Hello everybody and welcome to Books Unbound, the podcast where we unbind books to get to their hearts with your hosts.

Us! It's us! Sorry, I cheered during your intro. I just got so excited. It's Ariel and

Raylene. And Ruben. We and Rubin and Simon, Raylene's cat. Yeah, just wait. I'm sure he'll

scream at least once. He just woke up from a nap, so. He's got a lot to say.

We are so excited about this episode.

I don't think we've been excited about an episode this much since the last time we did this a year ago.

This is my favorite thing to do, honestly.

The wrap-up gets me so hyped.

There's just so much fun stuff to talk about.

And it's like you forget what happened in January. And then suddenly you stuff to talk about. And it's like, you forget what

happened in January. And then suddenly you have to look back and it's all like, wow, it's there again

in my head. It's so true. So as Raylene just said, we are doing our 20-21 wrap-up, our reading wrap-up.

I can't believe we're, I'm i simultaneously can't believe and i'm also so

glad we are at the end of 2021 right it has somehow been perhaps even worse than 2020

in a lot of ways there have been so many natural disasters in bc like it was on fire. There have been floods. There's been smoke everywhere. It's now ice rain. That's currently happening. So that's another fun addition to my life. Where are the locusts? Am I right? I know. We've all been making that same joke. We're like, it's going to happen. Sorry that you just had to hear that joke again i'm sorry about

that no it makes a lot of sense um yeah i think i think one of the reasons why 2021 felt really hard

for me and i think is probably what a lot of people have felt as well is that for some reason

we all had this beautiful dream that the second 2021 hit it would all be good again life would be normal again

and we all had to slowly over the year like except that nothing was changing like we all just had

and so that kind of was very miserable it was kind of obviously it was not as shocking a year as 2020, but it was more of a sad, slow misery. Yeah, because now it's like, I feel like nobody has hope at this point. It's like, oh, it's not going to be next year. Nothing's going to get better next year. Not probably the year after that either. Like, it's going to be years and years before anything feels quote-unquote normal again,

if it ever does.

I know.

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