Category: 48-Hour Book Challenge

How quickly my grandiose plans burst like a bubble! I’m in the homestretch of the 48-Hour Book Challenge and so far have only completed one book and written one review! But I’m still having a great time and still enjoying the challenge.

And, to be honest, I’m used to getting approximately one-tenth of my goals done. But I still have fun shooting for the goals.

In fact, I just noticed today that this year, the 48-Hour Book Challenge is happening less than a week from my 48th birthday! That should be significant somehow. Perhaps I should do another challenge on my birthday to celebrate! (And next year, I will actually be 48 on the weekend of the 48-Hour Book Challenge. Oo, and it will be the 8th annual. I will have to think of a way to celebrate.) Oh, I think I know what I’ll do! Regardless of the number of hours I read, instead of donating $1 per hour to Book People Unite, I will donate $48. It seems fitting.

So, although I’m not going to reach the 30 hours I hit last year, my stats still aren’t bad. I’ll list all the books and partial books I’ve read at the end, but so far I’ve spent 10 hours and 10 minutes reading, 4:40 blogging, 3:25 listening, and 1:30 networking, for a total of 19 hours and 45 minutes.

Since I finish up at 11:30 pm tonight, I won’t be able to hit 30 hours, but the only thing I have scheduled today is a nap. I’m afraid I really do need the nap, because now I’m on the 24th day of that vestibular migraine. I hasten to add that it isn’t a real bad one, with more dizziness than headache. But I do get a few weird symptoms as I get more tired, and the headache does increase, and I’m going to let myself fall asleep. But I absolutely AM going to finish Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein today! It is sooo good! And I hope to write a review about it, too.

I hope today to spend most of that time on the computer, writing and posting reviews. And this week, instead of watching a movie while I do my weekly ironing, I plan to listen to an audiobook.

One thing I find very amusing happened. Remember how I had to chauffeur my son to Prom in DC? And I was going to listen to an audiobook while doing it? Remember how the rules state you can only use ONE audiobook? So I couldn’t just decide to switch books?

Well, I picked out an audiobook early in the week with 14 CDs, so I wouldn’t run out of audiobook to listen to. It looked like a nice love story about a music therapist, and I loved that there were original songs at the start of every section. What I didn’t realize was that it would turn into a lesbian love story. Now I didn’t actually mind that — I think that reading is a good way to get a different perspective. And this was a very different perspective from mine. And we all found the description of the woman’s first kiss from her girlfriend quite amusing (lots of explosions and burning going on). I turned the sound low and tried to get them to talk among themselves. But when she started in describing her first time having lesbian sex — well, I decided that was definitely NOT appropriate listening for driving my son to Prom! So that cut down my listening time a bit.

Anyway, I’m having lots of fun with this, as always. I’m not sure I’ll get around to visiting the other participants’ blogs today, but definitely hope to do some visiting later this week.

Happy reading!

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I’m still gearing up for the 48 Hour Book Challenge, coming next weekend! Huzzah!

Now, awhile back I posted about how I was going to catch up on reviews during Memorial Day weekend and then turn in all the books I hadn’t reviewed.

Did I succeed? Well, no. I didn’t have the heart to turn in all the books I hadn’t reviewed. However, I did make good headway, getting five books reviewed. And I turned in a whole mess of picture books that I decided I wasn’t crazy enough about to review.

There are ten books left sitting here that I definitely want to review. (This is much better than 23.) I still have this coming week before the 48-hour Book Challenge to get them reviewed. But this amount is not unmanageable. I figure when the Challenge comes, if I haven’t finished with back reviews, after every book read, I will review the book I read, and then review one of the books from the To-Be-Reviewed pile, if I haven’t yet gotten it down to nothing.

Now, I’ve got some other grand plans brewing. First, Mother Reader has an unreasonable prejudice against picture books. Why do I think this is unreasonable? Because if the 48-Hour Book Challenge is by time, not number of books, and not pages, well, why not allow picture books? What have they ever done to be excluded?

Now, I also have a big pile of picture books sitting here. My goal this coming week (besides making headway on those other reviews) is to read all of the picture books waiting. Those I’m not crazy about, I will just return to the library. Those I love, I will write a review now, before I can be accused of using the Book Challenge time on *gasp* a Picture Book! That’s the plan anyway!

Let’s see. I’ve already gotten it down to 14 picture books waiting in the wings. Of course, if I don’t get all of them dealt with, I can always keep going after the challenge.

