want tobe presidential candidate, who, as I recall, is a senator right now. He's angling to become Secretary of State. So his family's under the microscope, and nobody can know the kids catch fire.

So the family calls on a person they didn't expect to need to step in as a nanny of sorts to wrangle these boys, and she is an estranged old friend with a troubled past who just has no idea what she's signing up to do. But even though on the surface, it's zany, like people are bursting into flames, obviously that's deep symbolism, it's such a poignant meditation on friendship and parenthood and hopes and dreams as they clash with reality.

[00:45:51] There's triumph and big defeats, and it's also a story about becoming your own person and forming your own family, whether that's the one you're given or the one you find. There's also a queer love story in this book. It's short. He typically writes books that are just over 200 pages. The characters are really memorable. I wonder if this would feel like a step outside your comfort zone instead of a leap across the abyss.

JEFF: It does. I really like the sound of that. I think that having fantastical elements inside otherwise contemporary political landscape makes the contemporary political landscape a little bit more palatable and accessible.

ANNE: I hope so. He's written two more books since then, and I don't think I'm dropping one out, but he's been writing long enough now that he has quite the... he's filling up his own shelf, Kevin Wilson is. But his most recent one is called Run for the Hills, and that has zero magical realism but preserves that zany sense.

[00:46:56] It's a road trip across the country from Tennessee, where Kevin Wilson is based, to California, as there are four half-siblings who do not know of the... Oh, wait. Hang on. If it matters, it starts in Boston, not Tennessee. Okay. So actually coast to coast. But four half-siblings who do not know that the others exist, they have no idea that their dad has been leading all these secret lives, who find each other, or rather get picked up one by one by the half-brother who starts it all in Boston and go on a trek to see their father.

JEFF: Interesting.

ANNE: Some for the first time in like a year, and some for the first time in 30 or 40. So it's zany, but also he's talking about real, authentic, important, sometimes hard human emotions, but in a package that I don't feel like is hitting you over the head with the pain in the world right now. But that's my hope.

JEFF: I like that.

[00:47:54] ANNE: But Nothing to See Here, I think that's the one for you to start. And readers are still reading this. This is still selling well on the backlist. It's one that I wouldn't be at all surprised to see on the shelves of my local bookstore that I think holds 8,000 copies, so in the same range right now.

JEFF: I might even have it on my shelf and don't even know it.

ANNE: Whoa. Maybe. For the Japanese pick that I was wondering, I wonder if this is... You know what? This isn't science fiction/fantasy. What we have here is contemporary fiction, literary fiction, definitely absurdist, but I hope you'll hear why it doesn't sound terribly outside your wheelhouse. The book I'm thinking of is called Diary of a Void. It's by Emi Yagi. Do you know it?

JEFF: I don't know it.

[00:48:45] ANNE: Okay. This is translated from the Japanese. It's short, it's weird, and what I like about it for you is that it does that thing that the science fiction/fantasy I enjoy, especially the science fiction that I enjoy, does so well, which is pose this wild "what if" question, and realize that the book is calling you to reevaluate so much that you took for granted in your own life.

This story starts with a 34-year-old woman working at a cardboard tube manufacturer in Japan, and at first she really likes her role because at the job where she came from, sexual harassment was a constant threat, and she, like, she needed to get out of there, and she did. And in this story that's firmly in the past, I don't recall any details about what happened, just that she didn't like it, and she wanted to leave, and she did.

[00:49:40] But in her new job, which at first was such a welcome change, she realizes, like, sure, they might be kind to her, her new male colleagues, but they expect her to wait on them all day long. She's the one who's expected to get the tea, and do the dishes, and clean up, and, "Do you know where the towels are?" And, "Do you know where the soap is?" And all those things that it's not her job to take care of, except she's a woman.

One day, completely impulsively, when they're like, "Wait on us, wait on us," she's like, "It smells bad, and I'm pregnant, so I can't." But she's not pregnant. But she realizes that her work life instantly becomes a lot better. Like, instead of looking to her to serve them, they're waiting on her. Because she couldn't because she has this real, "It smells bad," and, "No, no, no, you rest." And so she decides, "This is great. How can I keep the ruse going, like, for the whole nine months?"

[00:50:34] So this is playful and clever, but also really subversive, and also there's a point at which you're like, "Wait a second. I'm not sure what reality is in this book anymore." And it really makes you think as a reader, like, what is happening? What is Emi Yagi trying to do? What is the character actually thinking? Like, what is real and what is imagined, and where is the line, and is there a line? And is that even the right question to ask? It could be fun. Maybe. Maybe. Do you think it could be fun?

