Woo-hoo! It’s time for this year’s 48-Hour Book Challenge!
I got the idea from Pam Coughlan when she was posting on her MotherReader blog. Pam was super creative and organized, and she got the whole kidlit blogging community joining in and even got sponsors to donate to charity!
As for me: I simply set aside a 48-hour time period when I will try to do as much reading and blogging as possible. I took Friday off this week, so I’m beginning tonight, Thursday, at 9:30 pm. And will see how much time I can spend on books between now and Saturday at 9:30 pm.
Honestly, I feel like I’m set up for failure this time – and then I remind myself I can’t “fail” at reading. It’s not a competition. Any amount of time I get to spend on this is good.
But first I agreed to go with some friends to a musical at the Kennedy Center tomorrow night. Okay, that will be worth it! And it will break up the reading and get me out and about. It’s a good thing! (And I could have said No if I didn’t believe that.)
Then tonight I learned a family member far away is having a crisis and I will need to work from a distance at helping to solve it. That will take some time. But here’s the bright side to that – 1) It’s good I can help. 2) Reading will help me not obsess and worry about the things I can’t do. I hope. Already tonight I put off dealing with it until tomorrow – but I hope I will be calm and able to be helpful.
Okay, so Reading!
The great thing about the 48-Hour Book Challenge, and why I keep coming back to them – is that they give me permission to read. And SKIP housework for a bit.
This year, I don’t want to get any further behind on posting reviews (I’m down to 56 reviews written but not posted! A couple years ago, there were 270.)- so I’m going to allow writing and posting reviews. In fact, I finished an Audiobook tonight, so one of the first things I need to do is review that book. So that will take more time from actual reading – but it’s all reading related.
Why do I want to get reading time in? Well, Book Award Season has started, and I have books to read for the Mathical Book Prize. On top of that, I promised myself that this year I would read all 24 books I picked up at ALA Annual Conference. I have read 8 of them already, mostly picture books – and I’d love to read the Advance Reader Copies before the books are published, but that will take some doing.
Which reminds me – I’m also going to count time spent reading old reviews as part of #Sonderbooks25, my celebration of my 25th year of writing Sonderbooks. My first plan was to reread all the reviews of Sonderbooks Stand-outs from every year, but I was having so much fun, I’m now reading ALL my old reviews. I believe there are more than 5,000 – and I am still only on 2003 reviews, Sonderbooks #62 – when I was still posting as “issues,” before I’d heard of blogs.
Time blogging also counts! So I just spent a chunk of time writing this post, and I want to get to reading – and listening. (Listening is what I do while eating and doing other basic life tasks.) We’ll see how I do, but any reading time is good. (And I’m afraid I’ve still got Monday off for housework and for working on my new website, prayingwiththepsalmists.com.
Happy Reading!