(The plans were a crawfish boil. I’d have been so sad if it was canceled.)

This will be my master post, and I will update it as I go along! Feel free to ignore everything, but your takeaway regardless should be that readathons are the best.

In Conclusion

Y’all, I’m going to be super real with you: I went the heck to bed. After Hour Elevenish, I read some nonfiction and started Meredith Duran’s latest, The Sins of Lord Lockwood, and then the family went out for Indian food, and then I came back and finished The Sins of Lord Lockwood (A plus book), washed my hair, and went to bed at nine. I was all “I’m going to stay up late and do more readathon!” but I forgot that I hate staying up late and I love to sleep. So uh, yeah.

Anyway! I read three books, including one that I’m planning to write a proper post about. That’s still pretty good! And I’m hoping that for the October readathon, I can dedicate myself fully to the cause.

Hour Elevenish

Welp, I took a break from Readathon, as expected, to go hang out with family. It was great! I had a vodka freeze for lunch, and it turned out to be much more potent than I expected, so I had to take a nap.

But! Now I am back! And I have returned to the readathon with great enthusiasm and vigor, tearing through Shadow Girl by Liana Liu. It was a strange and distant read about a girl who takes a job as a tutor to the daughter of a wealthy banking family. Now what? Meredith Duran?

Nearly the End of Hour 3

Wow, when this is all over I’m going to probably write a long long post about Naomi Alderman’s The Power. (I know, it’ll be a scorching hot take by me, only two years after the book’s publication.) I went investigating to find out if Naomi Alderman is able to be cool about trans people, because The Power so entirely leaves them out of the story, and found a review of a trans lady’s memoir that reads exactly like the letters Book Naomi writes to Neil in The Power. Not to mention the book has two non-white protagonists but never engages with race at all, like really not at all. And–

Hm. I seem to be talking myself out of this book. Well! I’ll say that it was a fascinating and engaging read. I needed to start this readathon with a very strong read — because I’ve had a bookish hangover after reading Tara Westover’s Educated — and The Power did the trick in spades. Next up, I’m thinking romance novel? Or YA book?

Opening Meme (Pre-Hour 1)

1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today?

Louisiana! And the weather is cooperating for once, so I’m hoping to get a few hours here and there of reading outside in the sunshine!

2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to?

Hahahahahaha come on, stop it. Look at my stack. (“Stack.”) There is no way to choose a most-exciting book out of this chaos.

That said, I’ve got Meredith Duran’s latest romance novel checked out on my ereader, and I’m pretty excited to read it. I also have, um, Tamora Pierce’s new book about bb Numair Salmalin? Soooooooooooo.

3) Which snack are you most looking forward to?

I didn’t stockpile snacks! (eek) I have relatives in town, and while the plans for the day are very hazy, I feel reasonably confident that they’re going to include food at some point. I didn’t want to buy a bunch of snack food and then not be hungry for dinner with my aunts.

4) Tell us a little something about yourself!

My name is Jenny, and I did my first readathon only last year, a fact that now seems highly unlikely to me. I love readathons so much. Can it be that they only came into my life a year ago?

Anyway! I have 35 books checked out of the library (not counting ebooks, not counting books from my university library), and I’m hoping to make a dent in them because that’s legit unreasonable.

5) If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? If this is your first read-a-thon, what are you most looking forward to?

In the past, I’ve been very focused on reading hard and tearing through as many books as possible. This year, in part because I know my reading will be interrupted with family time, I’m coming at it with more chill. I have a bunch of research books checked out at the moment, and I’d like to spend a lot of the day reading and taking notes. I have a new bibliography and note-taking app. I am very excited about my new bibliography and note-taking app.

The post READATHON READATHON READATHON ahem appeared first on Reading the End.

In thrilling news, Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon IS TOMORROW. Can you tell I’m excited? I am SO excited. I have an aunt coming into town, so I don’t know exactly how many hours I’ll end up being able to do, but I’m excited about whatever it turns out to be.

Molly Ringwald wrote a really fascinating piece about sexual harassment and her films with John Hughes.

Junot Diaz writes with extraordinary power and honesty about being raped as a child. Trigger warning for child sexual abuse, ofc.

After taking the top prize at Sundance yet somehow not being picked up by a distributor, The Miseducation of Cameron Post finally has a distributor and will be available to watch in the summer. Yay!