JEFF: It sounds like it could be a lot of fun. It's not something that I would normally pick for myself, but it does sound fun. So that's a great recommendation.

ANNE: I'm wondering if we go next to a mega hit bestseller that the whole world has read, except that's never actually true. Maybe it could serve as a touchstone. I'm thinking about Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow. What do you think? Did I just see you wince?

[00:51:34] JEFF: Well, that's on my shelf of books that I really want to read.

ANNE: What appeals to you?

JEFF: I'll preface this by saying that I've seen the series and did love the story. The idea of the whole plot turning around his relationships with the people in this hotel. It was actually one of the things that most inspired the novel that I've been working on. I've just finished the first draft of my first novel, and it really is about people in a fairly constrained space who are building relationships and having plot develop around them and between them. I really loved that aspect of the series.

And then at times it does get very intense. I mean, with the Russian Revolution, there's a lot of atrocity and oppression and things like that that felt very heavy. And so I have been looking at that one on my shelf, I've got two of his books on my shelf, thinking, "Is this a way that I can build up my stamina for reading about these awful things in the world, knowing that I care enough about these characters?" Because they are delightful characters, and interesting. Even the villains are very interesting and, in many ways, very sympathetic villains. And yet, man, that Russian Revolution was a hard time. So I think it's a good recommendation that I've been trying to psych myself up for for a year.

[00:53:12] ANNE: I forgot there was a series. I haven't seen the series.

JEFF: Oh, it's very good. I mean, Ewan McGregor is phenomenal.

ANNE: I can understand why in the series they would want to conjure the backdrop against his sentence he's serving out inside this luxury hotel that doesn't appear prominently on the page. But this is... for readers who haven't read it, because if you haven't, it's never just you. I mean, this is the story of a Russian count who the Bolsheviks sentence in 1922 for crimes of state. Readers, they involve poetry.

His punishment is house arrest in a swanky luxury hotel called the Metropol Hotel that's across the street from the Kremlin. And what Amor Towles does here is show us how over many decades, the count makes a life for himself after his walls are literally closed in upon him. So it's a little bit claustrophobic, but oh my goodness, I could have told you what the dish was they make in the kitchen years ago. Now, is it bouillabaisse?

JEFF: It might be, yeah.

[00:54:28] ANNE: There's this scene that I want to actually go reread as soon as we hang up, Jeff. Is the one in which the Count and a few of his co-conspirators plan for ages in order to source all the ingredients so they can make one fantastic dinner in the hotel kitchen, and then they sit down and they savor it together. Oh, and there's a detailed scene about, like, how he gets a great shave. That was just such an indulgent human experience.

I read this when it first came out, so clearly it's one that stays in readers' minds long after they finish reading it. I think it's been out 10-something, maybe 10 years and a couple months at this point. Staying power. And he'll keep writing books. He's working on something. He'll have more to come.

JEFF: I think that is a really good recommendation. Thank you for giving me a little shove to follow through on it.

[00:55:21] ANNE: Okay, let's do two more. I dislike how many of these are American. Some of my favorite authors are... I love Mary Lawson. Some of her settings are not far from you. Her books are brutal. You don't want... In a couple years maybe we'll be ready. I think about what branching out might look like, and I, three of the five we're talking about are going to be American, and I'm sorry. That's okay.

I do wonder if taking a look at Searching for Terry Punchout, that Danielle recommended to me on a recent episode that I then went back and read, she found it via Canada Reads, I wonder if that would be a good selection for you, but Danielle already described it brilliantly on the show. So I won't step in her place. But for a literary upmarket novel that maybe will appeal to you is another one that's a little comic, okay, a lot comic, called Country People by Daniel Mason. He also wrote North Woods that sold very well several years ago. Is this an author-

JEFF: I've heard of North Woods.

[00:56:16] ANNE: For this one, he has said that his intention was to write a serious novel about Chekhov, but that kept not coming out of his fingers and onto the page. What he got was this. It is sharply comic, and it's about the absurdities of city people who pack up their lives in California and move to the country in Vermont, where they have all these romantic notions about what country life will be like. And they are demolished in short order by reality.

So the husband and wife are both academics. Kate, the wife, is a literature scholar, and she's been given a visiting professorship, and it's a swanky gig. They're real excited that she got this... they're going to go on a year-long adventure, then they're going to go back to their life in California. It's just going to be a blip. It's going to be great. And the husband, Miles, is going to finally finish his dissertation that he's been working on for something like 14 years. Like, this is a grown man who's still very much trying to figure out what he wants to be when he grows up, and it's absurd. I hope delightfully absurd to you.

