“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”* ― Learning, sharing and connecting through reading

 

One of the marvellous benefits of the internet is the opportunity to connect and share common interests with others around the globe, and in doing so, find new and expanded horizons.

It is always lovely to connect with fellow book-lovers and reading fans.  Participating in last weekend’s Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon was a compressed version of the joys of sharing book recommendations, reading thoughts and of course the all important low-down on snacks.  In the end, I read for about 6 hours in total, getting through approx 400 pages across four books.  This is probably about double the amount of reading I would normally do, so in that empirical sense it was a success, although it is really not about quantity.  And it’s amazing how easy it is to fall in to a jolly conversation on twitter about favourite books with one of the Readathon hosts at 4am in the morning – so much more fun than just having insomnia, which is an annoying feature of my life at the moment.  🙄

Continue reading →

This weekend I’m booked: Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon 2019

Woohoo, it’s time for the autumn Dewey’s 24-hour Readathon, which celebrates all things bookish, and where participants “read books, post to our blogs, Twitters, Instagrams, Litsy, Facebook, Goodreads and MORE about our reading, and visit other readers’ homes online”.  What better way could there be to spend time at the weekend!

Of course, it is not necessary literally to read for 24 hours.  You can just read for 5 minutes if you want to.  But from all the posts I have seen so far, it looks as if many folks have crazily high To Be Read piles and why not.  We all know that putting together lists and piles of books to read is one of the great pleasures of being an avid reader!

As you can see from the picture above, I have a modest pile in terms of number of volumes, but an ambitious one vis à vis number of pages.  Ducks, Newburyport is famously nearly 1,000 pages long, with only a handful of full stops.  But everything I have seen about it suggests that it is a wonderful read.  I have been saving it for this weekend because I think it will be worth having some dedicated reading time to get in to it properly.

And if I need a change or fancy a distraction, I have several great library books to continue reading.  I have not yet started Praise Song For The Butterflies, but am part-way through the other three, and enjoying all of them.  I am not expecting to read all of these books all the way through in 24 hours – I may be a reading fanatic but nothing gets in the way of watching Strictly Come Dancing on a Saturday evening.  But it will be great to be spending plenty of time between the pages.

The 24-hour period kicks off today (26 October) at 8am Eastern Time, which is a very civilised 1pm for me here in Scotland.

I am looking forward to checking out what everyone else is doing on the various social media platforms, as well as my own reading of course.  And most importantly, there will be snacks.  Oh yes – one’s choice of reading snack is almost as important as the books to read during the Readathon.  Along with copious amounts of tea, natch.

So I’m ready to go – roll on 1pm! 🙂