Readathon Wrap Up

In preparation for the readathon I took a nap between 9:30 and 11pm, aiming to get up and gather together snacks, drinks, and my TBR. I was really excited about joining in with this readathonbyzoe, because it would be the first time that I would be live tweeting my experience, along with everyone else, and because it would be the first time that I would blog this experience.

I thought live tweeting it would be great, as I would get to enjoy the excitement of others. I knew this would spur me on and encourage me to enjoy it even more.

When I really want to get stuck into a massive reading session, I tend to into what I call ‘book world’. To set up the perfect book world, this is what I will do:

• find a perfect little reading nook, it has to be somewhere comfortable, supported, with the option of being warm, and that will allow me to move around and reposition
• change the lighting to something soft that will remain well lit but gentle for a very long time into help avoid headaches. You also need to ensure the lighting is strong enough to stop you straining your eyes or becoming too cosy and falling asleep.
• I surround myself with a number of drinks (usually a cup of tea, bottle of water, and a drink of juice/can of soda) and snacks – because I don’t want to get up too often to grab these different items.
• I grab my reading paraphernalia and make sure it is close – this means post-it note tabs, highlighters, a pen I can write in, and a post-it note pad for longer notes. Yes, I mark up my books. I purchase most of my books (instead of library borrow) for this reason, because I love to highlight or underline quotes and phrases that I enjoy, and
  I love to be able to add comments. It’s a habit I picked up in University, and now that I write essays and conference papers on a lot of popular books that I read, it’s incredibly important – as I never know when a book will become a topic of a paper.
• Create the perfect atmosphere. I put on youtube, grab headphones if I’m not alone, and find an atmospheric playlist that will fit with what I’m reading. This readathon, I chose spooky soundtracks, with howling wind, pouring rain, and the occasional sound of creaking doors. I love to try and match these to part of the book that I’m in, when possible.

With all this setup, it is time to read.

Book 1: There’s Someone Inside Your House – Stephanie Perkins

00:00 – So, it is the month of Halloween, this readathon was spooky themed, and I was determined to find something that would scare the crap out of me. I decided to start with ‘There’s Somone Inside Your House‘ by Stephanie Perkins. I had heard a lot of mixed reviews about this, and I really didn’t enjoy Anna and the French Kiss but this sounded like a perfect teen slasher, and I love a mixture of horror movie types, including the teen slasher. I hoped that starting that at midnight, in the dark, would really be atmospheric and set the scene for the readathon.

04:00 –  I started to fade around 4 am. So it was time for my first cup of coffee! Rocket fuel!

06:00 – I managed to carry on reading until 6 am, with about 50 pages left, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open and really did not want to ruin the end of my book, so I stopped reading and took a 4 hour nap to refresh for the next part of the readathon.

10:00 – I was still really tired, but climbed back into bed hoping to finish the end of my first book.

11:00 – I loved this! I literally raced through it and enjoyed every part of it. I only put it down to tweet about how great it was, and to add little quotes that I was enjoying. It was a quick and easy read.

Book 2: Birth of a Killer – Darren Shan

12:00 – After making a nice cup of tea and some toast, I decided to start Birth of a Killer by Darren Shan. I’ve had this on my TBR shelf for years, along with the Demonata series, but I’ve always read other things before it. It seemed like a nice, simple read for today, and is about vampires and murders and so on, I thought it would be perfect.

15:00 – Getting some solid reading done…

17:00 –  Around now my BF finished playing his computer game and got extremely bored. He decided to spend the next hour trying to figure out what it is he actually wanted to do with the rest of the day but mentioned the idea of maybe joining in with my readathon. Like most readers, I jumped on the idea that he may want to read a book and ran to my shelves. I put together a quick TBR pile of books that would be short enough for him to read in one or two sittings, and that I thought he would enjoy – or that I was just desperate for him to read – and made him choose from them.

18:00 – Wayne finally chose a book, and we settled with a cup of hot chocolate to get down to our last bits of reading!

19:00 – Finished my book, and now I’m so annoyed. I had book 1 and 2 of the Larten Crespley Saga, and I thought these were the only ones, but it turns out it’s a 4 book series! And the end of the first book was a ‘to be continued’, and the end of the next book… So, even though I wanted to complete the two books, I decided not to read the second one and wait until I could buy the last 2.

Book 3: The Snowman – R L Stine 

19:00 – So The Snowman is a small book and part of the ‘point thriller’ imprint. I always loved these when I was younger and so I thought that this would be a great way to end the readathon.

11:00 – Only one hour left of the readathon and to be honest I was incredibly upset. I finished reading The Snowman and it was awful. It felt like a complete waste of 4 hours of the readathon, and I wish I had picked up any other book from my TBR. I finished it anyway and gave it a 1 star. I had an hour left of the readathon but it didn’t feel worth picking up an entire book with the aim of finishing it.

Book 4: The Language of Thorns – Leigh Bardugo

11:00 – I figured I could spend the last hour reading some of the short stories from this collection, and I’m really glad I did. It was a really nice way to finish off my readathon. While I was finishing this, Wayne decided to try and find a perfect book nook of his own, with lights bright enough to read by but no glare for him…. This was the result. (Wayne in his terrible reading fort).

 

00:00 – Readathon over! And it was really fun. I loved being able to interact with everyone on Twitter, and get to see what they were reading, the atmosphere created was really fun. It was also very nice to have Wayne join the last part with me. I will be doing dewey’s 24-hour readathon on the 21st, so I can’t wait to do this again. Results below!

 

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