Tag: readathon

Bookworm Blogging, Readathons, TBRs

Transathon TBR

Sarah

Transathon is taking place over the entire month of July! The goal is to read books about trans characters and/or by trans authors. I have a large possible TBR shelf on Goodreads and will be trying to read as many of these books as I can. Feel free to recommend anything else you think I’ll enjoy. I’d also love to read some more books by Black trans authors, if anyone has recommendations there as well! 🙂

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Bookworm Blogging, Readathons

Short-a-thon 2018

Sarah

I can’t remember the last time I participated in a readathon (I’m so bad at them!) but Destiny @ Howling Libraries and Kathy @ Books and Munches have put together this super fun one that I just had to join. 🙂

Here’s all the important info, snagged directly from Destiny’s post:

SHORT-A-THON!

Short-a-thon is a readathon that is going to take place from 12:00AM December 21st to 11:59PM December 31st. (You can go by your own time zone!)

The goal is simple: to focus on reading the SHORTEST books in your TBR! These can be short stories, novellas, graphic novels, manga—if it’s got a low page count, it works! Of course, our ideas of “short” books will all vary, so go by whatever YOU consider short!

We liked the idea of hosting this readathon for two reasons:
1) It’s unique!
2) BOOST THOSE READING CHALLENGE NUMBERS! Your December end-of-year wrap could look amazing with a big stack of short books thrown on top!

Here’s how you can join in…

Create a TBR in a blog post, tweet, or whatever else you like to use. We recommend making a list of your TEN (10) shortest books!

Leave a comment here or on Kathy’s post with a link to your TBR so she can add you to our official participants list (you can do this any time between now and December 21st).

Use #shortathon18 on social media so we can all find each other and cheer one another one, and be sure to follow us on Twitter at @shortathon! We’ll be hosting reading sprints and challenges everyday.

My Short-a-thon TBR

I decided to choose the same method as Destiny: I’ll write out a list of shorter books on my TBR (all under 150 pages) and choose my TBR at random. I’ve also split them up based on number of pages, like Destiny did! Some of these may not be published yet, and some I may not be able to get a hold of. I’ll select and random and read whatever I actually can and skip what I can’t. 🙂 Here are the books I’ve selected as options:

1-50 Pages: 

  1. A Monstrous Love: Two Halloween Romances – Magen Cubed
  2. Wet Nails – Shira Glassman
  3. Heaven or This – Topaz Winters
  4. Hex Wives #1 – Ben Blacker
  5. The Goddess Collection – Ailie Wallace
  6. Waiting on a Bright Moon – J.Y. Yang
  7. Complementary and Acute – Ella Lyons
  8. A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters – Sam Sax
  9. Throttle – Joe Hill
  10. A Jury of Her Peers – Susan Glaspell
  11. Hunting Monsters – S.L. Huang

50-100 Pages:

  1. The Terracotta Bride – Zen Cho
  2. We Should All Be Feminists – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  3. New American Best Friend – Olivia Gatwood
  4. In the Tall Grass – Stephen King
  5. By the Bog of Cats – Marina Carr
  6. Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions – 
    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  7. The Grownup – Gillian Flynn
  8. Sour Candy – Kealan Patrick Burke
  9. Avi Cantor Has Six Months to Live – Sacha Lamb
  10. Rose – Li-Young Lee
  11. This Way to the Sugar – Hieu Minh Nguyen
  12. The Little Red Wolf – Amélie Fléchais
  13. White Nights – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  14. The Curse Catcher – Laura Thalassa
  15. Night Sky with Exit Wounds – Ocean Vuong
  16. Black Helicopters – Caitlín R. Kiernan
  17. Riding the Track – Kara Ripley
  18. Bingo Love – Tee Franklin
  19. Learning Curves – Ceillie Simkiss
  20. Don’t Tell My Mother – Brigitte Bautista
  21. I’m Afraid of Men – Vivek Shraya
  22. The Lost Path – Amélie Fléchais
  23. ApocalyptiGirl – Andrew MacLean
  24. Jealousy Survival Guide – Kitty Chambliss
  25. Bluets – Maggie Nelson

100-150 Pages:

  1. Pizzeria Kamikaze – Etgar Keret
  2. Ongoingness – Sarah Manguso
  3. The Atrocities – Jeremy C. Shipp
  4. Ariel – Sylvia Plath
  5. Some New Ambush – Carys Davies
  6. Heathen Volume #1 – Natasha Alterici
  7. Afterlife – Melissa Jennings
  8. The Black God’s Drums – P. Djèlí Clark
  9. Do/ Story/ – Bobette Buster
  10. Wenjack – Joseph Boyden
  11. Water Memory – Mathieu Reynès
  12. The Backstagers Vol. 1 – James Tynion IV
  13. The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion – Margaret Killjoy
  14. Heavy Vinyl Vol. 1 – Carly Usdin
  15. Evidence of the Affair – Taylor Jenkins Reid
  16. Women & Power – Mary Beard
  17. A House at the Bottom of a Lake – Josh Malerman
  18. Moonstruck Vol. 1 – Grace Ellis
  19. The Devil You Know – KJ Parker
  20. Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time – Hope Nicholson
  21. Taproot – Keezy Young
  22. Giant Days Vol. 1 – John Allison
  23. Stairway – Matt Hawkins
  24. Kingdom of Needle and Bone – Mira Grant
  25. Sex Criminals Vol. 1 – Matt Fraction
  26. You Should Have Left – Daniel Kehlmann
  27. The Murders of Molly Southbourne
  28. Written on the Body – Lexie Bean
  29. The Buddha in the Attic – Julie Otsuka
  30. Dead Leaves – Patrick Kealan Burke
  31. All Hail the House Gods – Andrew J Stone
  32. The Reason I Jump – Naoki Higashida
  33. Zodiac Starforce Vol. 1 – Kevin Panetta
  34. Mockingbird Vol. 1 – Chelsea Cain
  35. Spell on Wheels – Kate Leth
  36. Runaways Vol. 1 – Rainbow Rowell
  37. Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat! Vol. 1 – Kate Leth
  38. Oh Honey – Emily Austin
  39. My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness – Kabi Nagata
  40. The ABCs of Socialism – Bhaskar Sunkara
  41. Batgirl Vol. 1 – Gail Simone
  42. Almost Midnight – Rainbow Rowell
  43. The Stepford Wives – Ira Levin
  44. Cold, Thin Air – CK Walter
  45. The Melody of You and Me – M. Hollis
  46. Anarchism and Its Aspirations – Cindy Milstein
  47. The Man in the Picture – Susan Hill
  48. Roadside Picnic – Arkady Strugatsky
  49. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? – Martin Noble
  50. May We Shed These Human Bodies – Amber Sparks

