Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Winter's Respite read-a-athon final results

I finished strong this weekend, reading around 470 pages in Fear and a new ARC, Visible City.  I'm very pleased generally with the results of the week:

Total pages read:  680
Number of books finished:  0

I didn't finish either of the two big books I was working on, but I did get through about 500 pages of Fear.  I also read a 300-page chunk of Fear in one day (which is a lot of pages for me), and have had a very different reading experience with that novel.  It's a big Russian novel from the Soviet period, and there are lots of narrative threads to follow.  Reading so much of the novel in one day helped me piece together all the threads and their place in the larger narrative.   

The experience of this read-a-thon was really positive.  I was keenly aware late last week that I was not able to read much, and that the clock was ticking on the read-a-thon.  I didn't feel the time pressure in a negative way, but rather as a gentle prod to keep reading.  When the weekend came, I knew exactly what I was going to do:  read as much as possible.  Instead of getting distracted by watching live feeds from Kyiv, or watching a terrible Super Bowl, I spent most of Saturday and Sunday focused on reading.  That's where the longer read-a-thon was a good thing for me.  It gave me a clear sense of how to use my spare time this week, and as a result I wasted less of it.

I'm grateful to the truebookaddict for hosting this challenge.  It was great fun, and I look forward to the next one.  Actually, I would love to apply the same discipline of the read-a-thon week to every one of my reading week

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