24in48

24in48 January 2019 Wrap-up

Posted on by Charity

Well. I’m done.

Working breakfast on Sunday

Actually, I’ve been done since 9:00 last night when I finished All Quiet on the Western Front just before my alarm went off signalling the end of the readathon, but I decided to sleep before posting my wrap-up.

I estimate that I got in about sixteen hours of reading, which is well short of 24 hours, but not bad overall.

I finished a total of three books.

Two of these—Winter by Ali Smith and All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque—I started before the readathon.

The third—Sleep No More by Aprilynne Pike—I read start to finish on Saturday.

I’ve participated in enough readathons now to have developed some guidelines for making them work for me:

Unwritten rule: schedule in breaks to play board games with my family to distract them from the fact that I’m not cooking all weekend.
  1. Choose a TBR that’s smaller than I’d like. This is not the time to be super-ambitious. Pick three or four books that really interest me and maybe one or two alternates.
  2. Include at least one YA or graphic novel in my TBR. YA and graphic novels go quick and give a sense of satisfaction when I see the whole book lying there in my “finished” pile.
  3. Include at least one audiobook. This rule is more important for me during 24-hour readathons. During the 24in48, I have enough leeway to get up and move that I don’t have to be reading the entire time. For example, this time, I went with my family on Sunday morning to play some basketball, but during Dewey’s, I choose to go for a long, long walk and listen to audiobooks to get my reading in while I move around.
  4. Scope out a reading nook or three. This is has been a problem for me in our new house. It’s got an open floorplan and not only is there literally nowhere to go that isn’t noisy when my family are home, I’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out a good place to put the furniture for a solid reading spot. It’s not perfect, but I have a little nook in our front room that works okay. I need to scope out a place away from the house, though.
  5. Be prudent about social media. It’s easy for me to get sucked into social media for an hour or more, so I need to be careful to limit myself. I only post on Instagram every six hours or so and on my blog for kickoff, half-time, and wrap-up. I miss out on some of the “community” aspects of the readathon, but it keeps me reading for more of the time.

And that’s pretty much it. I would love to develop some guidelines around snacks—like not buying a huge bag of salt and vinegar kettle chips at Costco at the beginning of the readathon—but that will have to wait for the next readathon, which might not be until October. The next 24in48 is July 20-21, and the next Dewey’s is April 6, but I’ve got family responsibilities during both of those. *sigh*

24in48 Halftime Report

Posted on by Charity

Twenty-four hours into the January 2019 24in48 readathon, and I’m still in the game.

A hand holding a book in front of a bookshelf. The cover of the book has a black-and-white image of a woman's face overlaid with the title Sleep No More and the words Forget the Past, Change the Present, Fight the Future. Aprilynne Pike is printed across the bottom of the book cover.

I finished Ali Smith’s Winter (which I was already halfway through at the start of the event) and read all of Sleep No More by Aprilynne Pike.

That was a very strange sequence of books, but it seems to have worked alright.

Snack-wise, I made some similarly incongruous choices. Half-caff coffee then fruit-infused water. Three bowls of salt and vinegar chips and three bowls of bell pepper slices. Popcorn with homemade vegan nacho seasoning and an apple. Scrambled eggs and dark chocolate (consecutively, not mixed together).

Apple slices on a wooden cutting board.

The chips were probably the snack I most enjoyed and the snack that I most regret.

I estimate that I read for roughly 10 of those first 24 hours. A decent showing. With several things on my schedule for tomorrow, I’m not sure I’ll be able to make the full 24, but I can give it a try.

For now, though: bedtime.

Feet clad in gray slippers crossed and propped on a brown chair on a sunny patio. The legs are in blue jeans and a Kindle Paperwhite is resting on them..
One of my reading spaces today. I couldn’t be bothered to fill the fountain.

Cautious Optimism: Preparing for the 24in48 Readathon, January 2019

Posted on by Charity

January 2018’s 24in48 readathon came when we were deep in moving mode. I made some half-hearted plans to participate, but reading took a backseat to finding lodging and figuring out where to buy food.

