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This week I'd like to talk about why Bookstores Matter. Now, this is a really important topic to me. It's close to my heart. It's near and dear to a project I'm beginning to jump into myself. If you've been following me on Facebook or YouTube or anywhere else, you know that I'm currently getting ready to start my own bookstore. Of course I have Edgewater Bookstore, which operates online, but I'm trying to make it a physical location. So today my goal is to reduce you a small mini essay I wrote called why Bookstores Matter. Then I'll give you a great book recommendation, something I absolutely love, and then I'll tell you about my bookstore progress. Let's Get into it welcome to this week's episode of the Read well Podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm your host, where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes, and let's get ready to learn something fascinating foreign welcome back to the Read well Podcast. My name is Eddie Hood, and let's get started with this mini essay titled why Bookstores Matter. A bookstore is more than four walls and many books. It's the place we go as a community to find ourselves. When you step through the doors, you feel different. Unlike going to the grocery store or the hardware store, there's something here, a sense that you're about to change for the better. Maybe you feel at home visiting your local bookstore more than you do anywhere else. Maybe visiting your local bookstore disconnects you from the chaos of the world so you can breathe and find your focus. Maybe you stop thinking about bills and the nagging pain in your back, because at your bookstore, no one is forcing you to become something that you're not. You get to choose your own adventure as you meander through the aisles, your fingers running down the spine of a potential reed. Maybe you'll step into a fantasy and battle the darkness, and that metaphor will help you with your own darkness. Thank you, Carl Jung. You may find a book that helps you launch your new business, plant your garden, or raise your teenager. Good luck with that. Maybe you'll dig into Play doh and learn about the Republic, the cave, and the Forms. One of my favorites, A local bookstore is worth having now more than ever, because our communities are losing sight of what it means to be a community. We've separated ourselves with zoom meetings, artificial intelligence, and social media. We use these tools from our cubicles and our living rooms, sitting by ourselves, wondering why we feel sad and overworked. I often feel sad and overworked. That's why when I close my laptop and my wife asks, hey, Eddie, what should we do tonight? The idea of going to a local bookstore sounds so nice. As I said, a bookstore is more than four walls with many books. It's a reminder that we are a work in progress and that that work is worth doing. We're human and we're hungry for something better. The question is this. What aisle in the bookstore will you find your answer? That's my short mini essay I wrote today on why bookstores matter. I was trying to speak from the heart as to how I feel at the end of a long day and how bookstores somehow mend my soul and make things right with the world. Okay, let's get into this week's book recommendation and then I will share with you my current progress on my own bookstore, something I'm very excited to tell you about this week. I would like to recommend the Best poems of the English Language, from Chaucer through Robert Frost. This is a book that was put together by by Harold Bloom, the humanities professor from Yale. Now, this is a fantastic book for many reasons. You know, Bloom was born in 1930 and he died in 2019. And he is this American literary critic who was a sterling professor, like I mentioned, of humanities at Yale University. This is a fun person to learn poetry from. He was interesting to listen to. But this book itself is rather big. It's almost. Well, it's over 900 pages of poetry, which might sound insane, but I'll tell you why it's worth picking up. Now, I bought mine. The the suggested retail price for this thing is $24.99. I got mine at Barnes and Noble a few days back. But I love it because the first 30 pages are set up to help you learn to read poetry. In fact, it's titled the Art of Reading Poetry. And Bloom walks you through sort of his strategy for thinking about this figurative language and how to make the most of of these great works. I love it because the book is organized by poet first, and then under that poet, of course, what he considers to be the finest poems that they've written. And you may or may not agree with Bloom, but he has many great poems in here. And the nice thing is at the head of each poet's section, he tells us quite a bit about the poet himself or herself. And then as each poem is introduced, we get some insight into that poem and how to read it. So this is a very nice companion if you'd like to dig into some of the poems you've always wanted to learn or read throughout your life. Okay, that's my book recommendation. And now if you've been following along, you know that I started Edgewater Bookstore online a few, well about a year ago now and it has gone quite well. And if you've been watching or paying attention to the Facebook page, you might know that I have recently started a Kickstarter campaign. A Kickstarter is just a sort of a crowdfunding thing and there reason why I'm doing this is because the most amazing property has come online and it has been really quite an exciting thing to try and get that building. I'm putting $100,000 of my own money in right now on, you know, scraping cash together. But the way commercial loans work, you need a little bit more than that. You need 10 to 20% down in order to purchase that building. So I thought it might be helpful to start a Kickstarter campaign and make up the difference. And so far it's going well. We're actually 24 hours into the Kickstarter campaign. We have 30 days to reach our goal, which by the way is a total of 25, 000. And the generous listeners in this community have already helped by donating 5, 000, which is just blowing my mind. Now the way this works is that a Kickstarter campaign is all or nothing. So the goal has been set, we have 30 days to hit it. If we as a community achieve the goal, then your pledges are captured and, and Edgewater will be able to make that down payment. If not, then your pledge is not captured, you pay no money and life goes back to normal. And that's totally fine. But one thing I've done is try to make donating to this, if you're interested in helping, worth it to you as well. So I've set up six different gifts that you get. So for each donor tier there are these really fun gifts. Everything from a list of 89 books that I would buy if I were starting my home library over to some of my more intense online courses that will teach you how to deep read live with myself each day, week or month, depending on the course you pay. Now I will post a link in the show notes to this Kickstarter campaign. But sometimes if it's a podcast, it's hard to click on links. So if you want to look into this and potentially help out, all you do is go to kickstarter.com and then in the search bar up top, just type the word Edgewater Bookstore. You'll see my face, you'll see the bookstore and you can learn all about it. Okay, that's it for this week. Now, before you run away, I'd like to give you a preview of what I'm going to be talking about next week because I'm quite excited. I've been reading a lot about Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was the American poet, essayist and lecturer who helped lead the Transcendentalist movement in the 1800s. Lived in Concord, Massachusetts. You might know his friend Henry David Thoreau very well. The gentleman who wrote Walden Emerson is known for writing essays that are transformative. His most important being one called self reliance. He was a champion of you finding yourself and living your best life through the process of being independent and finding yourself right. So the most spiritual life you could live is by listening to your heart and following the beat of your own drum. This is a very transcendentalist idea. Well, as he began to develop these ideas, he was a big note taker. He journaled a ton and he's been an inspiration to me in regards to how he ran his journals. He actually filled over 260 journals, indexing them all on topic and by idea so that he could use those ideas and those writings to come up with a better speech, a better class, a better whatever it was that he was writing. Okay, so if you have been at your desk or thinking about your own notebook taking system and you feel maybe a little disorganized or chaotic or stressed out, maybe you feel like if you put it in the journal you're going to lose it. Next week I'm going to be sharing what I've learned as I've studied the Emerson note taking system. I've just finished the book Mind on Fire, which is a biography of Emerson, as well as a book called First We Read, Then We Write, which is all about his note taking system. So I will share my findings with you next week and I think I'm going to make next week's YouTube video about that as well. So stay tuned. And again, thank you for helping out on the Kickstarter campaign. If you feel that is something you want to do, please do not feel obligated. But if you do help out, it is much appreciated. And as always, until next time, remember to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thanks everyone. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to Read well. You'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well Podcast.