The Jiffy Rediscovers Reading With Tom Grattan & Maureen Rodgers

This week brought the first official day of spring – but as a confusing and misplaced winter storm batters my windows, I’m bringing you one last cozy episode before we fold up the Cozy Map for good.

In this episode, I visit one of my favorite places on earth: Rodgers Book Barn in Hillsdale, NY. I chat with legendary owner Maureen Rodgers, who’s been stocking her shelves with used books since the 1960s, about how she finds books, what makes a book cozy, and how the book barn industry has changed over the decades.

Then, I drive to Kinderhook to visit my friend Tom Grattan, esteemed novelist and experienced reader. I snoop around his book shelves a bit, and Tom gives us three of his top reading recommendations for 2025 so far – with one bonus pick saved just for The Jiffy newsletter subscribers at the J'Fay Supreme level.

Guests:

• Maureen Rodgers – Owner of Rodgers Book Barn

• Tom Grattan – Author of "The Recent East" and "In Tongues"

Books Recommended by Tom:

1. "Mothers and Sons," by Adam Haslett
2. "Ghost Roots," by Pemi Aguda
3. "Lives of the Saints," by Nancy Lemann
4. Mysterious Book by Important Author

Extras:

• Get Maureen’s Cozy Reading Tips + Tom’s Bonus Book Pick – only at the J'Fay Supreme level.
• Upgrade for $5/month or $50/year: https://thejiffy.beehiiv.com/upgrade

Follow Tom on Instagram: @tomgrattan

Follow the Book Barn on Instagram: @rodgersbookbarn

Follow me: @jamescave

More Jiffy: thejiffy.xyz

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:00

Hello and welcome to another cozy episode of the Chiffy Audio Newsletter Podcast. It's the podcast version of the newsletter version of the James Cave Instagram feed. That's me. I'm James Cave, the talking voice here at the podcast. And you might remember over on the Instagram feed recently, I charted a map of cozy and comfy places throughout the Hudson Valley just to try to help us all get through winter. Well, in the midst of my discovery making, I found bookstores, fireplaces, restaurant places, even third places. Almost 150 comfy places in all. And because this week we celebrated the first day of spring as well as the first official nice day, a day above 60 degrees. I know that you might be thinking, is the cozy map still relevant? Is it even still needed? Isn't it time to move on? Well, I'll tell you, as I'm recording this, it's storming outside, a sort of a surprise storm, a wintry mix of ice, sleet, and snow, all of those. And the wind is also just blowing really hard. I don't know if you can, you might be able to hear it in the background. It kind of sounds like a ghost. Anyway, it's taking its toll on both my spirit and my patience. But because I don't want to be negative here, I only want the podcast to be a happy place. That's why I think it's time for one last look at the cozy map of comfy places before we fold the map up for good and hopefully welcome the warmth of spring.

UNKNOWN: 1:42

So

SPEAKER_03: 1:43

Now, OK, as part of the Cozy series, you may have seen it on the Instagram feed. I made a short documentary about one of my favorite places on the planet. The Book Barn in Hillsdale, New York. It's owned by a living legend, Maureen Rogers, and she's been in this old barn in the woods since the late 1960s. Maureen gave me a tour of the barn, and we talked for a long time. I learned a lot about her backstory, how she found herself in Hillsdale from New York City, how the market for used books has changed over the decades, and we heard her strategy for finding the coziest reads. But of course, I could only include a little bit of that conversation in the, what was it, something like three-minute Instagram video. So I thought for the podcast today, we could listen into an extended version of my conversation with Maureen Rogers. But first, here's the audio from that original documentary. During this winter time, I've been on a journey to find the coziest places across the Hudson Valley, starting with my own house. I'm putting them all on an interactive map soon, but my first stop had to be one of my all-time favorite places on the planet. Rogers Book Barn, tucked into the rolling hills of Hillsdale, New York. Rooms and rooms and shelves. Two floors just filled with treasures. This is Maureen Rogers. She owns and curates it with her assistant, Kate, and Maureen's been doing this for more than 50 years, if you can believe it. Obviously, it's a cozy place. I wanted to ask her about choosing cozy books. Maureen, hi Maureen, thanks for being here. Tell us, what makes a book a cozy read?