It’s okay to give up on books you aren’t enjoying. Let the switch flip in your brain, and set yourself free from the prison of books that aren’t a good fit for you. The mindset “Maybe I didn’t give up forever” is the one that has helped me a lot.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is incisive on the subject of NFL cheerleaders and the problem with the NFL setting itself up as the guardian of moral virtue.

How publishing is changing (and not) w/r/t race and gender.

Millicent Simmonds, one of the stars of the new film The Quiet Place, wrote a piece for Teen Vogue about becoming the deaf role model she never had.

Mikki Kendall on the two black men arrested at Starbucks for existing there. Black customers are inherently perceived as threatening, which is what leads to situations like this one. And last but not least, here’s a round table of some of my favorite writers talking about navigating public spaces while black. (If you’re not following all these people you should be! They’re great.)

How grad school applications can become performances of trauma for applicants from marginalized groups.

I can’t assess the accuracy of this piece about how East Asian narrative traditions differs from Western narrative traditions, but it’s a really interesting read. I want to keep this in mind when I’m reading books from China and Japan in the future.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the best show on TV but it does have a tonal dissonance problem in how it portrays the moral implications of various actions. Irene Yoon and Lili Loofbourow break it down.

On constructing a kinder future (in the stories we create and consume).

Not sure what’s been going on with FanCon? Clarkisha Kent has the depressing scoop. Rosie Knight and Jazmine Joyner have another very detailed breakdown of all the nitty-gritty details, at Women Write about Comics.

Skin care marketing is often just selling whiteness.

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2007 – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

THIS WAS BITTERSWEET REALLY. Do you remember this? The end of an era? I stayed up all night reading it, and I was so annoying to my sisters that one of them decamped to a different room and the other one said SHUT UP SHUT UP when I gasped over deaths. My wrath over Rita Skeeter’s hit piece on Dumbledore remains as bright and vivid today as it was on that summer eve. Fuck that lady.

2008 – Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh

Historical fiction done absolutely right. In the event, I wasn’t wild about the third and final book in this series, but Sea of Poppies is a marvelous, wandering, playful novel that I absolutely loved. Its sequel River of Smoke is also very excellent, and if there hadn’t been some VERY wobbly consent in the third one, maybe I’d have liked that one too. But Sea of Poppies, man. This is good stuff.

2009 – White Is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi

The house is both haunted and xenophobic. To this day I barely have a clue what Helen Oyeyemi is talking about w/r/t the plots of her fiction, and it doesn’t even matter. White Is for Witching is spooky and beautiful and who cares about the rest.

2010 – Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine

As my lovely friend Ana always says, I’d like to shove copies of Delusions of Gender into anyone’s hands I possibly can. This book debunks neuroscientific nonsense about gender in a crapload of different ways, and it taught me to be both a more critical consumer of neuroscience and a better, more well-informed feminist.

bonus: 2010 was also the year NK Jemisin published The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I try not to be whatever about this, but I am a massive NK Jemisin hipster and I really did like her before it was cool. I read an excerpt of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms online somewhere before it published and I was fully like “Who is this lady?”

2011 – Chime, Franny Billingsley

Y’all know I love an unreliable narrator, and Franny Billingsley does something in Chime that I’ve not seen played out in many other books, if any: Her protagonist, Briony, is unreliable to us because she is unreliable to herself. Discovering the ways she has been misled is one of the greatest pleasures of this odd, creepy book.

2012 – Thorn, by Intisar Khanani

Thorn is a retelling of the fairy tale “The Goose Girl” that manages to be dark and hopeful at the same time. Intisar Khanani is one of my favorite fantasy writers currently working. I don’t know what else to say beyond that. Thorn is wonderful. You should read it if you haven’t.

2013 – Gemsigns, Stephanie Saulter

It feels like Stephanie Saulter is weirdly unknown, and I can’t figure out why. Maybe she’s just better known in the UK? I have no idea! Gemsigns is this amazing, strange, gripping political science fiction about genetically modified humans fighting for their rights in a world where they have always been considered property. Many are the machinations. I loved it.

2014 – How It Went Down, Kekla Magoon

How It Went Down is a Black Lives Matter story told in many voices, and it’s beyond me that it mostly flew under the radar when it was published. It resists easy answers and insists on the complicated humanity of every one of its narrators. Kekla Magoon is an incredible author who reliably has me in tears.

