May old podcast formats be forgot! We're back after a brief hiatus with a new vision for YWAM going forward. We hope you'll enjoy this return to our roots as much as we enjoyed recording it. As always, we've got reading updates to share, as well as some book-haul chronicles and a bit of general media deliberating for the more reading averse of our listeners. Thank you all for seeing us through to another year of podcasting. We'll do our best to make this our best year yet.

Life, uhhh... finds a way... to delay our recording this podcast. We're back now, however briefly, to discuss Samanta Schweblin's NBA winning short story collection Seven Empty Houses, as well as lay out our plans for the rest of this year's reading! We're entering the final stretch!

This week's episode concerns discussions of mass illness; if that sounds too heavy, just be glad we didn't go with our first plan. Join us as we go over Veronique Tadjo's In the Company of Men, as well as our own recent reading achievements and some programing changes for the near future.

Cooler weather, a new job, and a school year in full swing shouldn't cause us to lose sight of the spookiness of the Halloween season! We got a bit more of that than we bargained for with this week's reading challenge, Thomas Olde Heuvelt's Hex.

Read up, me hearties! This week we're going in depth on Eiichiro Oda's pirate adventure phenomenon One Piece. And yes, one of your hosts has a new job, but he just wants you to know that he still loves this podcast very much.

There's plenty of stuff going on in your hosts lives right now, not to mention our scheduled discussion of Shruti Swamy's acclaimed short story collection 'A House is a Body.' Any of that would have sustained an episode on its own. And yet, something tells me this will go down as "the one about the pillow romance."

As hurricane winds assail the southeast, Elizabeth and Thomas have shouldered once again through illness and technical difficulties to bring you a discussion of Miya Kazuki's hit light novel, Ascendance of a Bookworm.

YWAM heads to Sweden for a discussion of Let the Right One In, John Lindqvist's hit vampire novel and film. We too will be staying out of the sunlight during this oppressive heat-wave, opting instead to catch up on our respective fantasy romance and pirate series.

Work is rearing it's head back into the lives of your hosts, with a return of students for one and some interesting prospects for the other. Meanwhile, on the reading front, Virginia Woolf's modernist classic Mrs. Dalloway poses some surprising challenges.

The heat is on, in a very real sense, with the latter half of 2023 getting underway. The two hosts had themselves some vacation goings-on to get into, before diving into all the books they have, and have not, finished.