The second readathon I have ever participated in, and it was pretty much a fail. Of course, I did say at the beginning that my TBR was pretty ambitious, but if I’d just tried a little harder, I know I could have done much better than I did.
Day 1
So on the first day I started reading A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab, and I got a good ways in, although I did not complete it. That night, I also read the first novella in Arcanum Unbounded. I was feeling pretty good about that because I hadn’t planned to finish a book on the first day. My plan, going into this readathon, was to complete a book every two days and read one entire book on the last day, while finding time to read one or two novellas from Arcanum Unbounded each day.
Day 2
This is where things started to fall apart a little. This day of the readathon happened to coincide with my boyfriend’s birthday, so I spent most of the day with him instead of reading, which I don’t regret doing. Still, I only managed to read 44 pages of A Darker Shade of Magic that whole day, and I didn’t read a single page from Arcanum Unbounded. I still had not completed a book, so I was a little behind on my goals, but I wasn’t too worried about it. Surely, I could catch up.
Day 3
After getting behind the day before, I was determined to catch up, and catch up I did—to an extent. I finished reading A Darker Shade of Magic and then jumped immediately into my next (and shortest) read of the readathon—Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire. I picked this book because it was super short and I knew I would be able to complete it in one day, which I did. That was all the reading I did that day, though. You’ll notice I still hadn’t read any more from Arcanum Unbounded. You will continue to notice that as this recap goes on.
Day 4
At this point, I had completed 2 books, which, at least in my head, meant I was ahead of schedule (even though I wasn’t really). I was off work all day that day and I didn’t have much I needed to do, so I should have used this as an opportunity to get even further ahead (or at the very least catch up on all the novellas I hadn’t been reading over the past 3 days). Instead, I read absolutely nothing. Not a single, solitary page. I really have no excuse.
Day 5
Keeping with the theme of this readathon so far, I read very little on day 4, so to compensate, I ended up reading an entire book on day 5. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was the book this time. Still, I had not read any more of Arcanum Unbounded, and I ended up going back-to-school clothes shopping with my mother that afternoon, so I didn’t have much time to read later in the day. I went to sleep that night thinking I would catch up over the weekend.
Day 6
I was very wrong. On day 6, I once again read nothing. With this one, I do sort of have an excuse. I spent late morning and early afternoon with my mom, shopping for school supplies and other things I needed to take to college with me, and then almost immediately after that I had to go to work, where I was until 10:30 that night. I definitely could have read something if I’d tried to, though.
Day 7
By this point, I didn’t even feel like I was in a readathon any more. I almost didn’t read anything at all. I spent the whole day doing things like cleaning my room and packing. Then, late that night, I started working on a blog post I had intended to go up the day before. However, I stopped after I had written two sentences because I realized I had a few hours left of the readathon and I wanted to see if I could try to salvage some of it. So I grabbed The Girl Who Smiled Beads and for the last three or four hours leading up to midnight, I read. Nonstop. It was probably the fastest, most intense reading I had ever done. I knew, at this point, that there was no way I could accomplish all the challenges, but if I managed to finish this book, I would have been a lot closer to it. Unfortunately, I only managed to read 192 pages before midnight, out of a total 265.
Quick Overview
Challenges Complete: 4
Books Read: 3 ¾ (ish)
Pages Read: 1,181
These are the numbers if I assume that when the challenges say “read a book” they mean “complete a book,” which I have to do. Otherwise I could technically read one page of each of the books on my TBR and I would have “completed” the challenges, which feels like cheating to me.
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That’s it! I hope you enjoyed reading about my fail-tastic readathon performance. I’ll see you later with a post that is hopefully a little more positive than this one. Also, I promise I will get up that blog post I was talking about up sometime this week, hopefully by Wednesday or Thursday.
Thanks for reading!
-Ariel