Hello everybody and welcome to Books Unbound, the podcast where we unbind books to get to their hearts with your host's us. It's Ariel. Alene. Yes. Yes.

I'm excited. I'm feeling good. I, uh, okay, let's just rip this band-aid right off for my visual viewers out there. I'm trying another new background.

Oh, God.

It's funny because I can't see what it is. Like it just looks like you're recording the same.

So I'm really curious.

It looks the exact same to you, Raylene, because we're back to at my desk.

But I flipped the camera from it used to be on my left.

And now it's on my right.

And that's really changed everything.

So I've done a little finagagling kind of shoved it behind my

desk um i also have this beautiful vase of flowers that i bought a couple days ago and good lord

they're beautiful they're so beautiful and i was like you know what i don't even care if it's a little bit awkward. I'm dragging these into frame. So there's just like, it's my head and then just a bunch of flowers. But what I didn't think about was while we've been setting up and like chatting before hitting record is I can really smell them. It's so nice. Like I guess I'm just never this close to flowers for more than a couple

of minutes or whatever. And it's a good life. I know the other day I was at my mom's house and I was

just like sitting on the couch and I was like, why does it smell so glorious? And then I realized she had a

whole bunch of flowers on a table. And I was like, wow, that's true. It's so beautiful.

I'm really excited to tell you about my adventures in reading this week. Like very genuinely had such a fun, weird little book week. Oh, that's awesome.

I've had a weird week, but not in a book-related way. So I'm excited to tell you. Okay. Maybe let's

start there. That's an intriguing

place to go. What happened? I've just like had a couple of strange viewing experiences this past

week, which is going to be really fun. Movies? Kind of. So I'll start you off. Let me take you back

to last Wednesday. On Wednesday, I went and saw something incredible, something strange, something, who knows

why it was even there, but I went and saw with a couple of my friends, Shrek the musical

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