[00:00:00] ANNE BOGEL: It sounds like while you have a pretty finely tuned, I don’t know, is radar the right word for finding books for yourself right now?

LYNN BAIN: Yeah.

ANNE: This isn’t really serving you yet in this realm of your reading life.

LYNN: Not even remotely.

ANNE: Oh my gosh. Okay, I have so many questions. So many questions.

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. Every week we’ll talk all things books and reading and do a little literary matchmaking with one guest.

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Now, readers, for today’s episode, if you are not new around here, you already know that I love speaking to guests in search of books that fit a very specific niche or who have very precise readerly interests.

[00:02:52] Today, I’m speaking with a reader with a very specific request, but I’m also confident that our conversation will appeal to a wide range of readers, whether they think they love this style of book or not.

Lynn Bain lives in Dallas with her family. She describes herself as an accidental entrepreneur because she didn’t intend to end up in her line of work, but here she is. She loves to read a wide range of genres and styles, as you will hear, but she came to me because she’d really love to identify good business books to read alongside her beloved stack of fiction.

The only problem is she’s tried a bunch and she doesn’t like any of them. In her experience, so many of these reads come across like either a textbook or like, really, they have no business being book-length. They should have just been a blog post. But she knows that reading good business books, because I was exaggerating a bit, there are a few that she’s enjoyed and you’ll hear about them, she knows they really benefit her, personally and professionally.

[00:03:51] So, can I help her find more? I hope I can. I know I really love this topic and can’t wait to explore it with Lynn, and hopefully, we will find some business picks that will feel helpful, inspiring, and relevant for her and also for other business owners, nonfiction fans, and curious readers tuning in today.

Let’s get to it.

Lynn, welcome to the show.

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

ANNE: Oh, well, I can’t wait to dive in. I have already told you off the record, I’m so pumped to talk about your submission and what you’re looking for. So thanks for bringing it to the show and to our readers.

LYNN: Of course, I’m excited to be here and talk about it.

ANNE: Well, we’re going to start with big picture. Would you tell us a little about yourself so we can give our readers a glimpse of who you are?

LYNN: I live in Dallas, Texas with my husband and my two boys. I’ve got a nine and a seven-year-old boy. I grew up in Texas and all the major cities, Houston, Austin, Dallas. Lived in Seattle for a brief period of time, but I would say it was a really formative years, the middle school years, which are cringe for everybody, but I feel like they’re also… when you start to formulate a lot of your own thoughts and opinions and that kind of good stuff. So lived in Seattle, and then we moved back to Dallas when I was in high school.

[00:05:12] Professionally, I started my career at one of the big CPA firms in Dallas, and then I worked at a boutique consulting firm in Fort Worth for a number of years doing operational and financial consulting.

Then life took a pretty big turn. In 2014, my husband, who had a real estate development background, decided to build a wedding venue, which was not on the bingo card for any of us. It’s a long story as to how he got to that point, but ultimately that’s what ended up happening.

So he started working on building a wedding venue in 2014. About the same time, I was ready for a change professionally. So I resigned from the consulting firm, I stayed on for several months to close things out. Then I was calling it my sabbatical, a few months to kind of figure out what the next step in life was and I realized pretty quickly that he was monopolized by this construction project, but did not have time to devote to actually the business itself.

[00:06:19] So I said, “Well, I’ll help for a few months.” And so I helped with some hiring and some getting things off the ground and marketing and some of the financial pieces. Ultimately, that was 11 years ago. My husband and I have now worked together for 11 years. We own and operate a company called Boxwood Hospitality.

It is a company that owns and operates wedding and event spaces. We have multiple venues that we own and operate in North Texas. We have a catering company called Boxwood Catering. We have a new cafe in downtown Dallas called Boxed & Brewed. We basically work together full-time. That is kind of how that came about.

I always say to folks that I’m kind of an accidental entrepreneur. There is no part of my background that would suggest that I like risk. I’m a CPA. We don’t really like risk. But that’s kind of where we landed and where we are now. So I’m an accidental entrepreneur, an accidental CEO.

[00:07:27] But I love reading, of course. That’s why I’m here. I love reading. I love chatting books with friends. I love cooking. I love hosting. I love traveling. I love any sort of hospitality experience. That’s the part that’s probably not accidental. I’ve always enjoyed a great coffee shop, a great restaurant experience, a great hotel lobby. So now in some way, shape, or form, we get to give that to our clients.

I also love a great road trip. We do a massive road trip every summer in the United States. And I just love a good road trip and a good road trip book. And that’s a little bit about me.

ANNE: Well, thank you. Now would you tell us more about your reading life?

LYNN: So I’ve always been a reader, forever and always. My mom was a teacher for 40 years. She was an elementary ed teacher. And my dad is maybe one of the most intellectually curious people that I know. And so they’ve always encouraged my reading and they…

[00:08:25] Actually, at a young age, they took my closet, turned it not into a closet, but into a reading nook for me. And I had all my books in my closet, so I could go in my closet and read. And so they’ve always encouraged it.

My mom and I have always traded books. We have very similar tastes. Even this morning, I woke up to text from my mom about a book she’s reading, and we just constantly trade back and forth.

My dad and I have a new fun relationship, and it actually ties to your podcast, Ian. So I submitted a question for your Christmas show when you were giving out gift ideas with your team. I submitted this last year because my dad, as many of our dads are, is so hard to buy for. I mean, what do you get an 86-year-old that can go get whatever he needs?

He is an avid fly fisherman, just obsessed would be maybe appropriate. And he has hundreds, maybe thousands, of books in his library, and every single one is about fly fishing.

[00:09:34] So I really wanted to nudge him with some stuff that wasn’t fly fishing so that we could talk about books, because I will read some of his fly fishing books, but not all of them. So I submitted a question, and I said, “I think my dad actually may have similar reading taste to your Will.” And you guys selected it, and Will gave me some great book ideas. And I got all those book ideas, and that was one of my dad’s gifts for Christmas.

And it actually has kind of spawned my dad in this new nonfiction reading genre or phase. And so he has been reading a bunch of nonfiction this year. So it’s been so fun. So now I get to trade that with dad, thanks to you and Will.

ANNE: I’m delighted to hear it.

LYNN: Yeah, it was so fun. I love books. I love talking about books. My friends know, come to me for book recommendations. That’s just something I love doing.

[00:10:29] I’ve always been surrounded by reader friends from early ages. I still love reader friends. My longest-term reader friend was from when I lived in Seattle during those formative years. Her name was Kelly, and she’s still one of my dearest friends. We’ve been friends for 30 years now.

She has a better memory than me, but she says my mom used to take us to the library together because her mom would work summers. My mom was a teacher, so she had off. She would take us to the library. We would get books. We would sit in the same room and read together. And that was how we would hang out.

So I’ve always been a reader, and now I read whenever I can. I’m busy. I’ve got a busy life, but oh man, reading is a high priority for me. I always have a physical book. I always have a Kindle book. I always have an audiobook. And I think I’ve gotten pretty good at selecting books for myself, partially thanks to your podcast.

[00:11:26] I’ve listened since episode one, and I’ve gotten a really good feel for what I like and what I don’t like, with one notable exception that we’ll get to talk about today. But I’ve just always been a reader. And now I’m trying to encourage that in my boys. They know the one thing mom will not say no to is a new book. So they know if they’re like, “Hey, mom, can we go to the bookstore? Hey, “Mom, can we go to Half Price?” They know the answer is going to be yes, and I just roll with it. So, anyways, that’s kind of my life as a reader.

ANNE: All right. Fantastic. Thank you. Lynn, you know I want to hear about your books, but I wonder if maybe we shouldn’t hear about the notable exception first. Because if you’re going to say what I think you’re going to say from your submission, I’m going to be listening through that lens, and I wonder if our listeners may enjoy doing the same.

[00:12:13] LYNN: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, it almost, I feel, like makes sense to start with what book I hate. Like I said, I’m an accidental entrepreneur, and I’m an accidental CEO. And I think owning your own business can be pretty lonely at times. You don’t get a lot of praise, but you get all the problems. Especially as an Enneagram 3, that can be kind of hard for me.

But I do not like business books at all. I don’t like the word “should”, and I’ve learned that from you. I don’t want to “should” myself with anything I should be reading. But there is a part of me that feels like I should be reading some business books, because I want to get better, I want to learn more, I want to challenge my own belief systems. And that’s hard to do when you’re kind of on your own owning something. And so I am looking for business books that don’t feel like business books, because I hate business books.

[00:13:23] ANNE: And it sounds like while you have a pretty finely tuned, I don’t know, is radar the right word for finding books for yourself right now?

LYNN: Yeah.

ANNE: That this isn’t really serving you yet in this realm of your reading life.

LYNN: Not even remotely.

ANNE: Oh my gosh. Okay. I have so many questions. So many questions. We’re going to save those. But Lynn, I’m going to be listening to what you love through this lens. Like, what do you love in your books? And how is that relevant to the books that you’re looking for to really fulfill this area of your life, but also your readerly curiosity? So I wanted to let our listeners do the same.

LYNN: Okay. Awesome.

ANNE: Okay. Can we talk about the books you love now and don’t?

LYNN: Let’s do it.

ANNE: How did you choose these?

LYNN: I have a note on my phone and I’ve just been trying for no good reason, nobody has asked me to do this, but to kind of nail down my top 10 of all time.

ANNE: I can think of lots of good reasons. I mean, like one, how fun.

LYNN: I know but-

ANNE: The universe has not put a challenge to you. This is self-directed is what you’re saying.

[00:14:25] LYNN: Nobody has asked me to do this. This is just because I’m a nerd. And I’m not a rereader. I almost never reread. But I’ve decided that to be on the list, I’ve got to reread it because I really want to make sure it holds up because some of them I read 20 years ago and I’m a different person than I was 20 years ago.

Anyway, so I’ve kind of been going back through those. So as part of that exercise, that’s how I landed on these three. These three stay in the test of time to me, and they are on my all-time top 10 for different reasons. And I was laughing because I was looking at my story graphs, and it says that I like emotional, reflective, and sad books, which is not what I would… you know, I wouldn’t, I don’t know. That sounds like Eeyore. But I do think that that is a tie that binds for sure. I do think I like being able to really get in the heart of a character and feel what they’re feeling. So these three all do that.

ANNE: I can’t wait to hear. What’s the first book you love?

[00:15:32] LYNN: The first one is The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher. I think there’s so many things to love about The Shell Seekers, and one of them is not the cover. I think if anybody is reticent to read this book, ignore the cover. It makes it look like an 80s romance novel and it is not in the least.

It is the story of Penelope. And I feel like I’m on a first-name basis with Penelope. She feels like an old friend to me. But Penelope has three grown children. She has gone through a divorce. She is living in Cornwall and kind of reflecting upon her life.

The title is based on a piece of art, which I also love art. So I think that was just a fun part of this book. But The Shell Seekers is the title of a painting that she was gifted by her father, who is a famous painter, but became much more famous after he died. And there’s much family strife over what is going to happen to that painting when Penelope dies. And while that is central to the plot, I think the book is so much deeper than that. It’s really more about her relationships, her history, how she is, who she is.

[00:16:50] I think what I love so much about this book is that it really was one of many books for me that kind of set me off on loving these older… And I say older very generously. My mother-in-law always says the thing that makes her laugh about this book is that Rosamunde Pilcher calls her elderly at age 62. And my mother-in-law is a little bit older than that. And so these older female protagonists that are just strong women.

I think one of the things about Penelope that I really enjoyed was the fact that her kids’ successes or failures don’t define her. I think there can be, I don’t know, a tendency in literature it feels like, for female protagonists that are mothers to be very defined by their children. It felt like she was a little ahead of her time in the way she portrayed Penelope.

But it kind of set me off on a love of a bunch of books. I have like a list here of books that fit that genre to me of strong female protagonists that kind of embrace who they are late in life. And I love that.

[00:17:59] ANNE: Okay. What’s the second book you love?

LYNN: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. This was a recent reread. I reread this last year because I wanted to read Table for Two, and I wanted to reread it before I read Table for Two. I will read anything Amor Towles writes, generally on the day it comes out, because I love him so much.

His ability to turn a phrase is… I mean, he’s a master. I love his writing. But this is the story of Eve, Katey, and Tinker Grey. And it’s set in 1938 New York City. I love New York City. It’s probably my favorite city in the world that I have visited. And that 1920s, 30s era, I just absolutely adore it in literature. And so that’s a big part of why I love this book.

[00:18:52] But the book opens with a photo exhibit, and it’s basically two competing images. And one is of Tinker Grey. He’s looking very dapper in 1930s New York City. And then one is a year later, and he looks very… it looks like the world has kind of beat him up a little bit. And so the story of Rules of Civility is kind of what happened in that intervening year, and kind of just the story of these three characters. So that’s a little bit about Rules of Civility.

ANNE: You know, I don’t know what your experience was. But before I reread it, I would have told you that the story began on New Year’s Eve 1937. And when I picked it up to reread it, I was like, “Oh, I forgot that this was a wistful look back.” Like it starts, I think, in the early 60s.

LYNN: Yes. Uh-huh.

ANNE: And I’m a sucker for like a wistful, reflective, what happened then and what did it mean to us all kind of tone? But I’d forgotten.

[00:19:54] LYNN: Yes. He’s just such a beautiful writer. Katie in the book is a reader, like a total reader. So if you are a reader, and you find another reader in literature, it’s just so fun.

ANNE: Okay. What’s the third book you love?

LYNN: What Is the What by Dave Eggers. This one is 20 years old now. I looked at it, I almost didn’t believe it was that old. And I believe I read it the year it came out. So in 2006. It’s classified as fiction. There’s a lot of discussion about whether it’s fiction or nonfiction or… but I think it’s largely based in fact. I think Dave Eggers took some liberties, and so it is classified as fiction.

