This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 24: My 10 Favorite Books, Part One.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host Sarah Werner, and, oh, this week. What a week this has been, it’s only Wednesday. And yes, I am recording this episode on a Wednesday even though it was supposed to come out on Monday. That in part might tell you what kind of week it has been. It’s not that work is overloading me more than usual. In fact, for once I’m actually kind of in a good place at work with my workload. But when we talk about that work-life writing balance, life is getting probably about three-fourths of the pie right now.

Several years ago, I made the conscious decision to live my life explicitly for other people. I did this for personal reasons, maybe I’ll get into that in another episode. But what that has meant for me is using a large part of my time to help other people, which again is something that I want and chose to do. But there’s never a shortage of people who need help. To my knowledge, there never has been and likely never will be a point in time in which the universe just says, well, hey, I think I’ve got it from here. Hunger, not a big deal. Climate change, on top of it. Suffering and misery and sickness, it’s all done. There’s a couple of reactions that a person could have to this. One of them being, well, you’re never going to help everyone, you can’t. You’re physically a limited being with very limited funds and limited time. So why even bother helping out at all? But I’ve tried that, and I think that I’ve learned that I’m not one of those people who can just stand idly by.

I need to be doing things for other people, I need to be helping. I need to be in the action, bailing water out of the boat figuratively or literally, otherwise my life simply is not satisfying or fulfilling to me. Maybe you’ve felt that way too. It’s one of the reasons that I write. I’ve had a lot of experiences in my life as I’m sure you have as well. Some of those experiences I want to translate into story to share with others and to let them know that they’re not alone. They’re not as alone as they think they are just as I thought I was so alone as I was going through some of these things. It’s one of the reasons that I do so much stuff in my free time. It’s one of the reasons that I agreed to serve as president of my church, it’s one of the reasons that I volunteer at The Humane Society.

It’s one of the reasons that I podcast. It’s one of the reasons that I host a monthly writer’s group downtown for young women looking to getting into writing. It’s one of the reasons that I do leadership workshops with the local YWCA for girls who are growing up in a world that is sometimes scary and bullying and mean and judgmental. This is all worthy stuff, but just because it’s worthy doesn’t mean that it’s automatically balanced. In fact, this week I have been experiencing that it is entirely possible to have too many good things building up in your life to the point where you’re saying yes to several good things, but you’re also saying no to several good things, or you’re not saying no to anything and you’re trying to fit in all of these good and worthy things into places where they don’t fit. There comes a point where you may feel that the needs of the world outweigh the needs of your job or your family or your writing project.

This is what I’ve been struggling with this week. I’m once again in a place where I have said yes to too many things, and I’m doing too many things for too many people. And my podcast is delayed, and I haven’t written creatively all week. And I’m still doing good work at work, but I could be more focused. And I haven’t seen my husband since Sunday. So there’s a lot of good things in life. And if you’re like me, if you’re excitable and joyous at all of the beautiful possibilities around you, it can be hard not to get sucked in. It can be difficult to pick and choose what you’re going to award your time to, but it’s necessary. The more and more, and more involved that I get in causes that matter to me and activities that affect others in a great way, the less and less time I have for myself and the more and more tired I get. And the more and more my creative energies build up in my brain and my heart.

And all I want to do is just explode or sit down and write for a million hours because that’s the thing. I’ve talked about writing as self-care before, as something that you just do to take care of yourself physically and mentally. And I think that’s something that a lot of writers just with the natural inclination to create deal with. I get depressed when I’m not writing, and I get exhausted when I’m working myself into the ground. And I get rundown when I don’t have time for myself or for my family. So this is what I’m dealing with this week. If you have any thoughts on dealing with work-life-writing balance, let me know. I’d love to hear what they are.

This week’s topic is my 10 favorite books. And, oh my gosh, you have no idea how difficult it was for me to narrow it down to just 10 or maybe you do know what it’s like. My living room is pretty much just a solid wall of bookshelves. And so when I was preparing for this episode, I just walked into the living room and went from one end to the other skipping along and picking out all of the books that I wanted to talk about in this episode. And by the time I was done, I had about 30 books. And I said, well, either this is going to be an incredibly long episode, or I’m going to need to pick my favorites of the favorites. And so that’s what I did. It’s just so interesting to me when people talk about their favorite books to ask why. Sometimes a book can become a favorite because it offers an answer at a needed and unexpected time.

