January Readathon and 2018 Challenges

I tackled a couple of reading challenges last year. And they really helped to start my year off right. In fact, they gave me such a huge spurt of accomplishment, I made my reading goal – and knocked out some books I’d been wanting to read for a long time, several of them five star reads. All this to say, I’m here to do it again.

This year, I thought I’d do the #RockMyTBR challenge again, but with a different tack. I’m doing #BeattheBacklist, which involves a little more accountability, a little more checking in. In fact, it looks like Austine put a heckuva lot of work into this!  There is a Bookstagram challenge, teams and prizes. I’m on the Story Sorcerors team. I fell off #RockMyTBR about halfway through, so I still have quite a pile of stuff here that I need to either read or just peruse and unhaul.

After attempting several readathons over the past couple of years, I think I finally have the idea down. There are certain things you should do: get your bookstack together; get your snacks/meals prepared; and get sleep before it starts. Last weekend, I did the #endofyearreadathon, which was hosted by friends on Instagram. We had a chat going and it was really fun. I read over 500 pages in the time I participated, which was about ten hours. It was a 24 hour readathon, and it helped me meet my Reading Challenge goal for the year on GoodReads. I feel like I got my feet wet with that one, and can get ready for a longer one.

Now I’m ready to dive into it for the new year, and for a little bit longer time. I am also doing Bout of Books, which I did last year too. Bout of Books is a week-long readathon, which this time runs from Jan 8 -14. Obviously, for a readathon this long, you can’t do all your prep ahead of time. But you can do some of it. And I will – getting my stack ready, getting certain snacks in the pantry, and clearing my calendar. I want to finish some series, and make a dent in my ARC shelf, and read some Tolkien books that are outside of Lord of the Rings. So my list looks something like this:

Godsgrave by Jay Kristoff
Ecstasy by Mary Sharratt
Stormdancer by Jay Kristoff
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Night of Cake and Puppets by Laini Taylor
Beren and Luthien by JRR Tolkien
This looks like a lot for a week, but a couple of them are really novellas. So I think this is reasonable, given that I read 20 books last January. And I’ll be working at the skating rink again, as a warming house attendant, which is basically guaranteed reading time (given that it’s freaking freezing out). That is what really helped me last year. I am looking forward to getting some long-awaited books read!

I find readathons really motivating. In fact, the 24 hour readathon actually motivated me to get my Best of 2017 blog post up a day earlier than I had planned, because the day I had planned to work on the post was the readathon day. And it needed to go up! So that was a great way to start off the readathon.

Last year, I did a diversity readathon run by Read at Midnight, but this year she did one in December and I simply didn’t have time then. In November, I signed up for the House Cup Reading Challenge, which I thought ran a lot longer than it did. So I totally messed up on that one. Sigh. Still, Ravenclaw won so yay for House Pride!

I’m always looking for new reading challenges. What are some reading challenges you have done? How have they helped you with your reading? Do you like to do them or not?