You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hugh.
In a world that keeps pulling us away from the page.
Author Ann Patchett believes reading might be the most quietly radical thing we can do.
The ability to really listen to another person is an essential skill for a novelist.
It's an essential skill for all human beings.
Anne, who's the author of 16 books, is also the founder of Parnassus Books, a beloved independent bookstore in Nashville Tennessee.
In her delightful talk she shares a love letter to reading and traces a path from a chance encounter with a Hare Krishna in a Chicago airport to a lifelong conviction that books are the invisible thread that binds us and that protecting that thread is worth fighting for.
I was able to sit down with Anne after her talk to dig deeper.
We talked about what owning a bookstore has revealed about community and third spaces, why book banning misses the point, and how to stay sane as a reader and a writer in what some are calling a perma crisis.
Reading. shines the light that disrupts the dark isolation so many people find themselves in.
And a little plug before the conversation, Ann Patchett has a new novel out today called Whistler.
I'm so excited.
And if you're interested in hearing more from Ann about this book, her writing practice, what it Mark your calendars for June 30th?
I get to speak with Anne again, but in front of a live TED audience for our TED Talks Daily Book Club interview.
To learn more and RSVP, visit go.ted.com slash membership.
Now on to Anne's talk and our conversation after a break.
And now our TED Talk and conversation of the day.
I had just turned 22 when I finished my first semester of graduate school at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
I was also taking classes in the printmaking program, ambitious, young, art-loving thing that I was.
I had flown from Iowa City to Chicago O'Hare, where I'd change planes and go home to Nashville for Christmas.
I had my Hermes 3000 typewriter with me, technically portable at 14 pounds, because I wrote stories.
I also had a shoulder blag of zinc plates, which I planned to engrave over the break.
Have you ever traveled with a bag of zinc plates?
They're a lot heavier than a typewriter.
In O'Hare, I got very, very lost.
I put my typewriter down, stood there lopsided looking at my ticket when a young man walked up and asked me if I needed help.
Time changes memory, but I remember him clearly.
He had on khaki pants and a pink Oxford shirt.
He had straight, sandy blonde hair and wire-rimmed glasses.
He looked like the young John Denver.
I gave him my ticket.
You are really lost," he said.
And then he took my extraordinarily heavy bag from my shoulder and the typewriter from my hand and said he would walk me to my gate.
Side note.
This was 1986.
I was shy and I was plain.
I was not the kind of girl whose typewriter was carried by men who look like John Denver.
And my heart expanded with the wonder.
Together, we traversed many concourses, and I began to worry about the time.
I said, he shouldn't risk missing his flight so that I could make mine.
That's when he told me he didn't have a flight.
I asked him if he worked in the airport, and he said, yeah, sort of.
He said he was a Hare Krishna.
What a beautiful world it was when you could still get lost in an airport, when zinc plates, sharp as meat cleavers, filled your carry-ons, when Hare Krishnas those dancing chanting members of a religious sect roamed freely from gate to gate.
I was terrified.
But of what?
That he'd kidnap me and make me a vegetarian?
I was already a vegetarian.
I had to keep walking with him because he had my typewriter, and I was in love with my typewriter.
In those days there were no screens updating travelers as to departure times, so I didn't know that my flight was two hours delayed until I reached the gate.
The Hare Krishna laid my burdens down and said he'd wait with me.
Would I have chosen to spend two hours in O'Hare with a Hare Krishna?
No.
But I lacked the courage to bolt.
I decided that, given the circumstances, the only thing I could do was listen.
The ability to really listen to another person is an essential skill for a novelist.
It's an essential skill for all human beings.
And what the Hare Krishna told me was one of the most remarkable things I had ever heard in my life.
He said Imagine loving God so much that you would be willing to stand in an airport all day so that you could tell people about God's love.
All day long, people rushed past him, even after he had forsaken his traditional saffron robes to mitigate first impressions.
They buried their faces in their newspapers as soon as he started to speak, and still he kept showing up, because God's love was the greatest thing he had ever known and he wanted to share it.
When I finally made it home to Nashville, I told this story to everyone.
In fact, I told it for years.
Two hours in an airport with a Hare Krishna.
But as I got older, I could see myself becoming that Hare Krishna, wanting to testify about the greatest love in my life, which is reading.
So great is my need to share this love that it outweighs my significant need for privacy.
I gave up printmaking when I left Iowa, but books have been my steadfast companions, my solace, my teachers, my joy.
I can't imagine what life would be without reading.
And so pretty much every day, in every situation I find myself in, I'm out there sharing the good news.
For a long time, my love for books was more cloistered, less zealot, but in 2011, all of that changed.
The two major bookstores in Nashville closed and after waiting around for someone else to open a bookstore, I decided to do it myself.
This was not the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
It was more like irritation.
People love to tell me that bookstores are dead, that books themselves are hobbling towards the dust heap of cultural irrelevance.
Heresy, I say.
Books are the rock on which I built my church.
Like the Hare Krishna, I didn't do this because of what I needed.
I had books.
I would always have books.
I fought for books because you need them.
The summer before we opened Parnassus Books, I went on tour.
I've been going on tour regularly since 1992.
This one, for a novel I wrote called State of Wonder, was going to be my fact-finding mission.
I collected information from all the booksellers I knew, but the most valuable came from my friend Daniel Golden at Boswell Books in Milwaukee.
He told me people were desperate to buy anything that was hanging from the ceiling, which is true.
More importantly, he told me to put the children's section as far away from the front door as possible so that when a child makes a break for it, you have the maximum opportunity to catch her.
Daniel talked a lot about the children's section, which was not a part of bookstores I knew much about.
If you want customers, he said, you have to raise them yourself.
That made sense.
Small children coming to storytime, being read, to learning to read themselves, will grow up to be great customers.
Fifteen years later, I can attest that this is true.
We have raised up a raft of customers.
But over time, this charming bit of wisdom has changed.
I don't think of it as cultivating shoppers anymore.
I think of it as cultivating readers, and not just for the books I write or the books I sell, but for all books.
I've come to believe that if you're interested in living in a society where people read, it's also your responsibility to cultivate readers.
What does that even mean?
Well reading to children the same way people read to us.
You can buy books for children who are in Title I schools who might not have books of their own.
We do a lot of this at Parnassus.
You can speak out against book banning. because books are not the things endangering our children.
And speak up for teachers and librarians who are doing the jobs that they've been trained for.
Also, You can just read a book.
Do you wish that people read books instead of, say, constantly scrolling on their phones?
Then read books.
Do you want your children to be readers?
Then model that behavior.
Of course you're going to read to them, but they also have to see you read.
Like all the people who told me not to open a bookstore, you may be wondering if books are even relevant in this golden age of technology.
Think of it this way.
Every piece of information coming out of your computer or phone is a single thread.
At any given moment, you are holding countless threads which range in quality from vital to worthless.
What a novelist does is takes all of those threads and weaves them into a tapestry.
Maidens, unicorns, pear trees.
This is no small job.
But when it's done right, the outcome is both beautiful and enduring.
Novels teach us empathy by putting us into another person's life, and they define our history by showing us how we've changed and will continue to change.
Think of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Now, think of John Updike.
And if this wasn't reason enough to love books, they also help us develop and preserve what I like to call a long-format brain.
The problems of the world cannot be seen one thread at a time, nor can they be solved.
The ability to think with depth and complexity is greatly enhanced by reading more than 280 characters at a time.
If you haven't read a novel in a while, it may feel strange at first, but stick with it.
What you put in is what you'll get back.
What surprised me most about owning a bookstore and practically everything about it surprises me is that it's not just books people come in for.
Reading, that solitary endeavor, has proven to be a means of connection.
Our monthly book club at Parnassus is now so large we've broken it into three sections.
We also have a classics book club and a romance book club.
And once a year, those two groups come together to read a classic romance.
Most recently, Pride and Prejudice.
Our author events have ranged from Jeff Kenney to Percival Everett to Barbara Kingsolver to R.F.
Kuang to Ina Garten to Bono.
And whether it's presidential histories or mysteries, what we see is that books give people the means by which to connect.
The conversations may start with books, but they go everywhere.
Reading shines the light that disrupts the dark isolation so many people find themselves in.
Go to your local bookstore and see what I'm talking about.
Every time I change planes in O'Hare, I think about the Hare Krishna, a person I was afraid of, a person I had nothing in common with, a person whose only intention was to help me both to find my gate and to find a force in the world greater than myself.
Through experience, we had both come to see that we were part of the larger human fabric.
He, through his faith, and me, through a different kind of faith.
Maybe this time we would sit at the gate a little bit longer and I would ask him what he was reading.
I would tell him how much I admired the courage of his convictions.
I would thank him for helping me find my way.
That was Ann Patchett.
Stick around.