Sometimes the reader is in a place, a context in which the words are able to speak to them more loudly or more clearly than normal and the book sticks with them. Or maybe the book features an ensemble of characters who through some trick of skill or magic are able to work their way into the reader’s heart and stay there. Or perhaps the book is something that the reader has had cause to study, say for a paper, for a dissertation. I think that with great understanding comes great love. And so if there is a book that you’ve studied, it’s quite possible that it has become your favorite because you’ve experienced and discovered all of the nuances, all of the possibilities, all of the clever little instances within its pages. Or maybe a favorite book is even an object of comfort, an old friend that you can turn to again and again knowing that it is steadfast, and eternal, and yours in a way that’s so very few things are and can be.

As I was going through my own pile, it was really interesting. I do a lot of reading on an eReader. But when a book is special to me or when a book is a favorite, or if a book has belonged to me for a number of years, then I do have a paper copy of it as well. And I’m going to admit something to you that only a couple of people very close to me know, and that is that I am unapologetic and chronic scribbler. I’m one of those people who reads with a pencil. And when I come across something that I like, I will underline it in the book, or I will write a little note to myself in the margins, or I will make a little doodle of a heart, or I don’t know, what have you, in those margins. It’s my way of interacting with a book. And I find that I can remember things or internalize them better or more efficiently or more easily if I am writing while I do so.

For those of you who find the pages of a book sacred, I apologize if I’ve offended you. If it makes you feel better, I do use pencil in my scribblings. But as I looked through this stack of about 30 books that I pulled down from my shelves, as I held each one and flipped through its pages, a flood of memories hit me. And it wasn’t necessarily memories that I had forgotten or let go of, rather they were memories that were better internalized because I had a book to associate with them for better or for worse. I noticed that many of my books were children’s books, The Westing Game, The Summer Pony, Matilda, Catherine, Called Birdy, books that had served as friends or comfort blankets during times of friendlessness or being bullied or feeling alone. Those books were always there, the words and the worlds that they held were always there reliable in a way that so few things are reliable.

I had a beautiful hardcover copy of Anne of Green Gables and about every 50 pages or so there was a beautiful colored illustration. I knew when those illustrations were coming up and I looked forward to them. These things were so formative and so important to me. And I’m sure you have your own books too that you remember from your childhood, books that kept you company or made you feel safe, books that could befriend you when there was no one else around, even books that showed you that yeah, life is hard, but it’s okay because you’re strong and you can get through it. Those are just some of the books that I did not include in my current adult top 10 list, but I don’t want to discount their importance.

So without further ado, I’d like to present to you. My 10 favorite books. Number one is Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. As an author, William Gibson has always deeply fascinated me. He writes science fiction that’s not really science fiction, rather it’s something that is called speculative fiction. So it’s a very near set science fiction time period wise that speculates on what the near future can bring. Mr. Gibson is the author of Neuromancer, which was published in, I think, 1984 and exists as the very first book in the cyberpunk genre. This may be just me, but I give William Gibson credit for inventing cyberpunk, which has gained popularity in pop culture with movies such as the matrix, which you may have heard of, and which I believe was very strongly influenced by Neuromancer.

So if Neuromancer is so famous and wonderful, why is my favorite William Gibson book Pattern Recognition? Pattern Recognition is the story of Cayse Pollard. Cayse is a woman who kind of bounces back and forth between Japan and London and several other places. She is essentially a marketing consultant or a cool hunter. She has deep visceral physical reactions to different brand logos. She can’t stand to wear branded clothing but is able to tell from just looking at a logo whether a logo has the punch that it needs to become iconic. Now, if that sounds dull to you, that might be because it is, and it’s not the point of the story. It’s merely just an excuse to plant this character, this introspective, thoughtful woman who nevertheless is led by her gut into this sort of seedy underbelly.

