Can you, what are we doing, Renee? My brain stopped. What are we doing? What are you waiting for me to do? Start the show. Start talking. I literally, my brain just stopped. Oh, God.

Welcome to Book Talk, etc.

A podcast bound to grow your TBR.

I'm Tina.

And I'm Renee.

And this is a conversational podcast about books and more from two Midwest mood readers who are easily distracted by new releases.

And this week, we let our patrons pick our reads.

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Hey, Renee. Hey, Tina. How are you? Love and life, man. It's Thanksgiving's over. It's the morning after Thanksgiving. I'm in my Christmas PJs already. I don't want to see a singular pumpkin or turkey around the house. I'm fully

into Christmas because I'm one of those that has to keep my Thanksgiving decorations up through

Thanksgiving because we hosted. It just felt right. And now today we can finally lean into Christmas and I'm

excited. Okay, good. Yeah, we had a good Thanksgiving. Lots of card playing. Do you, do you guys play cards when you get together or like board games or anything? No, I wish we did, but we don't. Okay. Yeah, we did. And the card game we played was 31. And I won one of the games. And we played with, yeah, we played with quarters. Everybody has,

you can be played with a dollars, but no one had enough. So it was, everybody has three quarters. And I won. I love winning. I would have loved winning if it was a penny. I don't care. Oh, I'm the same way. I could truly play card games, board games, drinking games, whatever we're playing, I am in and I could play all night. That's why I wanted to teach. I was trying to teach Lily to play Yatsi last week because I love Yatsi. I do too. So her, you know, the attention span's not quite there. But she was learning to count on the dice and stuff. So it's not a total loss. But like she lost interest by the end. And I'm like, no, no, mommy's winning. I got Yatzy. I got Yatzy and a bonus Yatzi. I can't quit. So it was a very, very big day at our house. I didn't even, I didn't know that you loved Yotsie. And I love Yotsie. I love, like I said, I love board games too. And just a couple weeks ago, I gave Darren three choices. It was like, I don't know if it was like Friday night.

We didn't have anything to do. I was like, let's play something. Your choice is Yatsy, rummy, or, oh, Scrabble. And he was like, not Scrabble. I knew you were going to say Scrabble. I love Scrabble. Do you like Scrabble? Yes, I do love Scrabble. Can we play Scrabble next time I see you? Yes. Yeah, that would be so fun. Oh, my God. I love it. So anyway, board games aside, how has your reading been? Because it's been a little while since we have recorded.

Reading's been good. I'm actually pretty excited now. Jonathan went back to work after

paternity leave. We had a lovely, I'm so glad we got to spend so much time together. Like,

we're very thankful that we were able to use our PTO and, you know, have that time. But I was telling

him, having him home at night really affected my

reading. And I am fully recognizing that now, part of the reason why I'm able to listen slash read so many books is because my husband works a different shift than I do. So I was like, wow, with you home, it's kind of taken, my reading has taken a hit. It's not Cassia, the baby. It's you. So not in a bad way, but just, you know, he's home, so I want to hang out.

Right.

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