Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon: I Read, I Puked, I Read Some More

This was definitely the weirdest read-a-thon experience I've had.  It started off with me eating my snacks and starting The Lies of Locke Lamora on Thursday instead of saving everything for the actual read-a-thon.  No regrets though, snacks and book were great, and the book was super long and would have probably been kind of overwhelming to get through in one sitting.

Then I pretty much forgot to get my usual spreadsheet set up, so at 4:55 Saturday morning I was copying and pasting from last time's spreadsheet.  I finally got settled in and started, and the first few hours were magical as usual.  Birds chirping, the sky lightening, and good progress on my book.

Then I had to get my kid up and drive her across town for a class.  I didn't want to tune her out during our only time together, so I didn't listen to a book or anything while we drove.  I dropped her off and located a coffee shop, where I ate an almond croissant, drank a latte, and kept reading.  After I finished all that and worn out my coffee shop welcome, I still had some time before I had to pick her up.  I went to read in the car, but instead I fell asleep for an hour.  Whoops!

I was almost done with Lies, so I struck her a deal--I'd take her out for a quick lunch if she'd let me read while we ate.  I finally finished the book around 1:00 and was ready for a quicker read.

I picked up Garvey's Choice, figuring a middle grade novel in verse would go quickly, and I was right.  It took about half an hour to fly through.  It was cute, and quite a bit lighter than I'd anticipated.  Then I picked up Amy Schumer's memoir, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo.  I keep getting disappointed with celebrity memoirs, and I don't actually know much about her work, but I'd read somewhere that it was actually well written, and again, I figured it would be a breezy read for mid-RAT.  It was pretty good, less name dropping and more feminism than some of the ones I've read.

After those books, I was ready for something a little more involving, so I picked up The Upside of Unrequited.  You can see my adoring review here.  What it doesn't mention is that for the last hundred pages or so, I was feeling increasingly queasy.  Right around when I finished it, I got sick, which is a euphemism for "started puking."  So that was fun.  By the time things had calmed down, I was wiped out, so I just went to bed.

Yep.  24 hour read-a-thon, and I went to bed at 8 pm.  Nice.

But then I woke up around 3 am, with two hours left, and decided to regroup and rejoin.  So I picked up Ghost and was absolutely enchanted by it.  It was only 4:30 when I finished, so I grabbed volume two of Giant Days, a graphic novel series about three UK college students.  I may have taken slightly longer than a half hour to finish it, but I'm still counting it.

I did very few of the check-ins and challenges.  I got a nap and the equivalent of a full night's sleep.  I threw up, and I HATE throwing up.  But I finished six books.  I liked all of them, and loved four.