Hi everyone, welcome back to Bad on Paper Podcast. I'm Becca Freeman.

And I'm Olivia Mentor.

And today is our first half of 2023 reading preview episode.

Yeah, we have lots of fun people and lots of good recommendations for you today.

We got so much good feedback when we did this in June, so I think we're going to make it a twice

annual thing. And we have five amazing guests who are books to grammars, book talkers,

publishing professionals. We have one author. So very excited to see what books they have to

recommend to us because honestly, for the back half of last year, I very heavily informed my

my TBR pile based on the books that other people came on and recommended.

Me too. My TBR pile right now is like a million miles high, but now it's going to be even higher.

And honestly, it's fun. Well, before we get into it, should we do some highs and lows?

Yes, tell me about your high. My high is that I'm taking some downtime. I'm refilling.

I last episode, if you listened, was feeling quite... I don't know if burned out is the right word?

Maybe burnt out? Yeah. Zonged. And so I have just been taking it easy and that feels really good.

It is not something that I usually let myself do and I'm trying not to have guilt over it.

Yeah. Good. I'm not there yet, but I'm getting there.

That's a positive update. Yeah. How about you? My high is that we bought a house.

So we're home at home now. You closed on it though. It's official. The last two times you've

talked about it has been unofficial. Yes, it is official. We closed on the house. We own the home.

Olivia. It's a thing. It's a thing. It's really weird. You were adulting so hard.

I know. We were driving away from the house and I was like, what if this burns down?

I was like, oh, that's just my responsibility to deal with in that case. You know, these are the

...