But it is the story of Valentino Achak Deng. He is a Sudanese child refugee of the Sudanese Civil War. The book opens with what I think is one of the most powerful scenes I’ve ever read in a book. And it goes on to tell the story of Valentino and how he escaped Sudan and how he ended up in a refugee camp and how he ended up in Atlanta as part of the refugee resettlement efforts.

[00:21:05] I think the thing I loved so much about this book is it just demonstrates a book’s ability to build empathy and a book’s ability to teach you about things you may not otherwise know about. I don’t think I knew a lot about the Sudanese Civil War when I read the book. I learned a lot. It led to a lot of curiosity such that I researched and read other things about it.

But really more than anything, I just, at that point… this was 20 years ago and so I think my awareness of refugee circumstances was really different. And it gave me such a firsthand account of what that looked like and how painful that must have been and how daunting that must have been to come to the United States.

This book has stayed with me. And I think it’s every bit as relevant, if not more so today than it was 20 years ago.

[00:22:09] ANNE: All right. I’m making notes and really noticing that this book prompted you to ask more questions than it answered because that wasn’t its purpose.

LYNN: Yeah, probably.

ANNE: Okay. Lynn, now tell me about a book that was not right for you. And why? Why? What made it not a great fit?

LYNN: Yeah. So I probably already alluded to it a bit, but I could have picked any number of books here, but if it’s in a bookstore under the business books category, it’s probably not going to be something I like. The book I selected was Atomic Habits. And I think it sold about a bajillion copies. So, me saying that I hated Atomic Habits probably is not going to affect his payroll.

But I think that so many business books should be a blog post, or they should be an article, or they should be a paragraph. But they obviously have to hit a certain page count to qualify as a book. I think that’s my frustration with so many business books is it feels like beating a dead horse when the thesis could be achieved in a much more efficient manner. Spoken like a true Enneagram three. It’s not efficient.

[00:23:25] ANNE: All right. Lynn, you feel this desire to read what you think of as business books. And I think you’re pretty clear on what you’re hoping to get out of them. And it’s not working out. So we’re going to focus our recommendations today on the kinds of books that might actually… we’ll see. I’ve got some ideas, but we’ll see what sounds promising and what less so to you, but might actually satisfy, like for example, your curiosity, your desire to get better and to learn and to challenge your belief systems and stretch. Can we do that now? Do you feel like you’ve told me what I need to know?

LYNN: Yeah, for sure.

ANNE: Should I just jump in with my main theory?

LYNN: Yeah, let’s do it.

ANNE: What if you want isn’t business books?

LYNN: Well, I don’t think it is.

ANNE: Okay. What do you think it might be?

[00:24:19] LYNN: You know, I jotted down a bunch of books that I would say fit in what I’m looking for and have worked for me. None of them would be… maybe a couple. I don’t think any of these would be shelved under business books.

ANNE: Okay. Readers, this is the moment I’m going to remind you that we always list every book we talk about in the episode in our show notes, whatshouldireadnext.com. Drive safe, fold your laundry, do what you’re doing, and we got you covered.

Okay, Lynn, tell me about some of these books.

LYNN: Yeah. Well, okay, so I have an entire shelf in my kitchen that is food memoirs. That is one of my favorite genres of book. Some of those fit the deal, but the one that really stuck out to me that fits in that genre is Delancey by Molly Wizenberg.

ANNE: Okay. I haven’t read that in ages. Two houses ago. So, at this point, for me, that’s at least 10 years, but I remember that one. I love that one.

LYNN: I think it was time and place. I mean, so much of reading is time and place, right? But it was when our first venue, which is called the Laurel in Grapevine, Texas, when the Laurel was under construction, that’s when I read this book, and it hit way too close to home.

[00:25:27] It is the story of a husband and wife that are opening a restaurant together. So it had the husband-wife dynamic. It had the construction dynamic. It had all the interpersonal things that go with opening a business. And it just hit real close to home. I remember vividly where I was when I was reading it and I had tears streaming down my face, looking like a lunatic.

So that one worked for me. And I still had some takeaways for sure. And yeah, it was a long time ago. I think it was over 10 years ago. And I think her life looks very different now than it did when she wrote Delancey, but that is one that really sits with me and probably is classified as a food memoir, maybe.

I think the two most obvious ones, and they’re ones that… these may be in business books, I don’t know, is Setting the Table by Danny Meyer and then Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. We’re obviously in the hospitality industry. I would argue every single person is in the hospitality industry.

[00:26:23] We have at our company what we call the Boxwood Book Club. And when we hire new employees, they have to read for the Boxwood Book Club and then sit down with some of our senior leadership team within the first few months and kind of go through the key tenets of a book. And for years, that book was Setting the Table by Danny Meyer.