[00:57:28] But there are small town scandals, conspiracy theories, but not scary ones, just ridiculous. The whole thing is just ridiculous, but not empty-headed. There's a family dog with a turbocharged sense of smell that factors prominently in the plot. There's a ski instructor so handsome that the whole town knows, like, you gotta be careful with him. He will scramble your senses. The husband maybe joins a cult. The kids get into their own trouble. We get the dog's point of view, and we see how he's hatching his own schemes. Some of the book is told as transcripts of a local call-in radio show. Mason is a skilled literary writer. This is really smartly written, but it's also really silly.

For the serious, this is a novel about what it means when expectations crash into reality. There's a lot of talk of literature in the pages, especially Paradise Lost, because Kate, the wife, is a Milton specialist. This is a midlife reckoning novel where this couple and many of their peers are going, "Is this what I wanted? Is this what I signed up for, and what does it mean for what happens next?" So I'm wondering how that sounds.

[00:58:36] JEFF: That sounds incredible. It sounds really familiar to me in the sense that Brighton is a really small town, a historic agricultural community, and we're growing really quickly, mostly from people who are retiring from Toronto. There's a lot of this idea of people moving to the country and having their expectations of life here challenged. And as a municipal councilor here, I hear a lot about that. So it sounds very familiar in that respect, but lovely to approach it from a zany perspective as well.

I am familiar with Paradise Lost and the academics around that, so I would probably enjoy that aspect as well. And yeah, finding absurd in the everyday is one of the things that makes life in these challenging times palatable and enjoyable. So I love that.

[00:59:26] ANNE: That sounds good. Jeff, I would love to find you a book akin to Marlon James' The Disappearers, and it is breaking my brain right now to think about something that is not emotionally devastating that lives in the same space. The closest I'm able to get, like on reflexive reaction, is How to Say Babylon, a memoir by Safiya Sinclair, which is not at all the same story.

But I wonder if there are enough elements that those books could coexist while still working to do very different things. I wonder if that's helpful, and I also wonder where that is on your post-burnout literary brain and content because the thing about a memoir is you know every word did not come from the author's imagination but from their heart and their memory. But her story is really compelling, and I wonder if that might be a good entry point.

JEFF: Okay.

[01:00:32] ANNE: But I'm going to keep thinking about that, and I will let you know if I'm able to come up with a really satisfying answer.

JEFF: Thank you.

ANNE: And I'm going to end with something light and British, if that's okay with you.

JEFF: I love both light and British things.

ANNE: Okay. I was not planning on talking about this today, so we'll see. We'll see how coherent I sound. But I just finished the new Nick Hornby novel that comes out awfully close to when you will be assuming ownership of the bookstore. It's called Cash Out. So he writes upmarket fiction, and what I like about this for you is it's a book with real depth that wrestles with important questions and is not emotionally devastating, doesn't touch any of those brutal topics. It's about football, or as we say in the US, it's about soccer, and I don't actually know how to talk about this because I feel so silly calling it soccer, but the word soccer does not appear in the book. I believe I remember you saying that books that would appeal to a wide demographic age-wise would be welcome.

JEFF: Yes.

[01:01:34] ANNE: What I like about this book is the protagonist is in her early to mid-30s, but the man who kicks it all off is her uncle. And her uncle is someone that as a reader you'd feel very happy seeing yourself in because of who he is in the story. So I do like how it functions on that multi-generational level.

Here's the thing. Sophie, our protagonist, her uncle has been a diehard fan for the worst team in British soccer for his entire life because he is from their town. It defies reason. It defies sense. So many people have said to him, "You know, you'd be a lot happier if you rooted for a better team," but this team is his, and there's no changing it. It just is what it is. And last year it wasn't all bad to be a fan of this team because their big win was they narrowly escaped relegation. This is where the bar is. They didn't get sent down, so that's an amazing... Like, people were popping champagne, like amazing celebratory triumph.

[01:02:37] So it's their shtick that every time Sophie sees her uncle, oh, my goodness, what's his na... Keith, every time it's her duty to say, "And what's Leicester up to?" And he tells her, and they have a long conversation where he goes into way too many details that he knows she cannot follow and isn't interested in. But she adores her Uncle Keith, who is misunderstood by the rest of the family. And she will listen to every word he says, and she enjoys her role in the performance, which is to feign interest and ask very good follow-up questions even though she hasn't a clue what any of this football terminology means.

So that is why when this team starts the season not terribly, and Keith decides to put 50 pounds on a 5,000 to 1 bet for the team to take it all, he decides to do another 50 pounds in Sophie's name. But then they start winning, and a couple games into the season, she realizes... I think the game's on a pub or something, and she's like, "Wait, is this the team? I've never actually seen them play. Who are these guys? Oh, my uncle talked about him. Oh, that's the superstar. My uncle calls him a whippet."

