Hello everyone and welcome to Books Unbound, the podcast where we Unbind Books to get to their hearts with your hosts, us.

It's Ariel and Raylene.

And it's 2026.

Yes, it is.

Now, our beginning of the year episode came out in 2026, but it was now recorded at

26.

So this is the first episode recorded in the new year with new energy.

You can tell we're practically brand new people.

It's, I mean, look at these headphones.

Hey, everybody admire my new headphones.

They look so good for our audio listeners. Raleen has worn these like, well, it's not quite

navy. There were more like a navy teal. Yeah. Colored headphones for years and years. And today has,

is debuting lilac headphones they're very beautiful

and it's a personal achievement of mine i i had nothing to do i want to say i had nothing to do

with it but i think my subtle shaming of your other headphones maybe did expedite the process a

little bit yeah you know what else helped though is that the

like ear part, like the foam on my other headphones on one side is just completely falling out.

Like not even a little bit being held in anymore. And so I was like, this is, I'm better than this,

you know, like I'm going to keep wearing them. I'm going to use them for the gym and stuff, but I'm like, I can do better than that.

Yeah. And these are so cute and they were on sale at Costco. So I just had to. They are perfect. And before you think that I'm just like hating on Raylene's style or something, the reason I hated them is because no piece of equipment has ever caused just more problems

recording this podcast, not microphones, not cameras, not computers. All of our problems came

from Raylene's headphones because they would like, they were, they didn't understand it.

...