48 Hour Book Challenge Finish Line

My first 48 Hour Book Challenge is complete and I consider it a huge success. It was so nice to have a weekend specifically devoted to reading. Although I didn’t get as hardcore as many people, I was still really pleased with my results. The books I had in progress are finished and I even added two new books to my pile. The final stats:

  • 13.75 total hours read
  • 1599 pages read
  • 7 books finished
  • 3 cups of tea consumed
  • Extra credit*: 1.25 hours reading time, 154 pages read

The Books

-1I don’t think I had a bad book in the batch. I felt like I had a nice mix of contemporary realism (The Moon and More, The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet,ย Dirty Little Secrets, and Jellicoe Road), fantasy (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and Shiver), and adult crossover (Tell the Wolves I’m Home). I’d definitely recommend any of the above. It also felt really good to finally cross a lot of those off my list–they’d been hanging out on my nightstand for far too long.

For me, this was a great reminder that sometimes you need to put away the phone, close the laptop, and shut off the TV. It’s easy to get sucked into “just one more Tweet,” but that ultimately means missing out on lots of good reading time. I’m going to try to be more mindful of this moving forward, because I loved reading all weekend. It reminded me of being a kid again and holing up in my room with a pile of library books. (You know, in the olden days when we used to have to call people to find out what they were having for lunch or when we couldn’t stream our favorite shows directly to our computers.) Any tweets or blog posts you miss will be waiting for you once you’re done with that chapter.

Thanks so much to Ms. Yingling for hosting this year’s challenge! (Also, major props to her 30 hours of reading time. Holy cow!) And high five to everyone else who spent the weekend

*If you didn’t see yesterday, the extra credit was from not having finished Jellicoe Road in the allotted 48-hour period but not being able to stop reading because of all the feelings.

19 thoughts on “48 Hour Book Challenge Finish Line

  1. pookapicks says:

    Wow! I can’t believe you read “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” for the challenge! It’s bulk is so intimidating! (I really do mean all of these exclamation points! I keep considered using different punctuation but that would be untrue). I haven’t even been able to bring myself to read that (though I’ve heard only good things about it by people who have read and loved some of my favorite recent-ish books, “The Night Circus”,”The Magicians”) because it’s such a time commitment. I keep thinking of how many other books I could read (that I want to read) in the time it’d take me to finish that monster. What if you’d gotten bogged down? Haha.

    I really admire your approach to the challenge. Kind of calm and innocent and natural. I felt the complete opposite: “gotta go, gotta go, read, read read: this is a CHALLENGE! FOR SPARTA! er…) That’d be my competitive spirit… I’m gonna try to borrow some of your zen next time.

    • Annie Cardi says:

      Oh man, don’t worry–I was almost at the end of “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” when I started it for the challenge. It was one reason I jumped in–I just wanted to finish it already and kept getting distracted by other books. ๐Ÿ˜‰

      And I did enjoy the zen approach, but I think there’s something to be said for a competitive spirit, too. Some people logged 30+ hours of reading; I think you need to be competitive to do that!

  2. laekanzeakemp says:

    Jellicoe Road is one of my favorite books of all time.squeezing in time to read us so hard but maybe incorporating something like this one weekend enough would help. And I’ll definitely have to check out some of the books that were on your list. I’m on hold for tell the wolves I’m home. Can’t wait for that one.

    • Annie Cardi says:

      Granted, several of them were already in process when the challenge began. (I totally can’t claim to reading all of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in two days.) But it was a great way to get through my “currently reading” list. You should totally try it!

  3. shelleybookclutter says:

    I really wanted to get Jellicoe Road for this challenge but it was checked out at my library. I have wanted to read Jonathan Strange for a while now and I’m thinking this summer I’ll get to it!

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