Hello, I'm David Kern.

I'm Heidi White.

And I'm Tim McIntosh.

And you're listening to a very special bonus shorter episode of Close Reads, a podcast for the Incurable Reader on which we choose books for 2020 on Close Reads.

Are you ready for this?

I'm ready, David.

Are you ready, Heidi? I'm so, David. Are you ready, Heidi?

I'm so ready.

I was born ready for this.

This is exciting.

I am going to get into the mud wrestling ring on this particular podcast special.

You're ready to go?

All right.

Okay.

So because we don't have a ton of time, we have about a half hour to do this.

We have literally 33 minutes to do this. We didn't want it to be too long anyway. I'm going to just quickly share what we're doing. We have a spreadsheet that I created that took a bunch of things that you all requested, and by you all, I mean the listeners, as well as things that have been being tossed around, you know, on the show, on the Facebook page and all that for a number of years. And then also things that Heidi and Tim and I each have suggested. And I've made a spreadsheet

out of it. And we're going to use this spreadsheet to make some choices. So we have roughly

17 or so books that we need to winnow down to seven or eight. What I did was there's 52 weeks in a year.

I subtracted four to give us some flex weeks. You should, you know, we have to take some time off

or whatever. Then I subtracted four weeks because one thing we want to do is we want to have

four weeks dedicated to short stories this year. So I don't know if that's going to be four consecutive weeks, a break between books.

We haven't decided that yet.

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