Welcome to Episode 573 of Live Happy Now.

Summer is finally here, which means it's time for pool days, road trips, and our favorite summer reading.

I'm your host Paula Phelps, and today I'm joined by Senior Happiness Editor and Unofficial Keeper of the Live Happy Library, Chris Libby. We're kicking

off our brand new Live Happy summer reading program, and Chris is sitting in with me to share

what's coming up over the next six weeks, how you can join in, and a few surprises we lined up

for our fellow book lovers. Let's dive in. Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. You know,

it's been a minute since we've had you on the air. It has. I'm very excited, especially about this topic, so I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Well, you are a book guy, so it makes perfect sense for you and I to sit down and talk about that. And obviously, the reason that you're joining me today is that we've been working on this summer

reading program. And I knew you and I were even talking about doing something like this last year. We just didn't get it done. And so I'm really glad that we're finally able to launch this. So I was curious because I know you're a reader now. Were you a reader when you were a little kid? Yes. Yes. I was. and I am, you know, road trips when you were a kid.

We, unlike, I was, and I am, you know, road trips when you were a kid.

We, unlike our kids today, we don't have screens, we don't have phones, so all we had was

books. But yeah, I was a big reader. One of my favorite types of books or genres was to

choose your own adventure. And so, yeah, those were always really fun for me. And so, yeah, growing up,

I read a lot of books. How about you? Oh, yeah. I was a total nerd. Like, all I did all summer

was read books and ride my bike. So the highlight of my summer was pretty much the reading program

at the library, because then you got a certificate at the end for reading the most books.

So that's really what made me want to do something like this.

I just have so much memories related to being able to spend my summer reading.

And that's kind of what got us started talking about,

and then we talked with the whole Live Happy crew,

and it made sense to put together a summer program that was just a little bit different than our usual podcast episodes.

We do talk a lot about authors on the podcast. So one thing we had to consider is how do we make

the summer reading program interviews different from our regular episodes? I would say the biggest

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