Now another goal I’m shooting for — an impossible goal but one I hope to at least make progress toward — is, when I go to ALA Annual Conference at the end of June, to turn in all my library books. Well, to make that slightly more possible, all the library books I haven’t actually begun. (This will exclude a whole pile of nonfiction.) During the 48-Hour Book Challenge, I think I will work toward quantity. Now, among all the other piles, there are lots of short books I have set aside thinking I will quickly read them some day. These are, mind you, longer than picture books, but still short. So I will attempt to focus on these during the 48HBC, and try to get every book I read also reviewed. We will see how I do.

But until Friday, let’s see how many picture books I can return to the library, either read or read and reviewed.

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Hooray! Mother Reader has announced this year’s 48-Hour Book Challenge! It will happen the weekend starting June 8. This time it’s not happening on my mother’s birthday weekend (the weekend before), nor is it happening on my birthday weekend (the weekend after). Now, it IS happening the weekend of my son’s prom, and I may need to be the chauffeur. But they will probably just have to listen to an audiobook on the way to prom!

Now, I noticed that I’m not quite as excited about the 48-Hour Book Challenge as I usually am. I think there are two reasons why:

1. I had a stroke almost a year ago. I was in the hospital for 10 days and then had lots and lots of days, over the course of the year, where I didn’t have the energy to do much besides read. Now thinking of spending a whole day or two reading doesn’t sound nearly as luxurious as it did a year ago. Instead, it makes me think of feeling bad!

Solution? Well, I’ll just have to change that association, won’t I? Better read for two solid days when I’m feeling good, right?

2. As a consequence of all that time to read, but low energy to do other things — like write reviews — I’m way, way behind on writing reviews, so really I should spend the time writing reviews rather than actually reading — and that would turn it into a chore instead of fun.

Solution? I am about to start a 3-day weekend with nothing scheduled. My son’s going to his Dad’s. Why not use this weekend to catch up on reviews? I will make the resolution that any books I have read but I haven’t finished reviewing by Monday, I will turn back in to the library *gasp* without reviewing! Then I will make a resolution from here on out to review books by the following Saturday after I read them. (This is writing the reviews, not necessarily posting them.) If I don’t review them by then, I will return them, un-reviewed. I will also plan to review every book I read during the 48-Hour Book Challenge.

I’ll let you know how this goes, come Monday! The key will be that I will need to write the reviews of my favorite books first, or I won’t have the heart to turn them back in. There are some good books sitting there waiting, so I really hope I can accomplish this! I can think of it as a dry run for the 48HBC.

Finally, one more thing about this year’s 48HBC. It’s also a read-a-thon, with donations going to Book People Unite, collecting money for Reading Is Fundamental. I’ll be sponsoring myself at $1.00 per hour. If you’d like to sponsor me, let me know in the comments or e-mail me at sondy at sonderbooks.com. I will definitely be posting how many hours I read.

So, the excitement is building, and I’m going to prepare by doing my pre-challenge on the holiday weekend. I had been planning to get out and walk in a garden during the weekend, but then I saw the temperature forecast. I think I will happily stay indoors, writing reviews! I will post how many I finish on the weekend. In fact, I’ll even fess up and admit that my piles here have 14 full-length books and 9 picture books. That’s doable, right? Right?

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I hit 30 hours, 30 minutes! Woo-hoo!

Here’s the breakdown:

Reading: 15 hours, 25 minutes
Blogging: 9 hours, 5 minutes
Networking: 4 hours, 50 minutes
Listening: 1 hour, 10 minutes

I read 1,606 pages and finished 8 books.

I wrote 9 reviews, posted 3 blog posts about the challenge, and posted 5 quotations on Sonderquotes, for a total of 7,858 words. I got one of those reviews posted.

I confess, as the time went on, I started reading short books so I’d finish more! For nonfiction, I read a bunch of individual chapters, but here are the books I finished. They were all excellent:

The Great Wall of Lucy Wu, by Wendy Wan-Long Shang
The Seven Towers, by Patricia C. Wrede
The Silver Bowl, by Diane Stanley
Squish, Super Amoeba, by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm
Zita the Spacegirl, Far From Home, by Ben Hatke
Freddie Ramos Springs into Action, by Jacqueline Jules
Freddie Ramos Zooms to the Rescue, by Jacqueline Jules
The Periodic Table: Elements with Style, by Adrian Dingle

With Networking, I didn’t plan to do so much, but got hooked into the YASaves conversation, and then couldn’t bring myself to stay away.