And what I mean by that is she kind of coasts through what we can call her day job glamorous though it is. She obsesses night after night over what is called throughout the book the found footage. Keep in mind, this is before viral video. This book really came out before the popularity of YouTube, but there is this sort of community online of people who are looking, scouring the web for bits and pieces of this mysterious video that has surfaced. What is remarkable about the majority of Gibson’s work is not his storytelling. I don’t know anyone who reads William Gibson for the plots. Rather what is remarkable about William Gibson is his writing. He is one of the most intense and imagistic writers I’ve ever come across. And he manages to do it without getting syrupy or sentimental. Rather, he just has this power of wielding words in combinations that I’ve never heard them in before.

It’s very punk, so it’s very anti-establishment and very liberated. And yet also deeply poetic. His writing is one of the closest things to magic that I’ve ever experienced. For those of you who have been listening to my podcast for a long time, you may notice that I’ve read this passage before, but I really want to read it again because I think it’s just a gorgeous illustration of the power of Gibson’s words. So I’m going to read just the first paragraph of Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Five hours, New York jet lag and Cayse Pollard wakes in Camden town to the dire and ever circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm. It is that flat and spectral non-hour, a wash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above and none really an option right now. Not even food as Damien’s new kitchen is as devoid of edible content as its designer display windows in Camden high street.

Very handsome, the upper cabinets faced in canary yellow laminate, the lower with lacquered unstained, ApplePly. Very clean and almost entirely empty save for a carton containing two dry pucks of Weetabix and some loose packets of herbal tea. Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that its interior smells only have cold and long chain monomers. Episode four of this podcast was about how much I love surprises, whether they occur when I’m writing or as it happened with this book when I was reading. I think every once in a while we tend to hit a dead end where we say, oh, I’ve seen it all, or I’ve read it all. There’s nothing new under the sun, there’s nothing left to surprise me. This book came to me at a time when I was feeling just that, and even reading that first opening paragraph for that first chapter made me realize that I hadn’t seen it all, I hadn’t heard it all. And I certainly had not read it all.

This was something new and delightful, and every word was a new discovery in the way that it related to the words proceeding it and in the way that it worked with the words in the surrounding paragraph to convey a larger image. I love Pattern Recognition. It’s one of those books that I keep near the side of my bed. I purchased a separate copy for my eReader so that I can have it with me wherever I go in case I need to remember what it feels like to be pleasantly surprised and fall deeply in love with words and the use and the poetry and just the magic that they can create. And, yes, the margins of my company of Pattern Recognition are certainly full of little notes and explanations and realizations.

Second on my list is Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I picked up my copy of Rebecca, which is still the copy that I have to this day from a library book sale for 10 cents. It’s the cheap mass market paperback edition with sort of folds of red velvet cloth draped across the front, and the name Rebecca scrawled across it in sort of a 1980s era romance, but it is not a 1980s romance as cheap and cheesy as this cover looks. In fact, I don’t even know why I first picked this book up at the book sale other than it was sort of my custom to buy every single book I could afford and fit into my backpack every time a library book sale came along, Rebecca is not a romance, and I didn’t know this when I first started reading it. I actually thought it was a romance. And I was like, “Well, I’m bored, I’ll give this a try.”

And within the first couple pages, I was completely absorbed. My breath was taken away by the strength of the writing and the magnetism of the imagery. I felt like I was literally being pulled into the pages of this novel and that it was speaking to something very deep within me. If you’ve read Rebecca, you know what this feeling is. Rebecca is the story of a character who remains nameless throughout, which is something I didn’t notice until I was almost done with the book. And I said, “This book is about, wait, what’s her name?” She’s never named. She’s a younger woman who marries an older man whose first wife Rebecca is gone and yet still holds a sort of power in her absence over the household. It takes place in, I believe the late 1930s or the early 1940s. And even if you’re not a fan of books from that era, even if you have more modern tastes, I promise you it’s retained its readability.

It is immersive and elegant, it’s haunting not only because it is a sort of gothic sort of novel, but because the images stay with you and the ideas remain with you long after you’re done reading it. I’m a very firm believer in no spoilers, and so I won’t tell you anything more than that. I will however advise you perhaps not to see the movie. This has been one of my favorite books for years and years. And I finally saw the movie, which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock. And so I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m in for a treat,” as it usually happens. Even with such a masterful director, it never quite matches up with the grand things you imagine when you’re reading. So read the book, let me know what you think. I hope you love it.