[01:03:44] And she gets really invested, and she's like, "Wait a second. I like all these people who've been into sports? I thought that they were shallow and, like didn't know what a good book was," but it turns out this is a book club where you're all reading the same book, but it never ends, like in a really good way. Like, there's always something new to talk about when you're following the football season.

This is a found family story in that she finds this community of fellow not just sports fans, but fans of this team that she did not know existed. So she feels like she's found a hidden paradise. She's learned a secret language, and it transforms her life. But meanwhile, there's money in it. And she learns... the book is called Cash Out, she learns that the options are, upon her uncle placing this bet for her. And he said from the get-go, "You can do whatever you want with it. This is yours. I did it for you. You have all the responsibility."

[01:04:40] That it's not just you win a quarter of a million pounds or nothing. Once they start winning, the bookies are very interested in buying back her bet. So she has a decision to make several games in like, "Hey, do you want to get out of debt so you can afford to move out of your crap boyfriend's house and buy that dress you wanted to go to your friend's wedding and not feel like you're drowning in a small amount of debt, but still, you have no money to pay it off in your charity job? Do you want 9,000 pounds now? Because you're probably not going to get 250,000 pounds later."

So through the book, I think the first line is, "This is a story about money." But she's constantly thinking like, "Should I, should I, should I, should I?" And if they want to pay her like 40,000 pounds, is that worth it? What about 200,000 pounds? Is that worth it? And then people find out that she has this option, and people find out like, "Wait, could you be a true fan if you have money in it in this way?"

[01:05:34] What I really liked about this book is on the surface it's so breezy while wrestling with this question of like, what is a good life? What does it take to make a good life? What is a life-changing amount of money? Is there such a thing? What's our relationship to money? How do we interact with people when money enters the picture? What does it mean to be a fan? What does it mean to love something? What does it mean to love something hopeless? And then how do we feel when it... What does it mean to live through a life-changing thing that we know will never happen again, and like live with the sorrow of that? All right. That was more than I thought I had to say about Cash Out. How's that sounding to you?

JEFF: That's sounding excellent for a number of reasons. First, it's been ages, but I have read Nick Hornby before and really liked him, and I've, of course, seen the movies of some of his books. And so I know that that will be accessible to me for sure. It sounds like a good recommendation because it's a book about sports, and I am decidedly indoorsy, and so would not choose it for myself.

ANNE: So is Sophie.

[01:06:33] JEFF: That's right. That's a good challenge for me to be more appreciative of sports. I know it's not a popular thing for a politician to say that I'm not into hockey or sports in general. So I know that that's one of my weaknesses for sure, is to just even be conversant about sports. So this will be a good challenge for me in that respect. And that discussion of found family really... the concept of community is really important to me.

I really see that there's a strong continuum between the work I do as a municipal counselor and the work that I want to do as a bookstore owner, just being invested in the quality of life of the people around me by providing that service of giving them good books to read. So yeah, I like this on every level. Thank you.

[01:07:26] ANNE: I like the way you're thinking, and I like that that sounds good. And maybe you can start a sports table. You've got Terry Punchout. You can do the Nick Hornby. I'm sure your patrons can recommend a few more. I'm not suggesting you fool anybody, but you might appear to be a sports guy for a moment.

JEFF: For a moment, yeah. That's a good idea.

ANNE: All right. Jeff, this has been such a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming to talk about your bookstore on the show.

JEFF: It's been a real delight to be here. Thank you so much, Anne. You've given me a lot to think on and work through, and I will be a better reader advisor or hand seller because of you, so thank you.

ANNE: Well, I'm so excited for your store, and I can't wait to hear what happens next.

JEFF: Thank you.

ANNE: Hey readers, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jeff, and I'd love to hear what you think he should read next. Find Jeff and his bookstore online. We'll have those links and the full list of titles we talked about today at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.

[01:08:31] Keep up with our show on Instagram at @whatshouldireadnext. Sign up for our email list at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com/newsletter, and we will send you updates about our newest episodes, upcoming events, and other happenings at What Should I Read Next HQ.

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[01:09:20] Thanks to the people who make this show happen. What Should I Read Next? is created each week by executive producer Will Bogel, Media production specialist Holly Wielkoszewski, social media manager and editor Leigh Kramer, community coordinator Brigid Misselhorn, community manager Shannan Malone, and our whole team at What Should I Read Next? and Modern Mrs. Darcy HQ. Plus the audio whizzes at Studio D Podcast Production.

Readers, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And as Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading." Happy reading, everyone.