2015 – The Scorpion Rules, Erin Bow

Two of my friends recently read The Scorpion Rules, thereby reminding me of how much I love it! An all-knowing AI has taken over the world’s weapons systems and prevents war by taking hostage one child from every country’s ruler. If the country declares war, the ruler’s child is killed. Greta is one of those children. The Scorpion Rules and its sequel, The Swan Riders, never go in the direction you expect. They’re packed with twists and turns, but at the same time they give the characters space to be thoughtful and interesting.

2016 – Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee

If you read Ninefox Gambit you must accept some level of having no g.d. clue what’s going on with it. It’s dense military sci-fi that weirdly reminds me a lot of my 2015 pick, The Scorpion Rules. Captain Kel Cheris is tasked with a near-impossible military task; the unstable, brilliant, dead tactician Jedao is installed in her head to assist her. Jedao is a superb character and I adored this book and you should too.

2017 – THICK! AS! THIEVES! by Megan Whalen Turner AT LAST FINALLY AT LAST oh God and it was worth the wait dear heaven I love this series

(Yes, this is eleven books. I know that. But more books is better than fewer books, n’est-ce pas?)

Happy Readathon!

The post Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon: 10 Years in 10 Books appeared first on Reading the End.

Hour 11

I was going to say that it’s hour 11 and I haven’t lost steam, but I seem to have read much less in the past three and a half hours than in the foregoing hours. Am I slowing up? Is my old age catching up with me? I did take a break to do some end-of-month budgeting and fold my laundry.

Read: 2 chapters of my genocide book (only 7 chapters now remain!), Paper Girls, vol. 1

Currently reading: Vision, vol. 1

Currently snacking upon: Nothing at the moment! I ate up all my raspberries and now regret not buying two things of raspberries. But it’s five o’clock, which means it’s time for a delicious, refreshing gin and tonic.

Hour 7

Fantastic news, y’all. The protag in Rulebreaker did indeed resolve her dilemma sexily. I chose Rulebreaker based on the results of my Twitter poll, then moved on to the runner-up, Angie Thomas’s NYT-bestselling The Hate U Give.

TWAS EXTREMELY SAD. And now I am back on the internets, checking in with my fellow readathoners.

Snacks eaten: Cheese fries. I meant to save them for later but I got super hungry.

Books read: One Crazy Summer, The Ship Beyond Time, Rulebreaker, The Hate U Give

Hour 4

Well this is going great so far. I read One Crazy Summer and The Ship Beyond Time (both awesome) and have now started on Cathy Pegau’s Rulebreaker, a romance novel in which (ahaha I am so excited) a con lady FALLS FOR HER MARK oh noes how will she resolve the resultant moral dilemma? (My prediction: Sexily.)

I also participated in a mini-challenge over at Pirates and Pixie Dust, ate a chocolate marshmallow bunny, and took a quick break to visit with my baby nephew and deposit a check at the bank. Readathon is amazing. I always knew it would be and I was right.

Hour 0 Survey

1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today?

Louisiana! The weather is “who cares, I’m staying inside all day.”

2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to?

This stack here?

(Yes, okay, I went a little nuts at the library.) Hard to say! The Ship Beyond Time is definitely one that I’m excited about, and I also have a romance novel on my ipad about a con lady who falls in love with her target, which sounds pretty great. But One Crazy Summer might be the book I’m most looking forward to: It’s been on my TBR for years and years, multiple bloggers have recommended it to me, and I’m only just now getting around to it.

3) Which snack are you most looking forward to?

ALL OF THEM. I never buy candy, but I bought candy this one time, because Easter-colored M&Ms were on sale for a dollar. So I have that, I have popcorn, I have raspberries and some spinach to keep things healthy, I have a jar o’ cookie dough, I have homemade Oreos and also regular Oreos, and I have cheese fries for dinner. Judge not lest ye be judged.

4) Tell us a little something about yourself!

Gosh, what can I say? I’ve been blogging for nearly ten years (I KNOW), but I’ve never managed to do a readathon before. I’m very excited. I like cheese fries a lot. My reading eyes are bigger than my reading stomach. I am going to read at least 50% of one book while exercising this morning because I’m really, really trying to stay faithful about exercising.

5) If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? If this is your first read-a-thon, what are you most looking forward to?

This is my first readathon, and I’m having feelings about it! The blogging community is objectively the greatest. I don’t know why it took me this long to participate in one of these things.

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