After a year here, I’m slowly reclaiming my reading game, and after my bit of success managing Dewey’s this past October, I’m giving 24in48 a try again.

I’ve got a small stack set aside—a Classic to finish (All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque), a book of short stories (Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado), and a YA book my teenager recommended (Sleep No More by Aprilynne Pike, whose middle name I hope for symmetry’s sake is Maria). Plus Ali Smith’s Winter, which I’m reading on my Kindle.

TBR flanked by local limes, meyer lemons, pink lemons, and grapefruit.

Start time is 12am/9pm Eastern/Pacific, but I’m heading to bed shortly and plan to be up and reading bright and early, with a few breaks to shop for groceries, shoot hoops, slice lemons to put in my ice water, and play Harry Potter Hogwart’s Battle Cooperative Deck Building Game.

With any luck, I can do all of that and still get in roughly 24 hours of reading during the 48 hours of the readathon. I plan to post a half-time report here and interim reports on Instagram (@imperfecthappiness).

Let the reading begin!

(Or rather, let the sleeping begin and then let me begin reading in the morning when I’m refreshed, rested, and have had a couple of samples of Trader Joe’s coffee while shopping!)*

January 2017 24 in 48 Wrap-Up Post

Posted on by Charity

Well, the 2017 24 in 48 Readathon, January edition, has come and gone.

I’ll use the official 24in48 closing survey as a guide for my wrap-up:

How many books did you read? Pages?

I finished two books, The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike (325 pages) and Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes (436 pages). I also read about ten pages of Edith Pearlman’s Honeydew, so my page total is about 771. And I listened to a little less than an hour of As You Wish by Cary Elwes while I took a constitutional, but I’m not going to attempt to convert that to pages read.

How many hours did you read?

I didn’t keep close track, but I estimate about twelve hours total, maybe fourteen. Some stuff came up that kind of derailed my reading plans (real life is always trying to push into my reading time), so I didn’t spend as may hours reading as I would have preferred.

What do you think worked well in this readathon?

I like the surveys, and I like the 24-in-48 format. I liked reading about the challenges, although I didn’t keep up with them myself.

What do you think could be done to improve the readathon for next time?

Couldn’t say. I didn’t follow the challenges or the social media presence all that well, but I think that’s my thing, not something anyone else needs to improve.

Will you participate in a future 24in48 readathon?

Absolutely. Anything to give me an excuse to bury myself in books for a weekend.

Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes

Posted on by Charity

Broken Monsters is the second and last book I finished for this year’s 24 in 48 readathon, matching my “finished” total for Dewey’s Readathon this past October. I cheated a little and read for two hours past the official end of the readathon, but I’m counting it anyway.

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From when I started the book at breakfast-time on Saturday.

This was the second book in a row that I finished reading at 2am, sitting on the floor of the bathroom with the door shut so my late-night reading wouldn’t disturb my spouse, who is much better about observing a healthy, consistent bedtime than I am. He’s also much taller than me.

I’d read very little in the way of crime dramas/murder mysteries until a few months ago when I began feverishly making my way through Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series. I can’t say with certainty that the commonalities I see between this book and French’s books is also something in common with the genre in general, so I’ll just keep to what I know. Beukes does all of the things that I love about French’s writing, and she does them even more. Like French’s characters, Beukes’s characters are distinct personalities, but they’re even more clearly—yet still subtly—drawn. Both authors weave their characters’ personal lives and a broader cultural commentary into the murder investigation at the core of the novel, but Beukes does it in a manner even more seamless and emotionally authentic. Reading this novel, I was constantly blown away by the virtuosity and subtlety with which Beukes writes.

The biggest difference between French’s novels and Broken Monsters is that Beukes puts no brakes on the bizarre. But while the novel gets really, really weird, Beukes still takes the reader along with her. I happily read bizarre fiction, but there’s usually a self-consciousness about it, a constant awareness that I’m reading something bizarre. But with this novel, the weird just kind of snuck up on me so that, by the time I was really aware of just how weird it was, I was already in it.

