This episode marks the one-year anniversary of the Open Book Podcast, so we thought we would do something a little different. We often ask our guests to share their journey as readers, including the earliest books that they read that really made an impression. For this special one-year anniversary episode, we're going to listen to a number of our guests from the past year and their thoughts about the books that made a difference to them when they were young.

Sally Kim is the President and Publisher of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group that includes the flagship imprint originally founded in 1837, with a catalog that boasts authors like JD Salinger, Louisa May Alcott, Malcolm Gladwell, Nelson Mandela and David Sedaris, to name a few. Sally’s journey from intern to editor and then publisher is both fascinating and comprehensive—she is one of the few people in the industry to work at all of the Big 5 publishing houses.

James Daunt is a busy man, leading three iconic booksellers on two continents. In this episode, he shares his journey from founding a single independent bookstore in London in 1990 to rescuing and turning around the two largest bookstore chains in the English-speaking world: Waterstones in the UK and Barnes & Noble in the US.