Hello and welcome to Books Unbound, the podcast where we unbind books to get to their hearts with your host, me, Raylene, and...

Me! It's Ariel. Woohoo! What is up? Woo! So, as you will obviously notice, I'm hosting this episode, which you know what that means,

folks. Next week we're having a special guest episode. Noel Gallagher will be on the

podcast, which we've been kind of teasing over on our Patreon a little bit. When we do live shows,

we're like, yeah, I swear we'll have her on soon. But then it just hasn't been working out yet. So it's going to happen. We're going to record with her shortly. And I'm really excited for that. So you guys have that to look forward to next week. But also, before we dive into this episode, I had a little, not really an announcement per se, but I think it was either last week or the week before, we had talked about

the fact that I've bought many, many books this year. And I said that I promised, yeah, I promised

that I would look into it and get you guys a number. So what I did is I went back through our

website book list. I started in January. I counted every single book that I knew

I had just purchased. Then I looked at my shelves as well to see which ones I hadn't mentioned

on the podcast and which ones that I had already read that wouldn't have been, you know,

like I just did everything I could and I think I've come to a very solid number. I'm so glad that you did this. I am so

excited. I didn't want to like forget about it and like let it go, because I feel like this is

very important. So what would be your guess? What would be your guess of how many books I purchased

between January 1st and now, August 15th at the time of recording this. Well, okay, just a little bit of

backstory to how I'm thinking about this. When we started doing this podcast two years ago,

we were, you know, we were brainstorming. How do we want to structure it? What segments do we want to

have in there? And we were like, let's do a book haul segment. So every episode, we would do a book haul. But then we talked about

how we were feeling really pressured to buy books. And we were like, it kind of felt forced.

Like if we have a book, we want to talk about it. But if we don't, it's kind of awkward. So

let's cut that segment out.

So then for a while, we just completely cut that segment out. And every few months, we would

have a couple of books to haul or whatever. I feel like it was the end of last year, beginning

...