I Just Finished a #24in48 Readathon, Failed Miserably, And Moved On

There’s no sense in crying over spilled hours not spent reading. – me

Over the weekend, I participated in a #24in48 challenge on Bookstagram. To give you some background on what that is, it’s a reading challenge to read for 24 hours within 48 hours. It’s run by the people at @24in48 and usually over a weekend. The objective is to drop everything you’re doing, stop adulting, and just freaking read! There’s also other challenges throughout the year, but this one is the biggie.

Of course this is a tough challenge because no matter how you slice it. It’s tough to read for 12 hours in a day. But I decided to challenge myself this weekend and sit on my tush for 24 hours and read books. Here’s how it went:

The Books

• All Your Perfects by Colleen Hoover
• The Snowman by Jo Nesbo
• The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones by Cassandra Clare

You may already know this list from my Friday What I’m Reading this Weekend (still in development), but I didn’t know that this weekend was the #24in48 readathon, so I entered these books into my challenge.

The First Book

The first book I read was All Your Perfects by Colleen Hoover. I was the most excited about this book since I received it earlier this week and squealed like a little girl when I received it. I even opened the package in my building’s foyer than waiting to get back to my apartment. Yes, I was THAT excited.

I also timed myself using my phone’s stopwatch and only hitting the pause button when I wasn’t actively reading. Here’s my time around when I finished. As you can see, I finished reading the book in four and a half hours, but by that time it was already 4:44PM (I started reading at 7AM). So a book that took me four and a half hours to read actually took nine and a half hours. What did I do with that time??

What I didn’t know was that this was going to be a harder challenge than I thought. After the first day, I was 100% convinced that I’ve read over 12 hours of books. Sadly, when I looked at the time, I realized I only read for four hours. Ugh.

And after reading the emotionally fraught story, I needed a break so I decided to watch a little TV. The TV took over the rest of my evening and I didn’t do any other reading. That meant that I ended my day at only four and a half hours of reading. Wow, really winning.

The Second Book

The second book started on the second day of the challenge. I was only down four and a half hours, which means that I had to spend 19.5 hours reading on Sunday in order to catch up with the rest of the reading. I’m pretty sure I slept for seven hours already, which means that I’m left with only 17 hours for the whole day if I were to read from the moment I woke up until midnight.

Well, as you can probably guess, the math wasn’t going to add up. But that didn’t put a damper on my time. I decided I would still record the time it took me to read a book and started with The Snowman by Jo Nesbo.

To begin, crime fiction is definitely NOT my strong suit. I’m not a fan of crime fiction and sort of a fan of thrillers. It really depends on my mood and the book. But I had heard so many good things about this one from @crimebythebook that I had to pick it up and read it.

Since my husband also left for the day, I decided to take this time to really get into the book and make up the time difference. As you can tell, I didn’t make it very far. Sadly, I also finished The Snowman earlier this morning, a full eight hours after the readathon ended. I also didn’t get to read my third book (which I will actually start now because I’m excited to finally pick it up).

Conclusion

In the end, I had fun! I thought it was interesting to challenge myself this way and I learned a lot about my reading habits. I can read a book in a day, but it takes all day to read despite actually only taking me four hours. I think that’s probably the best thing I learned about this process.

I’ve also learned that I’m getting better with myself. While the challenge was to read for 24 hours, I’m not mad that I didn’t accomplish it. I think I might have quit too early, but I’m not mad about that either. The point of the challenge is to challenge yourself. If it doesn’t work out, then you can work to challenge yourself again in the future.

I imagine this like a Pokemon tournament. You can’t go into the ring and challenge another gym member when you’ve got two pokemon at Level 2. You need to work up to challenges. You need to train and fight and push yourself so that the next time the challenge comes around, you’re able to beat it.

I will definitely look forward to the next readathon and next time I’m going to read all the books I set out and also get a wicked cramp in my butt from sitting on it too long.