Hello everybody and welcome to Books Unbound, the podcast where we Unbind books to get to their hearts with your hosts, me. It's Ariel and...

Me, Rubin. I mean, Raylene.

Ha, ha, ha, ha. Welcome to our 2020 wrap-up episode. This is very exciting. We were looking at our calendar,

as you can understand, you know, trying to map out what we were going to do at the end of

the year, and we realized we should have some fun and we should do a big old wrap-up.

So today we're going to tackle everything, Raylene.

We're going to talk about our top five books, our best rereads, the mashed potato books we

conquered and the mashed potato books we created.

Raylene is going to talk us through her cat books that she read this year.

I'm going to tell you how many books I started and didn't finish.

We're going to talk about our favorite covers and we're going to go over some stats.

Also, we're going to look at just a little shout out about our favorite books or movies and shows that we saw this year because there's a lot of good stuff.

Yeah, that's important too.

And also, full disclosure, we're recording this on December 20th.

We just want to put that out there.

So everybody knows that we might read more books. It's possible that we could read more books in the next 11 days, but we have to record it now to get it out on time. Exactly. I'm really glad that. I'm really glad that you said that really, and because I'm, like, riddled with anxiety over here that I'm going to read more books and that one of them will become my new favorite or have an amazing cover or whatever. And I'm just like, it's okay. It's just a podcast episode. I can tell them about it in the new year if I really need to talk about this book. It's true. It's true. You can do that. You have that power. All right. Well, I mean, I guess the place to start is the top five, right? Or should we say that till the end? I mean, I don't think it's going to be much of a surprise. That's true. You're not wrong about that. We may as well start with that, you know? I think that's the most, possibly the most uninteresting part of this

whole thing, because everybody probably knows already because I have talked about these books so many times.

Yeah, they're not going to be shocked by it. I really love to hear from you before we jump in. Are you

ranking them one to five, five to one? Or these are just the top five? These are the top five.

I mean, if I really had to rank them, I probably could. But I don't really know if I want to. I don't know what if I want to. I think I know which one is my number one, though. That's the only one I know. So, okay, I'll just jump right in. I'll save number one for last. Okay. Okay. So my top five in random order, The Secret History by Donna Tart. I'm so excited to hear that song. Nobody's surprised, but I freaking loved that book. It was so good. I still think about it. Like, randomly, it'll just pop into my head, and I'm like, oh, good book. Good book. The next one is the Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. Oh, that makes me happy because I feel responsible partly. You got me to read that. Like you chose that for me. I probably wouldn't have read it this year. Like I didn't read a lot of other fantasy books this year. Yeah. This was like The One and it was so good. So I'm really glad you pushed me to read that one.

I was so surprised by that one. I didn't think I was going to love it as much as I did.

Next up, another orange book, Tiny Beautiful Things by Sharon's Green.

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