Book number three is The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin first published in 1963. It was, I believe a crucial piece of work in the emerging civil rights movement. The book, or at least my version of the book is broken up into two parts. The first is a letter from James Baldwin to his nephew also named James. And the second part is an open letter, a little bit more autobiographical and is sort of a testimony to Baldwin’s growing up in Harlem and the social injustices that he saw there. This is a very slim volume, it’s only 106 pages and large margins. But it is without a doubt the most powerfully written book I have ever read in my life. Sometimes when I forget why I love to write and why I love to read, and sometimes when I forget that words can wield immense power, I turn to this book. And I even just read the first couple of pages and then I remember the effect that words can have on your mind and your heart.

I think one of the things that resonates most strongly with me, and this is purely personal is that it reads almost like a sermon. It has that special use of repetition and passion and fire that have a special meaning for me. I’ll read you a very brief passage for an example, and I want you to listen for the repetition and the power that that repetition can lend. He says to his nephew, “For this is your home my friend, do not be driven from it. Great men have done great things here and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and damned rivers and built railroads. And in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.”

There is a lot to learn from this book, not only about social injustice, but about how to structure words and sentences more powerfully. There is a sort of spoken chant beneath the written words, which lends them great power. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in becoming a more powerful writer or anyone who is interested in writing words that will be spoken out loud. There is a gorgeous poetry here and a beautiful use of repetition for the sake of powerful and passionate prose.

Book number four is a book that was recently, well, maybe not so recently made into a movie. And it is a movie that I have not seen, and I don’t think I can bring myself to see it because, you might accuse me of snobbery, but it cannot possibly be as good and powerful and moving as the book. This book is The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. And this is the first and certainly not the last book on this list that is the YA or Young Adult category. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is the story of Charlie who is a high school freshmen. And he is, I think, a character that will appeal to many people who were considered nerds or geeks or outcasts in high school. He is the wallflower, he is shy and introverted and introspective and thoughtful.

And I think what I love most is he is kind, that was what attached me most to this character. The Perks of Being a Wallflower contains many parallels to The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. If you’ve read The Catcher in the Rye, it is about a teenage boy named Holden Caulfield who lives a very complex mental life to put it lightly. You don’t have to have read The Catcher in the Rye to appreciate The Perks of Being a Wallflower. And in fact, if you have read The Catcher in the Rye and you didn’t like it, I think you can still find immense joy in reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I won’t tell you what those parallels are, but both stories deal with teenage boys who are very quickly and mercilessly thrust into a very adult world of drugs and sex and alcohol and parties and meaning and meaninglessness.

They’re both written as deeply personal works, The Catcher in the Rye being written from the first person perspective of a teenage boy and The Perks of Being a Wallflower written as a series of letters. And it feels like the letters are being written right to the reader. It’s a very intimate book, and it’s very lovely, and it’s very thoughtful. And I think that even if you had a terrible time in high school, as I think many of us did, I think that you’ll find this book to be very uplifting. And I think that you’ll end up cheering for Charlie as he finds meaning in this crazy new world that he’s been thrust into. So far I’ve had a reason for why every one of these books is on my list. For The Perks of Being a Wallflower, it’s the intimacy in which you get to know the main character Charlie.

Listen for that intimacy in this paragraph from The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands and doesn’t try to sleep with people even though they could have, I need to know that these people exist. I think that you of all people would understand because I think you of all people are alive and appreciate what that means. At least I hope you do because other people look to you for strength and friendship, and it’s that simple, at least that’s what I’ve heard. So this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad, and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be. The voice is very simplistic and precise, and yet it tells a very complex story dealing with very complex emotions and a lot of the paradoxes that I think that we often gloss over or take for granted in our own emotional lives.

So The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, consider reading it, I think it will be a good use of your time. Number five is another story about growing up, although it is considered a classic and not a work of young adult fiction. The book that I’m speaking of is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. If you know me well at all, you might be surprised that I have a classic on my list of favorite books. This is because I spent most of my formative years reading science fiction and mysteries and fantasies and all sorts of really cool genre literature. I really had no use for classics through high school. That is to say, I found them pretentious and difficult to read. I didn’t have difficulty reading, but they simply weren’t fun to process as other books were.