It has gotten replaced by Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. So I read that book three or four times a year. But both of those books, I would say, read much more like a personal memoir than they do a business book. There’s a lot of good business stuff in them, but they read much more like a memoir.

So those both worked really well. Unreasonable Hospitality continues to work really well. Like I said, I read that three or four times a year generally with our new hires.

And then a couple more that kind of worked a lot that kind of are, again, not quite business books. Actually, Shoe Dog by Phil Knight.

ANNE: Sorry, I’m only laughing. I haven’t read that. But the movie is based on that, is it not?

[00:27:27] LYNN: I assume so. I’m not a great movie person, but I think it probably is.

ANNE: Okay. So not a sneaker girl, in case that’s not abundantly obvious. But we loved the movie that has some of those principles in it.

LYNN: Okay. Maybe I could watch that with my boys, because they are sneaker boys. And I don’t even know why I picked this up, because it doesn’t, from the outset, look like something that would fit. But I think so often it’s easy to see the success of something, and you see the success. And you don’t hear about the hard days, and the hard seasons, and the hard, really long seasons. We’ve had a lot of those.

We’re a hospitality company that existed through COVID and has gone through big, hard things. He was very raw, in Shoe Dog, about the hard things. And I really appreciated that. I think it was vulnerable. It was more vulnerable than I expected. So that was a good one.

[00:28:22] And then another one that, again, not a business book, but A Fine Sight to See by Sophie Hudson came out last year. It’s really about Christian leadership. But so much of what she said really resonated as a leader, and as a Christian, and just in the way I want to conduct our business.

Those are a short list of things that have worked that, again, I don’t think are business books, but kind of what I think I’m looking for.

ANNE: Okay. So you’ve thought about this a lot. I really appreciate that.

LYNN: I have. Yeah.

ANNE: Lynn, something I’m hearing here is that you’re not after a how-to.

LYNN: No.

ANNE: And it’s funny, the way you described The Shell Seekers and Rules of Civility, I got a sense of what kinds of stories really draw you in. But when you talked about the Dave Eggers, it wasn’t so much about the writing style and the emotional tone, but how you got to enter someone else’s experience. And that caused you to ask questions you just never thought of before.

LYNN: Mm-hmm. Correct.

[00:29:27] ANNE: And thinking about that and applying that to this nonfiction you’re reading, I’m imagining… I mean, look, you know we’re big Rilke fans around here. We close off with his quote at the end of every episode. I wonder if you’re not looking for books that are more about showing how people are living their questions in their life and work, as opposed to, this is how you do it, here’s a paragraph or two example to give it some color, some flavor, some heft, but here’s back to the list of how to do it.

LYNN: Yeah, yeah. No, I think you’re hitting the nail on the head for sure. Well, I got some ideas. You want to jump right in?

LYNN: Absolutely.

ANNE: You want to break that down a little first?

LYNN: No, I want to jump right in.

ANNE: To totally contradict myself, I think there are some business books that I wonder if you would find interesting, not… I don’t want to camp out here because I think if you’re looking for business books, the easiest thing to do is going to be to look for business books. Like it’s going to surface the ones that might be in this area.

[00:30:26] But there are a couple that are a little bit older and maybe not as obvious, might be interesting. But I wonder if you’ve read The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. This is one I actually talk about with our book club community manager Ginger all the time. They have some specific examples we keep coming back to.

And this is, I believe, a business book that is what they do and what they write. Is this one, you know?

LYNN: It’s not. No.

ANNE: Well, they are specifically focused here on, like the title says, the power of moments. And when they say that, they’re talking about the memorable moments that have a disproportionate impact on our lives or our experience in the world or you know in a restaurant or in school. They have a lot of education examples.

So these are the moments that make us feel particularly proud or intelligent or connected, insightful. Like they even have some examples of moments that make people feel transcendent.

[00:31:20] And these are the ones that really prompt us to like remember and look back like, oh, do you remember the time? So I really thought this was quite a page turner for a business book, which doesn’t happen much.

But what they do is break down what makes those moments special, and then how can we deliberately create more of them in our own lives and in other people’s lives? So there are many ways to read this book.

You could read this as a person who’s tired of your daily commute and feels like your life has routine that’s not comforting but kind of like humdrum. Or you can read it as someone who, I don’t know, owns a hospitality business and think about what that means for creating memorable moments so that your guests think, oh, I’m so glad I worked with Boxwood or as a parent or a friend or a daughter or you know, like they give all kinds of both like intimate and also more like corporate examples of how this can work in real life.