SPEAKER_04: 3:10

Well, not necessarily a book, but I think you can find books in here that might be considered cozy. I mean, certainly some mysteries for sure, but also books that you could really, an interest of yours, say you were interested in fishing perhaps, and you would find something, you know, that would really look through and Make you think. And it's cozy if you can take it home and you sit by the fire and you look through your books. Does that make it cozy? So let's see. We're coming into the section up here that's mostly other countries. This is travel, a little travel section. I have an ephemera table, which is a good catch-all for stuff. Well, I find memoir interesting. And I also tend to... pick out, you know, one classic that I haven't read. Where to put them is another matter. Maybe the first half hour in the morning, read something that's perhaps a little challenging. Quite a lot of classics I need to really look at again, you know. So, and then this is literature along here and essays. So, I guess I just wanted to make sure that, because literature is after my own heart. So I hope anybody who comes in here could find something of interest, even if they didn't have it in their mind to start with. Books they never knew they wanted.

SPEAKER_03: 4:51

Thank you for being here. Thank you for joining me and talking with me. I've been wanting to chat with you for Oh, my goodness. As soon as I knew you existed here, this is so fun. I can spend and have spent like probably a cumulative of three months. Here.

SPEAKER_04: 5:15

Love it.

SPEAKER_03: 5:15

Just spending all the time. I think that's what makes this place just so special is that it is the absolute not the Internet. It is not at all Amazon. It is like a space. Thank you. Because this feels like a creative vision of Maureen Rogers come to life, right? So can you talk a little bit about the intention or the vision of the book? Well,

SPEAKER_04: 6:02

so first of all, when you pick books, they should have something going for them. And of course, a used bookstore. You know, so you think in terms of categories, you know, or different countries. So I started a history and travel section with different countries in it. But it's My own interest and bias really have been literature, history, and art. So it's tended towards that. It used to be that fishing and hunting were very big here locally, and then I learned locally what people might like. I didn't have any light reading. Now I have a whole mystery section, you know. So I've also listened to customers, what they might like, and I looked out for that when I was looking for books.

SPEAKER_03: 6:51

What do our neighbors like to read these days?

SPEAKER_04: 6:53

Well, of course, they come with lists, which isn't particularly a good idea. And they have some definite ideas. But local history has always been interesting to keep. Mystery section sells quite well. And then I stock a book, even if If it's interesting to me, you know, and it's some obscure history in, you know, the middle of Latvia or something, I will get it, you know, just because it looks like it could be interesting to somebody. and this would be true with art and photography, you know, if it's...

SPEAKER_03: 7:33

You've got books on interior decorating, jazz history. There's a book here in front of me called Eskimo Rolling on how to roll a canoe. You've got...

SPEAKER_04: 7:42

Yeah, well,

SPEAKER_03: 7:42

somebody might be interested in that. The Civil War. It's just so diverse and vast. You've got books on needlepoint and crafts and then these antique marble-edged, you know, leather-bound books over there. Right, well,

SPEAKER_04: 7:54

I'm always interested in the really antiquarian, which is trickier, really, much trickier. I was going to

SPEAKER_03: 8:02

ask, how do you source, where do you go to source all of these? How do these books find themselves here in your barn?

SPEAKER_04: 8:08

Well, some of them are donated. We have a really generous, which is wonderful, and that's donations really started to happen after COVID. COVID, so it hasn't been a long tradition, and I love it. It's really been a help. It's kept us in business. But apart from that, especially the scarcer books, tends to be house calls when people are moving or there's a generational shift. I also go to book sales.

SPEAKER_03: 8:37

I've seen you at library book sales. There we go. With your eye. You're looking. You're always looking. Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_04: 8:43

And sometimes my assistant Kate and I, we go, we try to cover the book sales only, you

SPEAKER_03: 8:50

know. Yeah, what are your strategies for success at those books? Because those library book sales can be very competitive.

SPEAKER_04: 8:56

Well, they are, yes. Well, I don't really have one strategy. Although I do look at the dealers in front of me and know what they're looking for. So I might go to another table or something. But gone are the days when I used to have long arms. And now that's the younger generation.

SPEAKER_03: 9:16

Well, I always give you the right of way at those sales. Thank you. I

SPEAKER_04: 9:20

appreciate that.

SPEAKER_03: 9:25

Okay, so here's what you do. You go to the book barn. You don't bring a list. Okay, it's not a good idea. You should just wander around. Let the books guide you. Spend half your day. Spend your whole day there. And as you start finding books, you can actually take them to the front. She has shelves near the cash register where you could stash your books and keep looking. And then after you're done, you can ask her to show you the good books that don't sell. I'm telling you, she will show you all the hidden gems. And I promise you'll have the best time. While I was at Maureen's place walking around, looking at all her books, I realized that I've been so busy being an upstate neighborhood local influencer trying to make this cozy map that I've lost touch with reading. I've let all the latest books pass me by. I've really fallen out of the loop of new releases. And, um... Let me tell you, there were a lot of new titles that came out in 2024. It looks like 2025 is going to be a good year, too. But it feels like getting back up to speed is feeling overwhelming. But that's OK, because I know who could help for that. We need to take a drive to Kinderhook, New York, to visit my friend Tom in his beautiful old home. Tom Gratton is a novelist and teacher, author of the 2021 novel The Recent East, as well as In Tongues, which came out last year. Tom writes about themes of displacement, identity, belonging, family histories, and he sometimes experiments with temporality in really interesting ways, shows how time passing can influence a narrator's recollection or the storytelling. And his writing is really funny and Tongues is one of my favorite books of 2024. It's truly stuff that only Tom could write. A brilliant mind and one of a kind. Oh, by the way, Tom also reads a lot of books, which is why I thought he could help here for this particular section. Oh, okay, we're here. So I'm hoping we can take a look and maybe snoop around some of Tom's bookshelves a bit. Maybe even get some recommendations. I hope he doesn't mind. Okay, let's go knock on his door.

UNKNOWN: 11:35

Knock, knock, knock.

SPEAKER_01: 11:37

How are you? I'm good. How are you doing, Tom? Come on in.

SPEAKER_02: 11:41

Do you want a cup of coffee, by the way? Oh, I'd love a cup of coffee.

SPEAKER_00: 11:44

All right. So we'll drink coffee and I will show you all the weird nooks where books are. You want to do a tour of the cells, right? So we've looked all over. We have some here. Um... They're not terribly organized. My office upstairs is where I have that sort of the mess. These look prettier because this is a public space. But yeah, so.

SPEAKER_03: 12:05

Did you ever go through a phase during the pandemic, you know, the peak where you curated yourself?

SPEAKER_00: 12:10

My little nook, because during the pandemic, when my first book came out, I was doing all of my book events from this tiny nook that you'll see in a second. So then I was like, I had a few books. I was like, I'm ashamed that this book is visible. So I'd move books that looked a little better. So this is the tiniest office in America, which is my office right here. As you can see, it's very small. Oh, it's perfect

SPEAKER_03: 12:33

for writing.

SPEAKER_00: 12:34

It's great. So I think this is probably a former closet. It is maybe... What is this? Four feet wide? Three feet wide? It does have a window, though, which is dreamy. And then my partner puts shelves on both ends. So this is really sort of where the things I'm reading or just finished mostly end up here. So this is like my... And it's less organized. It's less neat. There's some random notebooks and things. But this is definitely because I would sit and Zoom, do all my Zoom stuff here. So then I would see certain things like... Like some of this is like my partner's into sci-fi and I'm not. And I'm just like, so I'd move those so my head would cover them because I'm a snob and I didn't want people to think I read trashy sci-fi. So apologize to any of the listeners who love trashy sci-fi.

SPEAKER_03: 13:21

I was mentioning to the listener just a few seconds ago how my recent visit to Maureen Rogers' book barn happened. really made me realize how much I haven't been reading lately. And I thought, you know, if there's anyone in my life who I feel like would be good at reading, it would be you. So I thought... You read a lot of books. Yeah. So I thought, wow, what is... I wonder what Tom's been reading? Like, where do I even begin? And would Tom have any recommendations? So I was

