It’s time for a 48-Hour Book Challenge!
I’ve been rereading old blog posts in honor of #Sonderbooks25, my 25th anniversary of writing Sonderbooks. I’m currently reading posts from 2009 – and it turns out that was when I did my first 48-Hour Book Challenge. And it’s time for another one!
The first one was the brainstorm of Pam Coughlan, who blogged at Mother Reader, and years later in 2020 started working in the same library as me. At the beginning she revved up the whole large kidlit blogging community (the Kidlitosphere) to get involved. The idea: Take a 48-Hour period and see how much of it you can spend reading.
2009 was before I had been on any award committees, but wanted to be. And spending hours reading still felt like a guilty pleasure. Doing the 48-Hour Book Challenge helped me shed any guilt – because that was what I *should* be doing for 24 hours.
In 2026? I no longer ever have any guilt for spending hours reading. But I do have a much too large TBR (To Be Read) pile(s). And besides, I went to Wild Goose Festival over Labor Day weekend and have otherwise been busy – and I want a concentrated time to read. And besides all that, Columbus Day used to be one of my favorite holidays of the year simply because the weather tends to be wonderful and it’s a good time for a break. We lost that day off when we were given Juneteenth (which is also a wonderful time to be off) – so I’m giving myself a long weekend for Indigenous People’s Day and taking both Friday and Monday off. My plan is to read for Friday and Saturday, have a regular Sunday with choir and church and tabletop games, and then try to do some much-needed home decluttering on Monday.
I’ve been doing my own 48-Hour Book Challenges ever since Mother Reader stopped. So I get to make my own rules. What I’m keeping is that the goal is time. How much time can I spend reading and blogging during the 48 hours from 9:50 pm tonight (Thursday) to 9:50 pm on Saturday?
I will allow myself to count listening to audiobooks when I’m doing things like preparing food or doing laundry. (I got off to a late start because I did my Friday night bill-paying tonight instead, plus my usual Thursday night grocery shopping.)
I’m going to allow blogging (like this), and writing and posting reviews. I want to write reviews of any books I finish that I like well enough. (Just finished an audiobook that I don’t like well enough. It does happen.) I will also count posting to Sonderquotes and working on #Sonderbooks25. I’m almost ready to post the summary post for 2009!
As of today, I may allow one other activity – writing. Today I got another very kind rejection for my book, Praying with the Psalmists, which my agent is submitting to publishers. We got the feedback we’ve gotten before – too much memoir for what that publisher does. So for a while now, I’ve been planning to write a proposal for a series of books looking at how you can use patterns from Psalms in prayer, but without so much memoir. They’d be a series of devotional books, featuring two types of Psalms in each book, beginning with Laments for Lent. They’d be a great follow-up to my original book. But they might work on their own if I can’t sell the original book.
All that is to say, I’m going to allow myself some writing time in there.
But my plan is to spend at least half the time reading. So after tonight – when I do want to do my usual postings – I’m going to try to never do more time at the computer than I have already done reading.
I am thinking that I’ll still try to sleep late the next two days, and I hope to also go for walks. But I’m hoping even with that, I can get a nice chunk of time reading.
Oh, and that picture at the top of this post? That’s the t-shirt I’m planning to wear tomorrow – the one full day of reading in the middle of the 48 hours.
And no matter how many hours I check off, I am sure that I will achieve the main goal – a wonderful 48 hours doing lots of reading! What a treat!