Fall 2013 Readathon

Today is the twice-yearly celebration of reading known as Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon. I’ve lost track of how many of these I’ve participated in the last five years that I’ve been blogging, but it’s been most of them. It’s something I always look forward to not so much because it forces me to set aside a day to read–I can do that without tremendous difficulty–but because it makes me actually read on the day that I’ve set aside. (Please tell me I’m not the only person to look forward to a free Saturday to read who ends up spending the bulk of the day watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer or reading inflammatory articles on the Internet.)

As is typical for me, I’ve not done much to plan, other than to pick up extra snacks at the grocery store this week. I’ve always got lots of books on hand. Often, I choose one long, exciting book to spend the day with, but I haven’t even done that this year. I’m close to finishing Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett, so I’ll start with that. Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte is next up in my stack, but I also have to read Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis for my book group next week, so I may decide to read that. However, after PinF, I may be too emotionally shattered for anything other than Auntie Mame or something by Georgette Heyer. (Both options I happened to find on a book shopping trip with Simon and Thomas yesterday.)

As usual, I’ll be donating 10 cents per page read to a literacy charity. Once the readathon is over, I’ll select a project (or two) from Donors Choose.

I don’t expect I’ll make many updates here, but we’ll see. Instead, I’ll focus on Twitter for updates. But at the very least, I’ll add the final results on Sunday, so check back in if you want to know what I actually did read. And if you’re joining in, have a great readathon!

Final Results: I ended up confining my reports during the day to Twitter, but I wanted to share the full run-down here. I finished Pawn in Frankincense early in the day. Then I turned to Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte. I closed out the day on Saturday with The Bones of Paris by Laurie King. (That book only came out a month ago, but one of the used bookstores I visited Friday had a $10 copy. Ordinarily, I’d say that’s too much for a used book, but not when there’s still a hold list at the library.) I woke up before the readathon was done on Sunday morning and started Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat.

During the 24 hours I read for 11 hours and 45 minutes. My page count was 753 pages, meaning that I’ll be donating $75.30 to a literacy project at Donors Choose.

Some of you may remember that my usual readathon approach is to read a single long book, rather than several shorter ones. It was nice to check off multiple books from my TBR list, but for me, this approach was no better than my usual one-book method. I think the key is to read something engrossing, be it long or short. That’s especially important late in the day, when my attention is likely to flag. Agnes Grey, for example, was fine in the morning and midday, but I was glad to be reading The Bones of Paris late in the day. If I have a long, exciting book near the top of my TBR in the spring, I’ll happily go back to my usual approach.