When we come back, she and I talk about what 15 years of book selling has taught her about community and why even now she sees more goodness in the world than doom.
That's all coming up right after a short break.
Well, Anne, thank you so much for sitting down with us.
I'm thrilled that you asked.
You are a big reader and a writer.
So let's go to reading first.
Let's talk about reading first.
Let's just always talk about reading.
I could do this all day.
I really can.
Do you have an early memory of how it all started for you when you really fell in love with reading?
I was very slow to read.
I didn't read comfortably until I was in third grade.
So I was always longing to read.
And then I think once it finally clicked for me, there was no stopping me.
I was just reading all the time.
And when did you realize this was going to be a practice that would stay with you for the rest of your life?
Were you older when you thought, gosh, I like this more than everyone else?
You know, I always knew that I wanted to be a writer and I always knew that reading and writing, I think of it as like walking on two legs.
I can't imagine doing one without the other.
They are perfect. practically the same thing in my mind.
The novelist Patrick Ryan, who is my great, dear friend, said to me recently you know, if we had to pick, if we could only have reading or writing, it would be reading.
And I said, absolutely.
I mean, I would be sad if I couldn't write anymore.
Yeah.
But I can't imagine life without reading.
I think I feel the same way.
Has your relationship with writing changed over the years?
You've written so many beautiful books now.
My relationship with writing, it's still primary.
It's still at the core of who I am.
My life is so much busier.
I mean, when I wrote my first couple of novels, I didn't have email.
Nobody knew... where to find me.
There was nothing but giant expanses of free, quiet time.
So my writing has changed so much because now my life has changed so much and I'm always looking for that quiet place again to write.
Yeah.
The bookstore is a main character in your talk.
Yes.
It's like a vehicle that takes us through the story of it.
Let's talk about your bookstore in Nashville.
For starters, why'd you name it what you did?
Oh, I'm really glad you asked.
So the bookstore is named Parnassus Books.
And when we opened Parnassus Books, I had a partner for the first 10 years, Karen Hayes.
And she was the owner-manager.
Okay.
And we met as two people who were interested in starting a bookstore.
A mutual friend introduced us.
We had lunch and she said, I want to call the bookstore Parnassus Books.
And I said, that's a terrible name for a bookstore.
No one knows what it means.
By the way, including me, it's a mountain in Greece where the goddesses of art and music and literature lived.
I did not know that 15 years ago.
You don't know what it means.
You don't know how to spell it.
When you find out, you feel silly.
It's hard to remember.
I wanted to call the bookstore Independent People because of my favorite novel by Haldor Laxness, Independent People.
So here we have two people with two ideas and only one is going to get to win.
Right.
And I...
I thought, okay, you're the person who's going to be the manager.
You're going to be there every day, not me.
You should get to win.
You should get to pick the name.
And then she retired.
And then she retired and left me with a bookstore called Parnassus Books.
And there are the T-shirts and there are the pencils and the notebooks.
And I can't change the name.
That's quite a legacy, though.
Right?
What are some surprise or unanticipated challenges along the way of being a bookseller?
Everything about it was a surprise.
I guess the unanticipated challenge is how it has affected my reading life.
Oh, because i used to read henry james over and over.
I've read the awkward age twice.
Not a whole lot of people can say that.
And that's just gone from my life.
Everything I read now is a book that hasn't been published.
And I almost never get to reread and really to go back and read a classic that I'd never read before on this trip,
I brought Elizabeth Bowen's Death of the Heart because I thought it's a really long flight.
Oh, okay.
I was interviewing Louise Erdrich and we were talking about rereading and she said the book she goes back and rereads every year is Elizabeth Bowen's Death of the Heart which, by the way, I had never heard of.
And so I thought... my favorite writer.
This is her favorite book.
I've got to get on this.
How do you handle all of the recommendations that other people give you?
I imagine there's so many publishers that are trying to sell you on books.
You have no idea.
Yeah.
I mean, the UPS truck comes twice a day.
There are days I get five manuscripts from people who want me to blurb their book, want me to promote it, want me to edit it, want me to tell them if it's okay.
And if I just get the envelopes open and recycle responsibly, I feel like I'm doing a great job.
It's past the point that I could possibly feel bad about it.
So then how do you decide what actually makes it to the top of your stack?
What is your curatorial method?
It's that I know the writer, I know the editor, I know the publicist.
I have somebody saying to me, the sales reps.
The people who come to the store from the different publishing houses, who I know and trust, will say to me you really need to read this book.
