Welcome to Reality Rain Check
Where Books Meet Real Life
Join us as we dive deep into the stories that matter, exploring themes that resonate with our everyday lives through thoughtful book discussions and honest conversations.
Meet Your Book Club Hosts
Podcast Host
Emily Stanfill Bunnell
Emily is an Air Force wife, Anglophile, homeschooling mom of four kids, book-lover, nature-wanderer, and quiet-seeker. She received her BA in Humanities and MA in Comparative Studies at BYU, which is also where she fell into amazing friendships with Janelle and Ann Marie during a study abroad to England. Her favorite escapes include good dinner parties, talking with her husband, NYT games, writing, traveling, cuddling with her brood, reading books at night (or any stolen moment), playing and listening to music, knitting deformed socks, playing pickleball, going into the wild, and eating delicious food. Her not-so-great escapes: excessive BBC period dramas, napping like a corpse during children's movies, and doom scrolling.
Podcast Host
Janelle Morris
Janelle Morris is affectionately referred to as one-speed-Nelly by her family. She savors her food, loves a stroll outside, and has a hard time finishing a book unless she is listening to it at 1.25 speed. She lives in northern Virginia with her army reservist husband and their three daughters. Every Halloween they don a family themed costume. Janelle is a retired Spanish teacher, a meat smoker, and finds cutting hair strangely therapeutic. She received her BA from BYU in English and her MA from George Wythe College in Leadership Education, where she wrote her thesis on escapism. Podcasting suits her insatiable need to know more, and is her newest favorite escape. Her others are singing while playing the guitar, visiting her sister Shauna, book clubbing, and floating down rivers. She falls in love with life easily, as well as fictitious men and dead poets.
Club Director
Ann Marie Dalton
Ann Marie Dalton is the mother of four rambunctious beasties parading as boys, and she loves them fiercely. She and her husband live in northern Virginia, where she enjoys running in the woods, gardening, cooking, eating all that cooking, reading, and hosting book club events. She has lived on four continents and loves to travel to new places. She received her BA from BYU in Humanities, and her MA in Humanities from Penn State Harrisburg, specializing in Victorian art, culture, and literature. She has a thing for cemeteries and tombstone iconography--the older the better--and loves a good ramble through a Puritan graveyard when in New England. Her favorite escape is being outside in fall weather.