In fact, after writing that sentence, when I went to find the link, I then got hooked into Cecil Castellucci’s fantastic article on the Los Angeles Review of Books blog. This is an awesome quotation: “Putting the right book in the right kid’s hands is kind of like giving that kid superpowers.”

I did not get even close to caught up on writing reviews. But I did make good headway, and I’m hoping that I got into the groove so that more reviews will follow quickly.

What did I learn? I really do love to read! What a fabulous way to spend a weekend! I’m going to have to make more time for it.

What I’ll do next time: Get more sleep BEFORE the 48-hour Book Challenge. Needing sleep was my downfall as far as getting any more reading done, and I was tired the whole time. At the end of the challenge, I planned to take a short nap, and then get my weekend errands done. I slept for 4 1/2 hours! So now I’ll be a bit behind all week, but it was worth it!

Good Morning! I’m off to a great start on the second day of the 48-Hour Book Challenge!

I decided that Tim having the SAT today was absolutely perfect — I took the day off work, and got up early — all the better to read! Of course, I listened to an audiobook in the car. The one I was listening to was the third CD of Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese. It was kind of funny — they were talking about a doctor facing a difficult delivery of twins. Very specific. And then the doctor decided to crush the baby’s brain in order to get it out. Very graphic.

Of course, I apologized to my son for the unfortunate selection. He understood that I was listening so as not to have a break in the 48-Hour Book Challenge. He said it was no problem — that would probably be the selection they would have him analyze on the SAT.

Of course, that made me laugh! That would be the day! A selection involving a woman’s reproductive system and crushing the brain of a baby? Yeah, that would go over great on the SAT! So I sent him off to the test with a laugh. (I do love that kid’s sense of humor!)

Today I actually don’t have any more commitments at all except picking Tim up from the SAT at 12:45. Oh, and I need to call my Mom to wish her a Happy 70th (!) Birthday! But otherwise, my biggest challenge will be staying awake to read. I might give in and take a short nap — the better to stay up late tonight.

I did finish one book yesterday, and absolutely loved it — The Great Wall of Lucy Wu, by Wendy Shang. I did write a review, and promise to post it after I have written five reviews. Here are my stats so far:

Hours Reading: 5 hours, 45 minutes
Hours Blogging: 3 and a half
Time Listening: 20 minutes
Time Networking: 30 minutes

Grand total: 10 hours, 5 minutes

Not bad for 18 hours into the challenge. If I took 8 hours to sleep and shower and eat and do my writing, I hope that tomorrow, with going to church, I can keep it down to less than 10 hours — I want to hit 30 hours. It will be a challenge, but I might be able to do it….

Book stats are 418 pages read, one book finished. (I read a lot of excerpts from nonfiction.)

I’ve written 4 reviews, posted 4 quotes, and written one other blog post, for a total of 4,814 words.

Now, I am not writing reviews as quickly as I will need to if I want to make significant progress on getting caught up. I will have to start making them shorter. However, I am enjoying writing them, and I am writing them, so it’s all good. I have begun reading The Seven Towers, by Patricia C. Wrede, and I’m loving that, too.

This is proving to be a truly beautiful weekend! Read on!

Woo-hoo! I am now officially beginning this year’s 48-Hour Reading Challenge at 4:30 on Friday!

Mother Reader is the blogger who sponsors the Challenge. This is her sixth year doing the 48-Hour Book Challenge, and my third year participating. As I said in my round-up last year, this is the time when the guilt is totally reversed — You get to feel guilty if you’re NOT reading! 🙂 Woo-hoo!

The rules are most reasonable and quite lovely. As Mother Reader says, this is “that weekend extravaganza that lets you say, “Back off, I’m reading.”

In fact, that statement makes me think I need to point out what our theme song should be:

Seriously, I love the 48-Hour Book Challenge and look forward to it all year. This year, because I have to take my son to the SAT tomorrow morning (while playing an audiobook), I actually have both Friday and Saturday off. So I am planning to stretch myself and see if I can hit the 30 hour mark this year.

I’m afraid I’m going to be unspiritual and skip my small group Bible study tonight. We’re even doing a book study, but I will be so close to 30 hours… I won’t, however, skip church Sunday morning, so that’s the main “interruption.” If I’m not lingering to talk so much after church, this is why!