Okay.
So the main thing that I do at the bookstore is we have a first editions club, which I like to say is fruit of the month club.
That doesn't rot.
So we have a signed first editions club.
So what I'm constantly doing, right now I'm reading for October.
I am trying to find the best book for September, the best book for October.
And then get that author to come sign the first editions and we mail them out.
We have about 2000 members in the club.
So it's a big responsibility.
And I'm always looking for a fantastic book that is going to be in keeping with the kind of books and the level of books that I've picked in the past.
Right.
So probably the sales reps are my best conduit to the books because they know me.
They know what I've picked.
They know what I like.
And they say, oh, that Emily St.
John Mandel exit party coming in September.
Brilliant.
It's true.
It is.
I picked it.
In your talk, you talk about how people gather at your store.
And that's what I love about my local independent bookstore too.
What has owning Parnassus revealed to you about third spaces?
They're so important and for so many different reasons.
If you are taking your family out to dinner and you want to go someplace before your reservation.
If you have 20 minutes before you've got to pick your kid up at school.
If
Your partner is driving you crazy and you just need to go someplace private.
Or you want to meet up with your best friend and go to an author event and talk about it.
The bookstore meets all those needs.
And...
It came home to all of us at the store most profoundly when there was the Covenant School shooting, which was right down the street from the store.
I mean, a mile from the store in Nashville.
And...
Everybody, the school was closed.
People in other schools weren't sending their kids to school.
And to be able to go on social media and say, come here.
Just everybody come here.
And we'll be together.
We'll have the dogs.
We'll have coloring.
Kate DiCamillo, the brilliant children's author, called and said...
Every kid who comes in the store that day, I will buy them a book.
Whatever they want, send me the bill.
And to say things are as hard as they could possibly be, come here.
Come and we'll be together.
Do you see libraries in a similar way?
Absolutely.
Libraries obviously operate differently.
There's not the same capitalistic exchange, but they are also a third space and are increasingly threatened by local governments, Budget cuts and librarians are having to face cutbacks as well.
How do you see the role of libraries and bookstores kind of working in tandem?
Before I opened Parnassus, I was for years on the library board in Nashville.
And so those people at the library are my friends.
We have hired... several retired librarians who have come from the library to the store.
So we have a really good partnership.
And we do events together often.
We use each other's spaces.
We... help them fundraise.
We're just really there for one another and people say, oh, that's crazy.
Those are free books and we're trying to sell books.
It's not that at all.
We're readers and we need to make a place for all readers in all different ways.
You and I are both readers.
We are among readers here at TED.
What do you say to folks who are just like books aren't really for me, or I haven't been able to pick up a book and read a whole book in ages because I'm so busy?
Yeah, even at TED I've had so many people come up and say I used to be such a reader, but not anymore.
Now I'm too busy and now I have to read all the things on my phone.
And I think maybe the most compelling case for actually reading a physical book that I can make to these people is reading
Okay, you want your children to be readers, right?
You don't want your children to just spend their whole life scrolling on their phones.
It's not enough that you read to them.
They have to see you reading.
I remember when I was a kid, if my parents were reading a book, they were having a conversation with an adult, another adult,
And in the same way that if your mother was talking to another adult, you didn't walk into the room and interrupt that conversation.
And they always said that's what reading a book is.
So you have to be respectful of that and you have to model how important reading is.
You have to be able to think in a long format way.
You have to be able to see a larger picture.
And that's what we get from books.
You mentioned physical books.
Do you feel like reading kind of in an analog way should take primacy over eBooks or audiobooks?
No, I don't.
What matters is that you read. and people read in all sorts of different ways.
I like a physical book, and I sell physical books, but do I care if you are reading on your phone?
I don't get it, but I'm glad you're reading.
Something that just blows my mind.
At least once a week somebody will write to me at the bookstore and say my sister and I are having an argument.
And she says that audio books don't count.
But I think audio books do count.
The notion that so many people think that audio books don't count, that somehow receiving information through your ears instead of through your eyes is a lesser experience, I think, is hogwash.
I also think depending on who the narrators are or the voice actors.
Absolutely.
It can be better.
It can be a far more vibrant experience.
Sure.
Meryl Streep read my last book, Tom Lake.
And I always say, if somebody said I listened to that book, I'm so happy.
It is a better book if you listen to it.
And people think that's self-effacing.
But think about it.
It's my talent with Meryl Streep's talent on top of it.
It's a better book.
