Jenna Bush Hager Shares Studying Is ‘A Means To Join With Individuals’

Jenna Bush Hager is letting us know concerning the vital readers in her life.

The TODAY present co-host, 42, spoke with creator Ann Patchett, 60, on the Oct. 31 episode of her podcast, Open E-book with Jenna. The 2 mentioned the vital “studying companions” of their lives, with Bush Hager sharing that one is her mom, former First Girl Laura Bush, who had her grasp’s in library science.

“Once I was little, and in my teenagers, it was my mother, who … would additionally say issues like, ‘This could be too sophisticated for the place you might be in life proper now,” Bush Hager defined. “And she or he’d be proper.”

Bush Hager added that she shares a love of studying along with her twin sister, Barbara.

“We share books, and I really like books, however what I believe I actually love is a ebook suggestion.”

Bush Hager stated that there are different authors in her life who she connects with, together with novelist Emma Straub, who owns the Brooklyn bookstore Books Are Magic.

“I really like her a lot,” Bush Hager stated. “I believe indie bookstore homeowners in our nation … need to curate books that their complete neighborhood needs to learn. So that they know what’s on the market and what’s publishing.”

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Bush Hager, who picked Straub’s novel, All Adults Right here, for her Learn with Jenna ebook membership in 2020, was additionally influenced by one other well-known ebook membership host rising up: Oprah Winfrey.

“Once I was in highschool and taking AP English, I might stroll right into a Barnes and Noble or the BookPeople in Austin, which was our native retailer, and search for her little sticker,” Bush Hager stated.

“I needed to see what she was gonna advocate subsequent,” she added. “And I believe ebook suggestions are a strategy to join with folks.”

Patchett additionally shared the titles of vital books in her life, together with Charlotte’s Net by E.B. White. The Pulitzer Prize winner stated the novel was the primary ebook she liked as a baby.

“I learn it again and again, and I bought a pig for my ninth birthday,” Patchett stated. “As a result of we lived on a farm, and I begged my household to provide me a pig.” Patchett even gifted a duplicate of the novel to bestselling creator Kate DiCamillo.

“I tracked down, with nice effort, an autographed copy of Charlotte’s Net for Kate DiCamillo for her sixtieth birthday, that was a battered up, faculty model with out the paper jacket,” Patchett stated. “Simply to carry a ebook that E.B. White had held was unimaginable.”

Patchett, who revealed her youngsters’s ebook The Verts in September, additionally mentioned her unconventional writing course of, together with that she wrote the whole thing of her acclaimed 2023 novel, Tom Lake, whereas strolling on a treadmill.

“I do not like a standing desk,” the creator stated. “When you’re strolling, and it is not like I am going quick or something, you are simply in excellent alignment. You don’t have any rigidity within the higher half of your physique. Like, your ft harm on the finish of the day, however that is significantly better than your neck hurting.”

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“It was like strolling into the novel,” Patchett added. “It was the very best focus I’ve ever had in my life.”