[Kelly Mcevers:] There is nothing like a good book recommendation, and we have been collecting recommendations from booksellers across the country for our summer series, Pack These Pages. Janet Webster Jones says you can't ever pack enough pages.
[Janet Webster Jones:] I just encourage people to step into books, read them and enjoy them. They are our best portable, low-tech thing to read that there is in the whole world.
[Kelly Mcevers:] For 41 years, Janet Jones was a teacher and administrator in Detroit, her hometown. And now she owns Source Booksellers there. Her first pick is about balance.
[Janet Webster Jones:] I just love this little book. First of all, it has a bunch of balloons on the cover. And it's called "Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts For An Infantile Age" by Susan Neiman. Susan Neiman is a philosopher. And I'm particularly interested in that because I have a daughter that's a philosopher, so [LAUGHTER] we love philosophy. One of the things that she says is that maturity [reading] means finding the courage to live in a world of painful uncertainty without giving in to dogma or despair. A grown-up, Neiman writes, helps to move the world closer to what it should be while never losing sight of what it is. I really like that because I'm a grown-up and I like to practice being a grown-up, but I also keep my childhoodness with me, too. So that's, I think, a really good one to have for the summer. So we always have books on history and culture, so we have a book called "The Warmth Of Other Suns." This is a very well-known book. Isabel Wilkerson is the author. And it's an epic story of America's great migration. And I have to say that when I read this book, I had not thought of my parents as part of that migration. But they did yeah, they did come from the South. They happened to have met in college in Atlanta, Ga. And they're both graduates of classes of 1929. They've, of course, passed on by now. But I never thought of them in that regard. So we have a book on food because we do allow cookbooks. It's called "A History Of Food In 100 Recipes." This is from England and is from William Sitwell. And he writes about these many different recipes that we're really familiar with and talks about the history of them where they came from, how they got going. He has one called earth apples, potatoes fried and simmered in bacon bits. He talks about broth. It's he has a pair of pies, so he talks about pears in pies and how all that came about.
[Kelly Mcevers:] For Janet Jones' full collection of pages to pack this summer, go to our Facebook page or head over to Twitter, where you'll find us @npratc.