I also read many classics at a time when I was not necessarily taught the context that surrounded these books. So for instance, having grown up on a self-selected diet of fun books selected from the children’s and then the young adults and then adult section of the library. When I got to high school, I had read a ton of books. I had read most of the Star Wars expanded universe books, which are now no longer canon, but we’ll talk about that another time. I had read series after series of mystery and thriller. I had read romances and fantasies, science fiction classics, just everything I could get my hands on. And you can think I am a simple 10 if you like, but I did choose these books by their covers. They were exciting, they looked mysterious and intriguing. Very, very seldom did I pick up a book with a dreary painting of a sad looking woman on the cover, those penguin classics that I now really love. But as a 14 year old girl, they didn’t hold a lot of interest for me. They looked dour and dull.

I loved English class in middle school, I had some very fun teachers who had us read some very fun works. I loved creative writing, I loved grammar. Again, nerd. And I loved what we read. But then my first year of high school, I remember we sat down. And the very first thing that we had to read was Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, which is very common and very standard for an early high school education. The thing was, I had never read anything like it before, I knew nothing of the period in which it was written. And I did not understand at that time in my life that syntax and colloquial expressions were different during the 16th century. I wanted to understand what I was reading, but I just grew frustrated and didn’t understand how the people were talking.

And it was kind of taken for granted that since I was in sort of advanced classes that it would not need to be explained to me. I don’t know, maybe I am exposing myself as a huge idiot. I mean, everyone knows the story of Romeo and Juliet. And so I was kind of able to hobble along and not necessarily fake it, but fill in the gaps of my understanding with what I knew of the story. I was so elated when we finished with Romeo and Juliet. And so dismayed when we moved on to Thomas Hardy, we read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which I can now appreciate knowing the context behind it and such.

Again, if you present that novel to a young girl who is used to reading just simply modern pop culture fiction, I think there’s a little education that needs to go behind that like understanding that the reason Thomas Hardy wrote in such long unending sentences is because he was following a German style of writing. And the reason that Tess did so and so and was so very passive was because of the time that she lived in and what was expected and the examples that were being set for her, et cetera, et cetera. I won’t go into every single book that was foisted upon me through my high school education. But suffice to say that by the time I graduated from high school, I hated English class. I still loved writing and I wrote all the time for myself, but I was really turned off to the idea of classic literature. It was frustrating and my mind couldn’t sink its claws into the words as it could with language that I was more familiar with.

That’s not to say I didn’t try, I read every single one of those books. In fact, when I got to college, I enrolled in a Shakespeare class because I said, “You know what, I’m going to conquer this. I’m finally going to understand Shakespeare.” And then to my dismay, the class ended up more just being a bunch of theater people who were like, “Oh, I love this passage in Richard III,” blah, blah, blah. Not to disparage people who love Shakespeare, but I was not in the club. I was looking for understanding and not really finding it. Anyway, this is all a very long way of saying that it took me a really long time before I could willingly open up what is considered a classic book of my own volition and read and understand and enjoy it. Often all it takes is a good teacher or in my case, a good professor.

Having given up on English forever or so I thought, I was enrolled as a freshman in college in 19th century British literature, a class taught by Professor Mollie Sandock at Valparaiso University in Indiana. Professor Sandock opened up a world that had been closed to me. She provided the historical context that I needed to understand the texts I was reading. She was very patient as my brain slowly acclimated to different ways of writing. And finally, she became one of my favorite teachers and I became an English major. I took as many classes with her as I could. And finally, in my senior year, in my final class with her, I had the pleasure of reading Jane Eyre for the very first time. I know that Jane Eyre is very popular and it’s a classic that probably most people read when they’re in maybe middle school or high school. But no, I was 20 years old, a senior in college reading Jane Eyre for the first time.