I think what made the difference for me was the emotional authenticity that Beukes retains throughout all of the really off-the-wall stuff. There’s a scene towards the end of the novel in which Gabi says something to Layla that makes total sense but I completely didn’t expect. I hesitate to use the word poignant because that implies a level of sap that this scene does not possess, so I’ll just say that the exchange reveals the depths of the love between mother and daughter in a way that’s so surprising in its emotional truth that I cried just a little. Granted, it was almost 2am and I’d been sitting on the tile floor of my bathroom reading for nearly four hours, so perhaps I was in a more vulnerable emotional condition than if I’d been curled up comfortably on the couch and reading well-rested, but while I might not have teared up, I think I would have been surprised and the scene would have retained its emotional truth in either situation.

Two quotes stood out for me. The first, which I’ve truncated significantly because I don’t want to give too much away, stands out because it feels true to how our culture responds to attention-seekers at all levels, especially in this Internet-fueled, post-truth age:

“Just keep giving him attention. Even if it makes you an accomplice to his [expletive]ed-up fantasies.” (405)

And the second just made me smile because I’ve thought it so many times myself (minus the comma splice, of course):

“Hell isn’t other people, it’s other parents.” (316)

To any of my mom-friends who are reading this, I don’t mean you.

The Graveyard Apartment

Posted on by Charity

This is the first book I finished for the 2017 24 in 48 Readathon! I cheated a little and started six hours early, but hey…I finished the book! I’ll post book reviews here on the blog, but if you want the play-by-play, take a look at @imperfecthappiness on Instagram.

img_20170121_091957.jpgOverall, this book was pretty good. It wasn’t super-spooky, but I sat up late to read the whole thing in one sitting (with a break to put the kids to bed) because it was easy to read and because I found the deeper issues in the novel compelling.

There were no huge surprises, horror-wise—an apartment next to a graveyard, misbehaving electronics, weird noises, spooky happenings, a trip to check out city records about the history of the site. There were some things that were unclear or just dropped without further explanation, like the bird and the dark little figures. Some of the language was cliched or otherwise uninteresting, but I have a higher tolerance for this sort of thing in a translation. I found myself wanting to ask my friends who speak/read Japanese to read this and tell me if the word choice was any more skillful in the original Japanese.

One of the biggest things that gave me trouble was that the motivation of the antagonist(s) was unclear. Did they want to drive out the tenants (if so, why make it difficult to leave)? Did they want to kill the tenants (if so, why drag it out)? Are they targeting the one family specifically (if so, why all the collateral damage)? As another reviewer mentions, are they the spirits of dead people or are they malevolent spirits of some other, mythological type? Are they limited in power, as the beginning of the book suggests, or are they omnipotent, as they seem to be by the end (although they apparently still need the elevator)? It seems like the author can’t decide.

Two things kept me interested in this novel. First, the author did an excellent job of maintaining suspense. The action took almost too long for me, but not quite. That’s good suspense.

Second, there’s this intersection of the personal haunted past of the main family in the story and the haunting of the building. Read More

The 24 in 48 Readathon!

Posted on by Charity

While friends march with thousands of others around the world, I’m reading. It’s not as extroverted an activity, but it’s subversive in its own quiet way, I suppose.

This is not my first readathon, but it’s my first time doing the 24 in 48 Readathon. I’ve done Dewey’s twice, and trying to read for twenty-four hours straight is awesome but especially challenging for someone with two kids and four decades and a desire to nurture her love for literature, not flog it to death. Reading for twenty-four hours within a forty-eight-hour spread is much more doable (and pleasant!). Not that I’m keeping track of how much time I spend reading, or at least not with any precision. But it’s a fun way to continue recovering from the cold my children shared with me and it gives me a chance to clean out the leftovers from the fridge.

This year, I chose a bunch of scary books. I generally don’t have trouble staying awake when I’m reading, but these should keep me from nodding off, if I start to fade in the wee hours or in an afternoon slump.

img_20170121_114921.jpg

(Okay, so that bottom book, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman isn’t scary unless you fear travel memoirs, but the other ones should qualify as “scary.”)

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