Of course, I’d meant to get started much earlier today. But I decided I really should run some errands first. Had to buy snacks, right? And then it seemed like a good idea to take a nap. It’s going to be tricky going all the way until 4:30 on Sunday, since the big question will be whether or not I can skip my Sunday afternoon nap. I have my doubts! That will give me a few hours left on Sunday to get ready for a long week’s work — I’ll be working the next 6 days.

Now, the point of the 48-Hour Book Challenge is to pick a 48-hour time block on the designated weekend and read and blog about books as much as possible in that time. Blogging time counts.

This year, I’m way, way behind on writing reviews. There are stacks of books which I have read this year, and very much want to review, but simply haven’t done it yet. So my goal for this weekend is not quite as much fun as spending 30 hours reading. I want to spend the majority of my time writing reviews. I want to get within reach of catching up on that backlog.

Now, I probably won’t post all the reviews I write today. It works well for me to write them ahead and then post one a day. When I post the reviews, I add in links to related reviews and things like that and a link between the blog and the main site, www.sonderbooks.com. But I think I will keep track of my progress by posting a review after every five reviews I write. And I simply have to get some books read, or where’s the fun in the challenge? So I’ll definitely be reading some books, too. In fact, I think the key to reading instead of sleeping is to find one of those books that I can’t put down if I wanted to. So I hope I can pick a good one!

Here I am enjoying the 48-Hour Book Challenge last night:

What a lovely weekend! Though it goes to show that even with a whole weekend set aside for it, I barely make a dent in my piles of books to read and books to review. This weekend, I also made some progress blogging about the upheaval in my life this month. It’s book related, since the main event was losing my job as a librarian, right? Anyway, I also did some blogging on Sonderjourneys, Sonderblessings, and Sonderquotes. Besides posting reviews on this blog, I also posted the reviews on www.sonderbooks.com, my main website where I have links to related books and have all my reviews organized by type of review.

My 48 hours are up. Here are my stats:

Reading: 11 hours, 35 minutes
Listening to an audiobook: 3 hours, 50 minutes
Blogging: 9 hours, 20 minutes
Networking: 1 hour, 55 minutes (I did not count the 3 hours I spent at the DC Kidlit Book Club, though!)

Total: 26 hours, 40 minutes

The key this year was reading The Sky Is Everywhere through the night until I finished it. If I had been as caught up in The Red Pyramid, maybe I could have done it both nights.

I was disappointed that I only finished 3 books. But I did get lots of reading time in, so I can’t really complain. And I always read nonfiction books a chapter at a time, rotating my many piles of books. So any reading time makes progress!

I did review all the books I finished, plus one book from the backlog. I would probably have to spend more time on reviewing to take care of that backlog altogether. But it was nice to finish the weekend without being further behind on books to review.

Here are the books I finished. I was already on page 234 of The Red Pyramid, but the rest I began this weekend:

The Red Pyramid, by Rick Riordan
The Birthday Ball, by Lois Lowry
The Sky Is Everywhere, by Jandy Nelson

The other book I reviewed was a fantastic tribute to librarians:
This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, by Marilyn Johnson

The audiobook I’m listening to and totally enjoying is The Princess Plot, by Kirsten Boie

However, even though the total finished is low, here are some other interesting stats:

Pages read: 995
Words written on blogs: 6,356

I read lots and lots of partial books. First, during my daily devotional time, I read a page out of several devotional books:

The Bible
Journey to the Heart, by Melody Beattie
The Book of Common Prayer
Praying God’s Words Day by Day, by Beth Moore
Grace Notes, by Philip Yancey
Meditations to Heal Your Life, by Louise Hay
More Language of Letting Go, by Melody Beattie

The other nonfiction from which I read chapters are:
God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World — and Why Their Differences Matter, by Stephen Prothero
Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book, by Anita Silvey
A Thousand Names for Joy, by Byron Katie
Getting Organized in the Google Era, by Douglas C. Merrill
For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage, by Tara Parker-Pope
Won’t Let You Go Until You Bless Me, by Andree Seu
Feel: The Power of Listening to Your Heart, by Matthew Elliott
Embracing the Wide Sky, by Daniel Tammett
Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream, by Tanya Lee Stone

I kept expecting to find one to grab me enough to finish it to the end, but I was impatient and wanted to get to the fiction. Most of these I will finish before too much longer.

It was a wonderful weekend! I want to do this every weekend! Especially with so much turmoil and uncertainty related to my job, it was extra nice to have time to forget about it all and read, and also to reflect on it all and blog and remember to count my blessings.

Thank you, Mother Reader for sponsoring this challenge! What a treat!