SPEAKER_00: 13:48

wondering... I have a lot. And so I'm going to narrow it down to four books that I've read in the last few months that I thought were really interesting for different reasons. So the first one, can we Should we begin? Cool. All right. The first one is called Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett. Adam Haslett is, this is his third novel. He also wrote a really fantastic collection of short stories. The novel before this was called Imagine Me Gone, which if you want to read something that is really beautiful and will make you very sad, I recommend Imagine Me Gone. So Mothers and Sons is another great book by Adam Haslett, who I think is just a, he's a really smart writer who I just, I appreciate a writer when I feel like You just feel like you're having a conversation with a really smart person or listening in on a conversation rather with a really smart person. And I feel like this story is about, as the title suggests, about a mother and a son who, as the book begins, the son is, he's in his early 40s and his mother, he and his mother are estranged. He is a gay man living in New York, working as an immigration lawyer, helping people, trying to help people who are seeking asylum. So already that aspect of the story, I think, really creates a lot of momentum in terms of the plot because it's just, for these people, it's just... If they get asylum or not is just it's it's the stakes are couldn't be higher for and for his work. And so so and and I believe Hassett is a lawyer or a former lawyer. So he really understands this world. And so you get the sort of the minutia of it. Also, I will say sort of what can be really cruel about our immigration system in terms of the way that the lawyers try to keep people from seeking asylum. just sort of the casual cruelty which they engage in these people. So there are moments where you felt a little rage reading it too, but it's really beautifully done and really well done. And so the story starts to really take off when he has a young client, a man in his early 20s, he's a gay Albanian seeking refuge because a family member beat him to near death. And so he doesn't want to go back to Albania. And his sort of work and obsession with this case leads back to a trauma from when he was younger that led to the estrangement between him and his mother. There's also the narration of the mother, Anne, who, when the narrator, Peter, was young, left the father for a woman. And so now she and her partner have started this women's retreat center in Vermont. And so and she clearly wants to reconnect with her son, but he will not really give her the time of day. Long story short, things happen with his case and and and things do not go very well and that somehow forces them to reconnect. And also he slowly reveals what happened to sort of sever their relationship initially. Really well plotted book. It's really like both the characters are really both damaged and kind of, but also really seeking love in a way that, and really smart and that feels really, compelling to read. I really appreciated that it went in directions you didn't think it would go. That the young Albanian man, like that he sort of becomes obsessed with him. I was worried it was going to go into sort of weird cliche waters and it did not at all. And I also thought it was really interesting. A lot of stories about like a queer child and their parents, often the disconnect or the struggle between them is often about the child's sexuality. But having both of them as queer, just it complicated that and it became a story about... how parents and children struggle to connect regardless of what they have in common. All right, so this book is for people who like a really good literary book that is really beautifully written, that focuses on messy, complicated human dynamics. A book that allows for ambiguity that doesn't sort of have like a neat wrapped up ending. Okay, the next one. I loved, When I read a good short story collection, I love to tell people about it because I think oftentimes short story collections don't get as much attention as novels. Although this one has gotten a good amount of attention, but it's great and there are reasons for it. It is a debut short story collection by a writer named Pemi Aguda, who's a Nigerian writer living in the States now, and it's called Ghost Roots. These stories are really sharp and really unnerving. A lot of them are speculative, so a lot of them she's sort of playing with reality or the rules of reality that are sometimes really messed with in really smart ways that I think actually convey something really important about human experience. Not all of them are, but all the stories have kind of a haunted quality. So it feels like you're reading a collection of sort of ghost stories, even though some of them are written sort of as realistic prose. Really, just something really smart. It almost feels like something when you eat something that's really super flavorful, but like really rich and you have a few bites of it and you're like, that was just an amazing, such a satisfying experience. And that's what all these stories are like. There's one called Breast Milk, which is about a woman who has recently just had a kid and she's not able to breastfeed because her breast milk isn't, she's not producing breast milk. And there's so many things about sort of the sort of the shame of this and sort of that she has somehow failed, but also her ambivalence about being a parent. And there's this moment. And so she does a lot of stuff about sort of gender, both in Nigeria, but I think just about sort of gender expectations in general. And there's this moment in the story, and I read this story probably a month or two ago, where she, the baby she has is a son, and she just sort of thinks with dread about him as an adult and But like the likelihood of him as a man inflicting sort of harm on other people. But it's just a moment where she takes something like the motherhood and she, with such honesty and such just surprise, like will say these things. So... All these stories, they take these really interesting turns that you wouldn't expect. There's another one where an adult daughter is living with her mother. Her parents are already divorced, and the mother, on a rainy night, is driving, and she hits and kills a young woman. And so the mother just falls apart, and finally you start to realize, and this is giving a little bit away, but not too much, that she's convinced that now she's going to be punished, that her daughter is going to somehow be taken care of. And the mother just sort of becomes this weird ghost wandering around the house, even though she's just it's her grief. But but the way the stories move, they all move in these surprising directions. So I loved this collection. And I believe she might have a novel coming out in the next year or two. Pemi Aguda, Ghost Roots. Strong recommendation. Yeah. So the next one is kind of an oldie that I didn't know this book existed until my editor, who obviously I think has good taste because he's my editor, he posted about this book on social media. I was like, what is this book? It's called The Lives of Saints by Nancy Lamon, I think is how you say it. It came out in the mid-80s, and he just posted this love letter to this book. I was like, never heard of this. It took a while to find it. Luckily, the Mid-Hudson Library System, is amazing to shout out to the Kindergarten Library, but also the fact that they can get books from... And that's where I got it. And it's a short novel. It's like maybe 150 pages. And if you look at the cover and the title, it looks kind of like if any of you remember those sort of Ann Tyler books from the 80s, like The Accidental Tourist, which... not to talk trash about Ann Tyler, but she's, she's a great writer, but it doesn't, it felt a little, it looked, I was like, and it's called The Lives of Saints. I was, I was surprised. that this was something that my editor recommended until I started reading it. It is such a sharp book. It feels like a... It takes place in New Orleans in the 80s. The narrator is a woman named Louise who's just returned from college in the Northeast. And it's this New Orleans that's both kind of wealthy but also just decrepit and falling apart. And there's... It is really a book... If you love a book that has an amazing voice, this book... It's the beginning of the book. She's at a wedding and everyone's having a nervous breakdown. The bride's weeping. The groom is weeping. All the parents are weeping. People are like drunk and throwing. It's just, but there's this weird deadpan to the voice. You're like, what is happening? And yet it's so smart and strange. And there's this really interesting rhythm and cadence to her writing. It's all these really short chapters. And she is, she basically returned and she's not really sure what to do next. And she's in love with this man named Claude, who's one of the more interesting characters I've read in books. recent fiction who is really warm and smart, but there's this real sadness and damage to him and the self-destructive quality. And so it's really about her sort of this hopeless love story with him as, as this community, their part is sort of whirling and falling apart around them. And it was interesting when, before I read, I was looking at the blurbs on the back and they're like hilarious. And it is, but it also is a deeply sad book. Some things happen that are, there's such tragedy in the book, but I also, I, I love a book that is funny-sad. I think books, I think oftentimes humor and sadness are really close cousins, right? And she is such a funny writer and the voice is such a smart take of this world. And yet... There's some real tragedy and there's real heartache in this story. So I thought that book was really, really well done. I also think because there are moments where really difficult things happen, she never moves to a maudlin place. Like she never goes to, there's never sentimentality. But really it's the rhythm of her sentences. It's the way she uses language. It is the absurdity that just sort of highlights this world. And it's interesting because this story about this community in which everyone knows everyone feels almost old-fashioned like a Jane Austen novel when everyone talking about everyone's business, but then the way the language structures, functions and the way she sort of, the way she's able to compress ideas into like one really surprising, strange image sort of feels really modern. So it's a really, so I thought it was such a, it was such a singular book, weird in all the good ways. So if you like kind of weird, if you like a Joy Williams or someone like that, whose voice I think is amazing, I think this is a book you should read.