[00:32:23] And I do think that like lots of showing, augmented by telling when necessary, may fit more in your desire to learn and get better and have your curiosity satisfied. And really, I mean, I think the ideal book is going to get you thinking about what these stories mean for you, or what it might be like to experience them yourself. I think both are very cool and can change the way you think about your work.

LYNN: Yeah, absolutely

ANNE: Okay, cool. Next one is courtesy of my husband Will. It’s a Jimmy Buffett book, Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way by music critic Ryan White. I like The Power of Moments. This came out like 2017, 2018. So it’s not news anymore if it ever was.

But the writing in this one is a little more meandering. So if you like a firm structure, you might notice that. But it also kind of felt like the medium is the message because we’re talking about Jimmy Buffett.

[00:33:20] However, the author notes that Buffett’s magic was making the world believe that he was just going with the flow and barely in control. But he is obsessively detail-oriented by nature. But that is not the Jimmy Buffett brand.

And what this book is really about is the Jimmy Buffett brand. And something that’s interesting here is that Ryan White, because of his background, shares a lot about how music promotion, well, in production first, works when it does work, both the recordings and the performances.

So you get a little bit of behind-the-scenes about how deals are made, how accommodations are set up when performers are on tour, what the souvenir business kind of looks like. And those are things that I kind of wonder about in passing when I’m on a show, but then I forget about and move on with my life. But yeah, I have a lot of curiosity about those details.

[00:34:20] But the real focus here is like how did Jimmy Buffett, who like jokes in his performances… because I surprised Will with tickets just right pre-COVID. He’s been a fan for forever. We went to see him at Riverbend in Cincinnati. But he jokes about how like he knows four chords. Like his songs are really easy. It’s more about the vibe in the lifestyle he’s created. So now people joke about the Margaritaville industrial complex. And that didn’t just happen by coincidence. And this book is about how it did.

LYNN: Okay, interesting

ANNE: This is not a how-to but I’m putting that on your radar as a writer who owns a business, like I do, has really benefited most not from hearing stories from other people who do what I do but who do things not totally different, but also not in the same lane. I love to hear stories from musicians, how they do their writing, how they think about their business, how they think about their promotion, how they think about it all. It’s just different enough to give me a clearer perspective, I think

[00:35:28] LYNN: Yeah, there’s some really good singer, songwriter memoirs

ANNE: Yeah, for sure. That often to me feel very much in the spirit of a food memoir, but totally differently.

LYNN: Yes. But a lot of similarities. I mean, there’s a creativity there, there’s a curiosity there.

ANNE: Okay. Now this one is probably still businessy. But Laura Vanderkam, have you read her? Off the Clock is the one that stands out to me.

LYNN: No, I haven’t.

ANNE: Okay. Well, she’s like time management and productivity writer. This one came out back in 2018. This is called Off the Clock, I think I said, and it focuses on highly productive people who have like big jobs, big commitments, big obligations, very successful in their work but who feel like they have abundant time.

She does have that specific angle. Like how can you have a big job and also… I think she said something that really struck her when she was talking to some very important executive and she was interviewing them. And these are my words, not hers but saying like, oh, you know, I don’t want to keep you because I know you’re very busy. And this person is like, I have all the time in the world. And she was like, “What are you doing? Like, that you feel that way? Because lots of people would assume the bigger the job the more pressure you feel and the more demands on your time.

[00:36:52] But what I remember loving about this book is how she goes deep with people who do have important jobs doing different things in a variety of fields and examining how they’re making time for the most important things.

As I’m telling you about this, Lynn, it sounds a little obvious to me. But like one example that’s really stuck with me is she’s talking to this principal at a school who tells her, “I figured out the most Important thing I can do in my job that will move the needle for the whole school and everyone in it is to spend more time in the classroom observing teachers and coaching them.” And that right there was fascinating to me. Like, okay, tell me more about that. What is so effective about that? What does that look like? How are you trained? What do you need them to know? What are you looking for? How does that impact this? Like I have all kinds of questions that do get answered to a large degree.

[00:37:44] But she’s looking at people who have really wrestled with, what is my key mission, and then have, to a large degree, been able to figure out through trial and error and persistence how they can make that happen to a more meaningful degree in their work. I don’t know if that’s like ringing anything for you.

LYNN: No, it is. I think when you said, I will be honest, when you said something about productivity and time management, I was getting major glaze over. But it sounds extremely compelling based on the way you described it. Because it sounds like it’s a little bit more about real-life examples of how people within their own spheres of influence have made it work and have gotten better at what they’re doing. And that part is interesting to me.

I think really like any time it’s I think your words were showing, not telling, yes, more of that. I love showing, not telling. I want to hear about people’s real stories. I want to hear about you know, even different professions and how they have figured things out. So I’m very interested.

