24-HOUR READ-A-THON STARTING IN T-5 HOURS!

OMG, you guys, I just found out about this and it made my day. No, it made my whole goddamn week. So here’s the story. Dewey’s Read-a-thon takes place twice a year, in October and April. On each of the two selected days, hundreds of book bloggers and reading enthusiasts sign up to read for 24 hours straight, all at the same time (you can find start times for different time zones here). During or after the read-a-thon readers post updates to their blogs and/or Twitter feeds saying how it’s going, what they’re reading, how long they’ve been reading and how many pages they’ve read.

The idea is to just read. Read as much as possible, read to the exclusion of distractions and TV, read wherever you’re comfortable, read whatever you want. Some readers go hardcore, forgoing showers, errands and social interaction – even reading while eating – and try to go the full 24 hours. Others pop in and out, taking breaks, napping and calling it a day when they get tired. Whatever your personal reading style, there’s room for it here.

I’m a late registrant, somehow having missed talk of this until now (nearly midnight and the scheduled start time for my area is 5AM!) so I won’t be going hardcore. My plan is to get up when I’m up – hopefully around 8 or 9 – and just read as much as possible for as long as I can, taking breaks as needed. I’ll see how it goes and maybe next year I’ll try for a hardcore read!

If you want to learn more about the read-a-thon, go here, or to register go here. And don’t forget to check out the blogs of participants listed on the registration page, drop some words of encouragement, and spend as much time as you can reading tomorrow!

I’ll try to add a post or two here, but if you want to see what I’m up to (and check out other readers), follow me on Twitter (@Backlist_Books) or the hashtag #readathon.

I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to read, but here are some of the titles on my possibles list:

1. Faceless Killer (Kurt Wallander thriller #1) – Henning Mankell
2. Fangirl – Rainbow Rowell
3. Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock – Matthew Quick
4. The Cuckoo’s Calling – J.K. Rowling
5. The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow – Rita Leganski
6. Further Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin

If you’re joining in, what’s in your reading pile? Any books to recommend?