Right.
I want to talk briefly about book banning and your response to it.
Obviously, we've seen an uptick in book bans over the last few years.
How has that had an impact on your work as a bookseller, if any?
Yeah.
It hasn't had any impact on my work as a bookseller.
It's just somehow one more thing I have to stand up for.
I was saying to a friend of mine recently I feel like life these days is sitting in a bar and In which all of these fights are breaking out and you look up and think oh, that's not my fight.
Oh, no, that's not my fight.
And then something happens and you're like, oh, God, all right, that's my fight.
Book banning, okay, I got to get up and get in the fight.
Yeah.
So book banning is truly ridiculous, in that when we think of book banning we think about Lady Chatterley's Lover and raking all of the copies into a pile and setting them on fire and smuggling one in from France in your luggage.
That's not book banning.
Book banning now means One person in the state of Florida who doesn't have any children at all can call a school and say I don't think they should teach Paradise Lost.
And so they pull it off the shelf pending review.
Pending review, a group of people who are going to sit down in Florida and read Paradise Lost and make a decision.
Guess what?
That's just not going to happen.
And so all these books are getting pulled.
It's just a ridiculous waste of time because it's not addressing the problem.
The problem is what do children have to fear?
Not Paradise Lost.
Children have to fear gun violence.
Children have to fear the things that they can so easily get on their phones.
Pornography, for example.
But no one's gonna take away their phones or their guns because we don't ban things we love.
We feel like we have to ban something to show that we're concerned citizens, and then we ban books.
I'm curious how are you approaching being a reader and being a writer in this time of what they're calling a perma-crisis?
So from a distance, everything looks absolutely cataclysmically awful.
Up close, it can look pretty good. in that people are kind.
People come into the bookstore all day long and I see them interested in reading but also interested in one another.
Really nice to the staff.
I don't know.
I see so much goodness in the world.
And I think that that is the counterbalance.
If we're always looking at things that are far away and never noticing that...
Here we are, two people we just met.
We're having a really warm conversation.
Everybody here has been so lovely.
That's not to discount the horrible things that are going on in the world that we need to work on helping solving and fixing.
But don't overlook what's good.
Yeah.
I really like that.
To follow up, there's a question that we often ask our guests, which is what is a small gratitude you have in your life right now?
That people read, that people are reading, that people do really care about books, that people really care about librarians and school teachers and teachers.
There are people in Nashville who go down to the state capitol every day to protest the firing of a school librarian who refused to move certain titles off the shelf, who just keep showing up.
Bless them.
All right, before I let you go, book recommendations for us?
I know you already sprinkled some in, but what are you recommending to everybody right now?
So getting recommendations from me is really lousy in a lot of ways, because I am always recommending books that are so far out.
First I will say 2026 is the best year for fiction that I have seen, since we've opened the bookstore.
Oh, my goodness.
That's quite a claim.
There are a raft of fantastic novels.
Kin by Tiare Jones, Land by Maggie O'Farrell, the Emily St.
John Mandel.
The book that is, for me, the big winner of the year is Iyun Lee's Music Against the Night, which is coming out in October.
And if you want to make sure that you get that in your mind and you keep it, go back and read her last book, In Nature, Things Merely Grow, which is a nonfiction book.
Very tough, very tough subject matter.
It's about the death of her two sons.
And it is the most beautiful true, honest book about what it means to love someone and to accept their choices.
Wow.
What a treasure to have this raft of book recommendations from you, but also to sit down and get to spend time and talk to you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
That was Anne Patchett at TED 2026 and in conversation with me, Elise Hugh.
If you're interested in hearing more from Anne, go to gotedcom slash membership to sign up an RSVP for my conversation with her about her new novel Whistler, on June 30th 2026.
If you're curious about Ted's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And the interview was recorded in Vancouver by Dave Palmer and Rich Amies of Field Trip.
The TED Talks daily team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner and Tansika Sungmarnivong.
Additional support from Daniela Balarezo, Valentina Bohannini, Banban Chang, Brian Green and Laini Lott.
Learn more at podcasts.ted.com.
I am Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
Richard Reeves is unimpressed by online influencers who peddle ideas about hyper masculinity.
You're talking about boys and men.
We're actually doing stuff for them.
You're good on podcasts but where's your policy agenda?
We've actually done a bunch of stuff for boys and men.
Sorry what have you done?
Ideas about the next era of manhood.
That's next time on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
Listen and subscribe to the TED Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts.