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Book Reviews, Bookworm Blogging, Readathons

Make Me Read It 2017 Wrap-Up

Sarah

This was my first readathon and I had a lot of fun with it! It was really great connecting with folks on Twitter who were also doing the readathon, and I participated in a couple of sprints. The books I chose were all from my owned-but-unread pile, because most of these books have been sitting on my shelves for a while and I needed some motivation to get to them!

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The first book I attempted to read was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It had been gifted to me probably a year or two ago and I’d been putting off reading it ever since. This is definitely not a book I would buy for myself, the concept is somewhat interesting (I went to college in Burlington, VT and a lot of my friends were “localvores” so I sort of know something about that), but the potential for condescension was way too high for me. And that initial perception was correct–although I adored Kingsolver’s writing from the start, it was clear that she has a very high and mighty attitude on the matter, which I didn’t appreciate. DNF.

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For my official book #1, I read Lost at Sea by Bryan Lee O’Malley. It was honestly a breathtaking book and you can find my full review here. To summarize, let me just say that it is a beautiful graphic novel about a girl finding herself. Also, there are a lot of cats.

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For my second book, I read Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus. My full review is scheduled for Saturday, I believe, but this is a lyrical collection of short stories. To my surprise and delight, they almost all took place in the Boston area, which is where I live!

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Next I tried to read Cats & Daughters by Helen Brown. I was not really impressed with the writing or the story. I didn’t make it very far in–not even far enough to meet the cat. It’s definitely less about cats and more a memoir. Which is fine, but I was really in it for the cats! DNF.

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My next tried-to-read book was The Atlantis Gene by A.G. Riddle. It was also not very well-written and from the start the plot seemed shaky to me. Perhaps it gets better, but I didn’t want to find out. I also felt really uncomfortable about the “cure for autism” aspect, although again I didn’t really read far enough in to get a real grip on that, so I can’t really speak to it. DNF.

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Finally, book #3 of the readathon was Wicked by Gregory Maguire. This was a reread, as I read this for the first time in high school and didn’t remember essentially any of it. And I’m actually still working my way through it because it is just… not holding my interest at all. It’s kind of been dragging on and I’m not really enjoying it at all! But I’ve made it pretty far in, so I’m dedicated to finishing it.

Anyway! That’s my wrap-up for Make Me Read It. I (kind of) made it through 3 books and was able to remove 3 more from my TBR. Even though I didn’t read as much as I’d have liked to, I did enjoy the readathon and am glad I was able to pull 6 books total off my TBR list! At least I really liked 2 out of the 3 books I ended up reading through, although next time I do a readathon I should probably put on more books I expect to like instead of making it all books I don’t know much about!

Thanks for reading! Did you do the Make Me Read It readathon? Share your experiences and/or your thoughts on my reads in the comments. You can also find me on Twitter and Goodreads.

Bookworm Blogging, Readathons

Make Me Read It Readathon 2017

Sarah

This is going to be my first readathon, and I’m super excited!! I first saw this over at Wonderless Reviews and thought it looked like a really cool idea. It’s hosted by Tea and Titles, and here’s the gist of it:

What is #MakeMeRead?

Look at the books you own, either physical, e-book or ones you’ve borrowed from the library and pick out a few you really want to read, or feel like you should read. It’s up to you how many you pick, personally I’d pick a few more than you expect to be able to read in a week. Example: if you think you’ll only read two, pick out five books or if you think you can read seven, pick out ten.

Make a list of these books on your blog, or make a video, or a Goodreads shelf or post a picture on Instagram—whatever is easiest for you. Then get friends, other bloggers/booktubers/bookstagrammers etc. to vote on which books you HAVE to read.

When the readathon comes along, you read the books in the order of most votes. For example, if one book gets 10 votes—you read that first, then the one that got 7 and so on. If there’s a tie, then it’s your preference. The goal is to read as many as possible.

When is it?

This year the read-a-thon will be running from August 6th through to August 13th. You can start reading as soon as it hits 12am in your timezone, or whenever you’d like.

Remember that the idea is to have people vote on your books, so try and get that post/Twitter poll/photo up as soon as possible in order to give your fellow participants the chance to vote!

My poll is below! They’re all books I own and have not read yet (save for one reread) and you can choose up to three. I’m super excited about this and I really hope I’m able to get a lot of books read!!

Are you participating in this readathon? Please let me know in the comments below! And link me to your polls so I can vote too. 🙂 You can also follow me on Twitter and Goodreads.