SPEAKER_03: 23:57

Well, this was really fun. Thank you for talking us through all these books and taking me to her on the

SPEAKER_00: 24:02

bookshelf. Sure. Really great. I'm so happy to do it. Hopefully, I'll be here again soon with more book rambling. Oh, Tom will be back.

SPEAKER_03: 24:11

He's going to return every quarter to tell us what he's read recently that we should know about. I mean, he calls it book rambling. And honestly, the way he describes the craft, I could just listen to him book ramble all day. I don't know, maybe we can call this segment Book rambling with Tom or Tom's book ramble. I don't know. I was thinking of just calling it Tom's shelf, but sort of a ring to it. Anyways, I'm just glad that he was here in the show and I'm glad you were here to listen to it. By the way, there is a fourth selection. Tom has a fourth selection. It may be even the best one. But I'm going to save it for the premium subscribers at the Jiffy Supreme level. That's right. You can subscribe to the newsletter, upgrade to the Jiffy Supreme. It's an audio exclusive, and it's worth it. Also, I've got Maureen's cozy reading tips over there, too. It's just a bonus for Supremers only, and you can upgrade for$5 a month to$50 a year. I'll put a link in the show notes to upgrade. It's all very exciting. I also have Tom's reading list in the show notes as well. And hey, if you read any of these books I'd love to know what you think. DM me at James Cave on Instagram. Also, DM Tom. Follow Tom on Instagram, too. He's at Tom Grattan, T-O-M-G-R-A-T-T-A-N. I promise you'll be glad you did. It was really fun. Thanks for listening. Oh, one more thing. Here's what else you need to know today. As I mentioned earlier, it's the start of spring. So with the closing of the Cozy Map, I'm very excited. We're starting a new series. We're calling it the Hudson Valley Mud Index of 2025. I mean, they're saying it's the mud season right now. Apparently, the snow is melting, the fresh huts are rising, and the trails are getting soggy throughout the valley. But I'm not seeing too much mud right now. Apparently, we're in a bit of a dry spell. So we're going to take a really close-up look at where the mud is and try to find some of the Hudson Valley's best And I'm also going to be launching our Jiffy Mart soon. This is the online store of the Jiffy. It'll be very exciting. Stay tuned for that. That does it for this episode of the Jiffy Podcast. If you liked it, share it with a friend or someone you love. If you didn't like it, you could share it with your enemy. I think either way, it really helps. Or you could even leave a review if the spirit moves you. I'm just glad you made it this far in the episode all the way to the end. Thanks for listening. Until next time, I'll see you over on the Instagram feed.