My Own Personal 24in48

So if you've followed me on Instagram for any amount of time, you'll know that I LOVE participating in readathons. One of my favourite ones normally happens twice a year -- 24in48. The idea is that you read for 24 hours in a 48 hour period. The founders decided not to run 24in48 this July due the awareness of Black Lives Matters and wanting to allow space for more reading events hosted by Black people. I understand their reasoning completely.

I had already suspected an official 24in48 wasn't going to happen and had already decided to do my own this past weekend. I have a huge stack of library books that I want to read and I tend to read between ten and twelve books in a 24in48 weekend so I thought this would be a good way to get through some of them.

Since I haven't written much about what I've been reading lately, I decided to do a "real time" blog post. (I didn't actually write this blog post throughout the weekend but this will give you somewhat of an idea of how the weekend went.) So enjoy my own personal 24in48 documentation:

4:04pm Friday -- I hadn't decided exactly when to start my readathon. Normally 24in48 starts at midnight but I thought I might start mine a little earlier. However, I wanted to watch the first Blue Jays game of the season so...

Anyways, here was my aspirational TBR. I tried to be aware of adding in books about racism and by diverse voices.

10:12pm -- The Jays won their season opener against Tampa Bay and I decided to start reading at 10:30. Dave and the kids were in bed and late night reading is usually one of my most productive times.

10:39pm -- I was finally ready to go. And yes, I do readathons as much for the excuse to eat great snacks as I do for the reading!!! And I didn't mean to start with The Guardians by John Grisham but I was halfway done it and decided to just finish it off.

1:54am -- After three hours of reading, and with only thirty pages to go in The Guardians, I decided to head off to bed. I was pretty tired.

10:08am -- I got a later start than I had intended on Saturday but I was finally ready to continue reading with some fresh blueberries, some coffee-hot chocolate and two books. I'd taken The Dutch House out of the library in early March and still hadn't gotten around to it. I did read about forty pages at the pool at the end of June but I needed to finish it. So I started my morning off with that one.

12:20pm -- I made good progress, got sucked into The Dutch House, and finished it in a couple of hours. I read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett quite a few years ago and, for me, no book of hers has measured up to it. However, The Dutch House was definitely better than State Of Wonder and Commonwealth. I probably need to re-read Bel Canto and see if I like it as much. I also finished The Guardians. Again, I want to re-read some of Grisham's earlier works. I liked that this one looked at the innocence of black men (especially) on Death Row but it felt like something was...missing...

2:30pm -- I started Cilka's Journey, and switched to reading outside, in the shade on the driveway since it was a hot day. Everyone raves about The Tattooist of Auschwitz but I thought this book, by the same author, was way better. And since some of my great-aunts spent time in Siberia, I really resonated with this book. I finished Cilka's Journey at about 6:30. (I did try to read one of the books on racism for about half an hour but it was very dense and I decided to not finish it. Boo.)

Then I picked up A Good Neighborhood. This book made me uncomfortable to read. It was about a man who used his white privilege for selfish reasons and ended up ruining people's lives. It was just so sad. The author writes about how she basically felt she had permission from Zadie Smith to write from Black people's perspective and I don't know if I agree with that. I'd love to have a book club about this book because it just didn't sit well with me for a number of reasons. Have any of you read it? What do you think about some of these questions???

Around 11:15, I picked up The Witches Are Coming by Lindy West. This book made me think. The essays are powerful. It made me feel both sad and hopeful for our world. I crawled into bed around 2am and read until almost 3 to finish this book. I just couldn't put it down. Plus only eight hours left to read on Sunday felt very do-able.

I started my morning around 9am with The Wife Stalker. This book was due at the library which is why I reached for it next. I finished it around 1pm but I have to admit, it didn't really hold my attention, I didn't love it, and (spoiler alert) the very last sentence of the book makes it end very murkily, which I hate. I LOVED The Last Mrs Parrish by this same author (these same authors?!??!) and think it might have been their best book.

Around 1pm, Dave took the kids swimming, I took a quick lunch break, and picked up this book of essays. While I didn't appreciate the author as a person (I don't agree with her on-again, off-again affair with another staff person while they were both in other relationships), I did enjoy this look into working at The White House. It made me want to try and get a job there at some point! I guess I'd have to ditch my family or convince them to move! Ha! And clearly there would need to be a different president.

By 5:40, I only had an hour left to read. My Sunday reading felt like it went really quickly. I picked up When Stars Are Scattered for Sam because of a recommendation from Allena. Rachel has read it a few times and I really liked it too. I feel like it's a good book to help kids understand life from a very different perspective. And it was a very good reminder to me of how privileged we are to be waiting for life after this Covid pandemic in our North American comfort.

Technically, I had about six minutes left to read to reach 24 hours when I finished this book. I picked up one of Rachel's Rainbow Magic Fairies books to help me finish off the time. Those books are as insipid as I imagined they would be but Rachel LOVES them and I can totally see why!

And here is my final stack of books read along with my time. I finished with two and a half hours to go of the 48 hours. It took me a little longer to finish because I ate supper with my family and we talked with my parents for about half an hour.

It felt very different doing a 24in48 without the social media community. I had only me to keep me motivated. However, I also didn't get distracted by social media so that was also good. I am quite proud of the fact that I managed to finish this without external motivation.

Sadly, my library due dates dictated what I read to a certain extent and I don't think I did a good job of reaching for a lot of diverse books. I also don't think the non-fiction books on racism are good readathon books because I want to digest them slowly as opposed to powering through them for a readathon, if that makes sense.

And now I probably need another readathon because I have five more holds to pick up at the library, four books to read on my Kobo, and this is my current library book stack: