Welcome 2025! In January we choose books that are about goal setting and achieving success and being the you, you want to be. Our book this month is Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear.This book is designed to reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits–whether you are a team looking to win an Olympic medal, redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal. There is a curious amount of talking about cake in this episode! Oh, and also what good habits we’re hoping to develop in 2025!
It’s our last episode of the year. We talk about the progress we’ve made on our personal goals for 2024. Upon reviewing them, we feel like we have experienced growth and also adopted some unexpected goals for the year. We discuss our podcast highlights from 2024, discussing our non-fiction, fiction, and children’s book selections. We talk about how inviting authors and experts to join us helped deepen our experience. Every single of our guests was fascinating and a kind person that we would like to hang out with. We then reveal the books for 2025. 2025 promises to be a fun and exciting year.
It’s December and that means we’re reviewing a children’s book. For 2024, it’s The King Penguin written and illustrated by Vanessa Roeder. This beautifully and fancifully illustrated book explores what happens when King Penguin Percival becomes too selfish and is booted out of his penguin colony. It’s a story that demonstrates the importance of apologizing when you’ve done wrong. Young school-age children will enjoy learning about the many types of penguins and explore more abstract concepts, such as democracy. This is a fun Christmas book selection, since it’s set in the snowy polar region.
Dr. Terryl Hallquist, Thornton Wilder scholar and Ann Patchett fan, joins us to discuss Patchett’s newest novel, Tom Lake. Tom Lake centers around a pivotal summer Lara spent in a summer stock theatre company where she performed her signature role of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s OUR TOWN. There she meets two men who will change her life. She falls in love with the soon-to-be famous actor Peter Duke and meets the director/aspiring cherry farmer, Joe Nelson. Lara recalls the summer to her three grown daughters, home during the pandemic, who beg her to tell them about her glamorous life as a young actress, her romance with Peter Duke, and her blockbuster film. There are lots of layers to this novel and we explore many with Terryl. Linny is calling in from her American Red Cross deployment in Asheville, North Carolina and Nancy is fresh off her trip to see Linny followed by a trip to New York City to see six shows in five days.
Ann Patchett’s 2023 novel, Tom Lake, explores the permeability between past and present. While they are picking cherries to try to save the crop since the normal large migrant laborer crew is absent due to COVID, Lara’s adult daughters ask their mom to tell them the story of how she once dated the famous actor, Peter Duke. In retelling parts of her story, we learn about Lara’s evolving notions of love and purpose. Once a promising ingenue, Lara was known for her role as Emily in multiple productions of OUR TOWN. Patchett’s love of the Thornton Wilder play shines through her writing, giving this novel a multi-layered depth. This is the first Patchett novel Linny and Nancy have read and it’s good one.
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