Fall 2017 Readathon: My Books and Best Laid Plans

Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon is coming! The Readathon is probably my favorite day of the whole year. There’s nothing more indulgent or nerdy that sitting down to read for an entire day with the rest of the bookish Internet.

To get ready, I’ve been focusing on my five major strategies for Readathon success — choosing short books with big fonts, starting with a quick-ish read, mixing genres and formats, preparing mostly healthy snacks, and getting the house tidied up for a distraction-free day. I’m also excited that I’ll have two Readathon companions this year. My sister and my mom will be around on Saturday, and both are planning a full day of reading. I think that will be really fun!

I’ve been taking books and and off my stacks for the last few weeks, but I think I’ve finally settled on my options for Saturday. If the day goes really well I’ll be able to finish four books, plus a few comics, and clock in some time with an audio book. Here’s what I’m considering:

Nonfiction

• A Moonless, Starless Sky by Alexis Okeowo (256 pages) — Four narratives of “ordinary women and men fighting extremism in Africa.”
• The Return by Hishram Matar (272 pages) — “When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. … Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance.”
• Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud by Anne Helen Petersen (288 pages) — