Discussion: Readathons

Hey all, Dani here.

Welcome, once more, to Friday. Last week was a Recommendation post, so that means that this week is a Discussion topic, and seeing as how next weekend is Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon for the fall, I’m going to talk about my thoughts and experiences when it comes to these reading events.

Obviously if you feel the need to go back through my blog’s history, I have done so many readathons. I think this upcoming Dewey’s Readathon will be my 10th one? And I’ve done a few other 24 Hour Readathons, as well as a couple week-long events. Because of all of these events, I felt like I had a decent enough amount of experience to write up a post with Tips and Tricks for Surviving a Readathon, so you can check out that post as well if you’re interested.

I’m in a weird position with reading this year. I’ve blown through my reading challenge goals so easily, and I’ve been reading so much more than I have in the past few years. It’s awesome, but it’s also made me a little more lax when it comes to participating in readathons. Actually I think most of the 24 Hour ones in 2019 I’ve only read a few pages or maybe a couple of books. My record for a Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon is completing 9 books, which was an outstanding thing, and I’d love to beat that. Now, obviously the easy way to beat that is to just binge-read volumes of manga. Most manga tend to be in the 200-230 page range, and I can read one in about 30-45 minutes. So if I’m focused and reading for as much of the 24 Hours as possible, then sure, I could probably read 20-ish books.

But, when it comes to this next session of Dewey’s, I had already scheduled a Halloween One-Shot D&D event at our local game store, so that’s going to take about 5 hours out of my reading day. But hey, 19 hours out of 24 still isn’t bad.

Of course I’m also not sure exactly what I want to read. I still have a week to figure everything out, which is nice. I could come up with a solid TBR, or I could just wing it and pick up whatever ends up sounding interesting. I just don’t know where my mood is going to be just yet.

The photos in this post are the next volumes of manga I need to pick up for each of these series that I’m reading, and then some Middle Grade books that I’ve been wanting to read, and some hopefully cutesy romances as well. The main goal when I’m trying to figure out what I want to read for these events is how quickly I can finish a book. There are many different ways to calculate success when it comes to a readathon. Some people count how much time they spend reading, some readathons track how many pages you read, and some track how many books you complete. I tend to focus on number of books, and then from there I can easily calculate the number of pages read.

That is why I try to choose the books I do. I want books that I know I’m going to read quickly. It doesn’t matter if the book is 500-600 pages if I will fly through the pages. Obviously my typically benchmarks are that a 300-400 page book should take around 2-2.5 hours, and a 500-600 page book will probably be closer to 4 hours, so I definitely don’t try and choose a lot of those. Then again a 200 page manga is a half-hour. So I’ll also try and switch between shorter, quicker reads and slightly longer ones.

I also find it helpful to switch up genres. If I’m just reading a whole bunch of fantasy then they start to feel a bit too similar after a number of hours of just straight-up reading. So if I read a fantasy and then read a contemporary then it keeps everything light and fresh in my mind.

But maybe that’s me.

I’ve seen some people who use readathons to binge-read a series they need to catch up on, or to barrel their way through that intimidating massive tome they’ve had their eyes on but just haven’t gotten around to starting yet.

I was tempted to pick up An Affinity for Steel: the Aeon’s Gate Omnibus by Sam Sykes, which is obviously three books together, but it is 1,472 pages in total. I have a feeling I’m going to love them, but I don’t know that I want to spend my whole readathon trying to get through this one book.

Okay, but yeah…does this post feel less like a discussion and more like I’m just rambling sort of about the topic of readathons? I guess that happens sometimes. I don’t know. I don’t have a specific aspect of readathons that I want to specifically talk about.

Do any of you do readathons? What’s your approach to figuring out your TBR? What sort of food and drinks do you like to consume during these reading events? Do you have a specific spot where you do your reading or is it just wherever you happen to pick up your book?

Let me know your thoughts on readathons in the comments below, and I will be back soon with more bookish content.