TBR Jar Readathon Reading Recap

Hey guys! I didn’t do as good with this readathon as I was hoping I would. My goal was to read 4 books over the course of the week and I ended up only finishing 2 and then getting about halfway through a third. I’/m a little disappointed with that, but that’s 1 ½ more books than I usually end up reading in a week, so with that considered, I guess I did okay.

Day 1

The readathon started on a Saturday, which you would think would be a great opportunity for reading, and normally you would be right, but on this particular Saturday I barely read at all. First of all, I woke up late, and I had a meeting I had to go to and some catching up I had to do. I forgot to record how many pages I read each day for this readathon, so I don’t know if I actually ended up reading anything at all on this day. (The book I had drawn was The Way I Used to Be by Amber Smith.)

Day 2

On Sunday, I had to clean my room, which took a while, and then I had work from 4 until 10:30, during which time I obviously couldn’t read. So, not much reading got done that day.

Day 3

Monday rolled around, the busiest day of the week for me, in terms of school. I had work in the morning, an exercise class to go to, 3 classes, and work at my second job in the evening. And yet, during all that, I somehow managed to find some time to read. Granted, I did not finish it, but at least now I had read a more significant amount.

Day 4

Ah, Tuesday. Tuesday is an odd day for me. I have a lot of things to do, but they’re all sort of spread out, so I had a ton of time to power through the rest of my book, which I did. So, 4 days into the readathon and I had only finished one book. Things were already looking a bit bleak for me. But I psyched myself up, drew out the next book for my TBR (Because You Love to Hate Me), frantically wrote the blog post announcing the next book, and then didn’t end up finishing it before I had to go to an exercise class. I posted it after that, though, and then I started reading my second book.

Day 5

On day 5, I discovered that short story collections are beautiful things. They make you feel like you are reading so much faster, just because you are plowing through so many complete stories all in one place. On day 5, I ended up reading a good chunk of the stories in this collection, but I didn’t finish the book.

Day 6

I finished reading the short story collection in the evening of day 6, and at this point, I kind of knew that I probably wasn’t going to meet my 4-book goal. That feeling was solidified when I drew the third book from my TBR, and it was Eon by Alison Goodman, which is over 500 pages long. Feeling disheartened, I powered on, determined, for the moment, to at least attempt to read a large chunk of this book. The problem was that I had already spent pretty much every spare second reading Because You Love to Hate Me, and my brain was just not interested in focusing on words on a page anymore. So instead, I scrolled through Pinterest on my phone, feeling guilty about the fact that I wasn’t reading.

Day 7

Most of my reading of Eon happened on the last day of the readathon. But Eon is not the kind of book that you can read quickly. The world and magic are very complicated, and even though I had already read a large amount of this book previously, I still needed to slow down a lot to understand everything that was going on. Plus, I had to work for 2 ½ hours that evening, so for the last few hours leading up to midnight, I wasn’t able to make any progress with the book.

General Overview

Pages Read: 1,009

Books Read: 2 ½

Overall, this was probably the worst I have done in a readathon thus far, but I did come into this week thinking that I was being overly ambitious, and clearly I was. Maybe trying to do week-long readathons while also trying to keep up with school, work, a social life (ha, what’s that?), a blog, and at least some sleep is not a great idea. I think maybe next month I might try to do a shorter readathon, like a 24-hour one on a weekend, or a month-long one. We’ll see how this goes.

Anyway, that’s all I have for this post today! Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you soon with another post!

-Ariel