[00:38:53] ANNE: Yeah, you don’t want how-tos and hacks. I think you want to see people wrestle through the questions, and then watch them experiment with what might help

LYNN: Yes. And I love to see them have success, but I don’t mind seeing them struggle a little bit too because I think that makes it feel more real to me.

ANNE: Yeah. Oh, I’m remembering a book from the Summer Reading Guide where the premise is let me tell you about the worst year of my life.

LYNN: Was it the Molly Jong-Fast book?

ANNE: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

LYNN: I just read it.

ANNE: I want to hear about that.

LYNN: Yes.

ANNE: Like tell me what was so bad that that stokes a lot of curiosity? Okay, now we’re moving into a different end of the spectrum. I feel like I’ve talked about this book a lot in our spaces, but have you read The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker?

LYNN: Yes, I have.

ANNE: Okay.

[00:39:43] LYNN: On my work, there’s only a few business books, quote-unquote “business books” that are in my office. But that’s one of them. So it’s super relevant.

ANNE: Okay, was that a fit for you?

LYNN: Yes, it was. Parts of it I liked better than others, but it is a fit. Yeah

ANNE: Okay. So listeners, if you have not heard me talk about this multiple times, what she’s doing is evaluating why some gatherings work and others don’t. And just like really to encourage her readers to think differently about why and how they gather and how you’re shaping your gatherings. Whether you’re talking about like Table for Two, clearly Amor Towles is in my head, or like a huge ballroom conference, she covers the gamut.

LYNN: Yeah.

ANNE: Okay. So, Lynn, the books we’ve talked about so far have been more explicitly not out of place in the business section, but I want to move now into books that are less obvious picks, but I think may hold a lot of what you’re looking for, if that’s okay.

[00:40:46] LYNN: Yeah, that sounds amazing.

ANNE: The first one sprang to mind when we were chatting beforehand, and you mentioned that you were fascinated by processes. And I think we were actually talking about how we put together our podcast and just about how other people run their businesses. You’re a business owner, and you’re always kind of wondering, like, what’s going on behind the scenes of the other, you know, person’s business that you only see like the front-facing aspect of. I’m putting words in your mouth a little bit. But am I getting it sort of?

LYNN: That’s completely correct. Well, we were talking a little bit just because even getting to do this podcast recording has been so interesting to me, because I’ve listened to you for years. And to even just see a little bit of the behind-the-scenes and how you guys go about it, yeah. So I’m always just curious. I love getting to kind of peek behind the curtain at other people’s processes and how they go about things.

[00:41:39] ANNE: Okay, I’m glad to hear it. Well, a book that is going to sound so, so dry but I think you might find interesting, is Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. The subtitle is How to Get Things Right. He’s the author of Being Mortal. Do you know this one?

LYNN: I’m familiar with Being Mortal. I don’t think I’m familiar with this one.

ANNE: I gotta say The Checklist Manifesto sounds like the productivity book to beat all productivity.

LYNN: Sounds like Atomic Habits.

ANNE: Yeah. It is not that. So this is written by an esteemed surgeon wrestling with these big questions of how do we most value and preserve human life and health? And I do not remember the circumstances that compelled me to finally pick this up, but I vividly remember not wanting to read a book called The Checklist Manifesto.

[00:42:34] But a friend recommended this. And I’d really enjoyed the sensitivity and insightfulness, and also just the plain surprise of what he wrote about in Being Mortal. So I read it anyway. But what he’s writing about here is how to successfully live and work in a world that’s becoming increasingly complex.

And he does say, because there’s telling when necessary, that there are two reasons today, and this book is at least 10 years old, so not 2025 precisely, but I think it’s the same, two reasons people fail. And that is ignorance, and also inaptitude.

And what he means by that, because gosh that sounds harsh, it’s coming out of my mouth, is, for example, he’s in medicine, we don’t know how to treat a disease, or treating a disease, for example, is so mind-bogglingly complex that coordinating all the pieces of all the different people, and, I think I already said processes, but coordinating all that to make everything happen at the right time in the right way for the person, specifically dialed in, treating them specifically in what they need, is hard.

[00:43:45] Like, that’s a lot to manage. And to do it perfectly once is a miracle, but to do it over and over and over again is a system. That is a lot to ask.

You know, my takeaway from this book isn’t necessarily the checklist idea, because this book is not going to teach you how to write checklists in your business. But what it does do, I think, is prompt one to think about: where are the sticking points in my work? What is hard that we don’t really maybe want to acknowledge, or have not clearly acknowledged, just because it has to get done? That this is really hard.

And he has all these fascinating examples from medicine, and from the construction of big complex buildings, and aviation, to explain why systems remain vulnerable to human error, especially when they’re astoundingly complex, and how we can think about that and what we can do about it.

And so he does have the telling, like, “Hey, let me explain the problem to you,” but then he has these lengthy tales of both problems and also what it might look like to tweak things to make them go well.

[00:44:53] So you’re not running a surgery ward, but I think seeing how the problem is one being dealt with at the hospital down the road from you, fascinating, I think, to you and me. But also just seeing how to think about it and then what ways of creative solutions might move us in the right direction. How’s that sounding to you?

LYNN: That’s interesting. I actually did, when I was in the consulting firm, I did healthcare consulting and worked with a lot of surgeons. And so actually this is very interesting. I’m very curious about it.

ANNE: Okay, I’m glad to hear it. Have you read Ina Garten?

LYNN: Yes, I love Ina.

ANNE: Be Ready When the Luck Happens?

LYNN: Yes. Yes. I think that was one that I listened to in a day the day it came out. I remember it well, because I think it came out on my birthday last year, and so I spent the whole day listening to Ina. I do think that one fits in kind of the food memoir, show me about somebody else’s experience and let me learn from their experience versus telling me how to do it. So I think it very much fits in what I’m looking for. But yes, I’ve read that one.

[00:46:04] ANNE: Yeah. How the business came to be, how you expanded, how you opened a second store, why you closed it, why you moved, why you partnered, why you didn’t, yeah, lived out without really very much at all in the way of [inaudible 00:46:19]. I think I remember maybe two very precise, this is how I do it. And one were these are the elements about making food taste good, real quick, I think it was like 20 seconds on the audiobook. And the other was two non-negotiables in my business. But mostly it was, let me tell you a story about my life.

LYNN: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

ANNE: More food. Have you read much Ruth Reichl? I’m specifically thinking of Garlic and Sapphires and Save Me the Plums.

LYNN: Oh my gosh, I love her. All of her books are on my food memoir shelf right now. They are some of my very favorite food memoirs. Anytime anybody’s looking for a food memoir, I bring up Ruth Reichel.

ANNE: What makes them good for a hospitality person?

[00:47:01] LYNN: So much of what we do, when you were talking about the book The Power of Moments, we talk all the time, you know, we’ll do probably over 300 weddings this year. For every single one of those clients, it is the most important day of their life, generally to that point. We’re in the South, so we deal with a lot of relatively young brides, and it is the biggest day of their life to that point.

And yet we will do 300 weddings this year. And so how do we make every single one of them feel like they’re the only wedding we have that day, even if we may be running seven or eight concurrently?

And so anything that speaks to that dynamic is super interesting to me. So when you were talking about The Power of Moments, that one resonates for that reason, I think. So many of the restaurant books, and especially the Ruth Reichel books, so much of what she’s writing about, a lot of the places she’s reviewing or a lot of the places she’s visiting, they are special occasion restaurants. They’re places people are going for birthdays or engagements or a kind of once-a-year type celebration. And the people behind the scenes, we do not get the opportunity to mess up. It has to be perfect.

[00:48:24] And so there’s a lot of overlap. You know, we’re not quite restaurant, although we do have a café now, but there is a lot of overlap anytime you look at these special occasion places with a wedding. And so there’s just a lot to be gained from reading about those experiences.

ANNE: That’s very cool. I love hearing it from the hospitality pro.

LYNN: Well.

ANNE: Can I give you a wild card for our last one?

LYNN: Of course.

ANNE: Historical fiction from a hundred years ago. I’m wondering about The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray.

LYNN: I loved it. I actually just went to the Bella Costa Green exhibit at the JP Morgan Library in New York City. Loved it.

ANNE: Woman charting her own path, making a job that didn’t exist.

LYNN: Oh my gosh, so good. Yes. I loved the book. And then the exhibit happened to be going on when I was there in April, and it was a Saturday so it was so crowded. It was just, I mean, again, yeah, to your point, I love female protagonists that are kind of doing their own thing.

[00:49:28] ANNE: I love it. Lynn, of the books we talked about, any takeaways for finding your own? And what do you think you’ll read next?

LYNN: Gosh, I’m torn, but I think I might start with the Off the Clock book about highly productive people and what that looks like. A lot of what you said in that resonated. And so I think I might start there, but I think a close second is going to be The Power of Moments, for some of the reasons we already chatted about.

ANNE: Love it. Can’t wait to hear what you think.

LYNN: Thank you.

ANNE: Lynn, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for talking books with me today.

LYNN: It’s been so much fun. As I told you, it felt like Christmas morning when I found out I got to be on this podcast. So thank you so much. I appreciate it.

[00:50:14] ANNE: Hey, readers, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Lynn, and I’d love to hear what you think she should read next. Find the full list of titles we talked about today at whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com.

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[00:50:55] 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 MMD 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.