Hello and welcome to Best Laid Plans.

This is your host Sarah Hart Unger and this is the podcast where we talk all things planning

and planning adjacent.

Today we are going to do a summer reading focused episode since we are in a little bit of a

planning lull, I think in the summer the planning energy isn't quite as high, although I have to

say I am very excited to be beginning the second half of 2024 in my Hobonichi of Beth and my Aaron Condren life planner and am just feeling some

kind of fresh start energy from the second half of the year. But otherwise, we'll be back to more

planner reviews and really more productivity focused content later. Today, I thought we could take

a deep dive on summer reading and hobbies and fun to some

extent. So we will be talking about making time for reading, different practices I've tried to

track reading and maximize my own reading pleasure, and then I will also talk about my favorite

books so far this year in 2024. I don't read hundreds of books or

anything like that, but I've read some great things this year, both in the fiction and nonfiction

world, and so I'll share some of my top picks so far. All right, so first let's back up and

talk a little bit about my personal history with reading,

because I'm sure some of you can probably identify with having different habits around reading

as a younger child, as a young adult, and then later on if that applies to you.

So as a kid, in the 80s and 90s, I would literally just get stacks of paper books, of course, and

like devour them. I didn't read highbrow stuff, lots of babysitters club, lots of Judy Blum,

lots of series, but I just loved reading. To be fair, it was the 80s and 90s, so maybe there

just wasn't that much else to do, but I mean, we had Nintendo. We had computer games and I still

loved my books, the act of getting in bed, getting all cozy, maybe on a stormy afternoon,

...