I remember that I read it over I think my winter break. I was staying at a friend’s house and everyone else was asleep. And I said, “Well, I might as well get this over with.” But, oh, how I connected with this book. I had never connected so much with a character from a classic novel as I’m sure many young women readers and writers and artists connect with Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is the story of a girl who is growing up and kind of fighting against this world she’s been jammed into. She is a very stubborn and free and creative spirit. And she’s been wedged into this world where women have a very closely defined role. The book is of course beautifully written and populated with unforgettable characters. And maybe I enjoy this book so much because it carries a hint of that sort of gothic sensationalism that I grew up loving in so many of my fun to read books. But this book was special to me because it was a first, it was really the first time that I willingly stayed up late reading a classic book.

In fact, I could not put it down, it was so gripping. So it’s one of those books that is sort of a first for me. I will always be grateful to Professor Sandock who gave me what I needed to break into a world of books that I didn’t understand and was not prepared to read. So thank you Professor Sandock. Nowadays, I even pick up books on my own. I’ve been reading Moby Dick, and it’s amazing. It’s so cool that I can … I almost feel a little bit fortunate that now I have all these books that I can discover that I hadn’t read before. There’s so many good things out there. Those are the first 5 of my 10 favorite books. In part two, which will come next week, I will introduce you to the other five books in my top 10. Until then, I’m curious to know what your favorite books are and why, or if you have just one favorite book or if like me when asked to pick your favorite book, you will go and pull 30 or more off the shelves.

There are very few things that I love talking about more than books. I’ve said before that reading is essential for any writer, and any writer will tell you the same. Special thanks go out this week first and foremost to my Patreon supporters who sponsor this podcast financially. Special thanks go to official cool cat, Sean Locke, official red dude, Andrew Coons, official podcast caffeinator, Rebecca Werner, and so many other lovely people who helped me pay for hosting costs and other expenses that come with podcasting. I truly and deeply appreciate it, thank you all so much. If you are interested in becoming a Patreon supporter of this podcast, you can go to my website sarahwerner.com, S-A-R-A-H, W-E-R-N-E-R, .com. And for the show notes for this episode, simply click on help support this podcast. It’ll take you to Patreon, which is a third party secure donation platform. And you can give 50 cents an episode, a dollar an episode, $20 an episode. You know, whatever.

Special things also go out to my teacher and early mentor Professor Mollie Sandock. She retired several years ago and moved somewhere on the East Coast I think. Mollie wherever you are, thank you. I would also like to thank my good friends Peder Aadahl and Ronn Gibson for their continued inspiration and encouragement. And especially to Peder who got me into podcasting. I have a couple of announcements, the first being that I have officially launched my weekly email newsletter. I’d had a newsletter before, but it was by no means weekly. It is now a weekly thing and will contain inspirational tidbits and quotes and advice on writing that you will not get from this podcast alone. So if you want to subscribe to my email newsletter and get an email in your inbox every Wednesday morning, go ahead to sarahwerner.com.

And there’s a couple of ways you can sign up for it. You can scroll all the way down to the bottom of the website where you’ll get a little popup box that asks for your email address. You can also type your email address into the black bar at the top of my website, or you can navigate to my contact page where there is a line of text, that’s actually a link that encourages you to sign up for my email newsletter. So please do that if you haven’t already. It’ll just give you some great bonus content that again, you won’t get from just listening to the podcast. Speaking of podcasting, I’m excited to announce the launch of the sister podcast to the Write Now podcast, which is called Coffee Break. Coffee Break is something new that I’m trying. And it is an interview series in which I have conversations, very casual conversations with other creatives, other writers, people of inspiration, people I esteem.

Hopefully those conversations will be enjoyable for you. They’ll be available in the same feed as the Write Now podcast. And so you can download them, you can subscribe to my feed and get both podcasts or you can kind of pick and choose which episodes you like. So look for that coming up. Finally, if you have any questions for me, if you want to share with me your favorite books and why, please do contact me. I love getting email, I love getting form submissions from people. You can email me at hello at sarahwerner dot com or you can navigate to my website and go to the contact page where you can fill out a form that will ask for your name, email, and a brief/not brief message. Not sure what the character limit is there, but I think you can type for quite some time.

And so please feel free to use either of those as an option for getting in touch with me, I would love to hear from you. Until next time in which I will share with you part two of my top 10 favorite books, until then. This has been the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am Sarah Werner, and I love books.