Introducing Cville Reads

A New Series We Think You'll Love

Commerce Street Books is a real bookshop for a real community. We want to be the place you find your next great read. So why not do quick interviews with interesting people about their favorite books? What could be better?

Enter Cville Reads.

Charlottesville is a place people come to in order to be around people who love ideas. Throw a rock in any coffee shop in town and you are likely to hit a PhD in Latin American Studies who crochets seriously on the side. Or a retiree who left a big, important job in DC to be closer to their grandchildren and can recommend some wonderful political memoirs. Or a Cross Fit junkie with a deep love of W.H. Auden’s poems. Or a barber who can’t wait to gush about the latest Romantasy drop.

We want Commerce Street to be one place in town where you’ll find these wonderful people. Cville Reads is how we’ll introduce them to you.

The idea is pretty simple: we are publishing short interviews with interesting folks about their reading lives – what they are currently reading, what sorts of books they often give away to others, which authors they wish more people would read, and so on. The interviews will be short and sweet, we promise, and focus on the particular interests of our community.

This means you may react to someone’s recommendation with a “gah, I actually hated that book” or, even worse, complete indifference. That might happen. But you may also catch some inspiration. You may find yourself interested in something you didn’t know you needed. You may even find your true book buddy — that person whose taste so clearly matches your own that you’d like to tell the Algorithm to take a hike and have a cup of tea with your new best friend instead. And wouldn’t that be Heaven?

Volume One: Shannon Glover

Thanks for doing this, Shannon. First off: Where can we find you around town?

I'm a Charlottesville High School parent as well as an instructional coach there, so I log a lot of hours at CHS. The second most likely place you'll find me is riding on any of our local mountain biking trails, especially O Hill.

And what's in your current stack?

The current stack is Intermezzo, Fever Beach, The Right to Sex, and for work, the YA novel Furia.

What's the last book that made you cry?

My reading habits make it more likely that I'm crying because I'm laughing. My daughter and I regularly read aloud to each other out of Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris to make each other belly laugh until we cry.

What author(s) do you think are underrated? Overrated?

I'm not sure you can call a Pulitzer Prize-winner underrated, but I think there aren't enough people reading Larry McMurtry. Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show are both favorites of mine, but I've also loved all of his other novels I've read. When an author can artfully articulate quiet desperation, I'm on board, and I think McMurtry does that at a level that rivals Virginia Woolf.

The author I find overrated is John Green, but I think that comes from my time as a middle school English teacher. He was churning out YA banger after banger during that time, and there aren't many YA books I love. I'm curious about his newer essays and nonfiction, but man, those middle grades teaching years have created a real mental block for me around him.

Last book you recommended to someone (and do you think it was a good recommendation)?

The last book recommendation I made was at a reunion of my high school girlfriends a couple of weekends ago. It was the book North Woods by Daniel Mason. I think Kristen will find it tedious, Peden will enjoy the march through history, and Charity will love it because she's a woodsy magical thinker. So I guess it's a mixed bag.

Thanks, Shannon — I’m sure they’ll love it. And if they don’t, tell em to come find something else on Big Weekend.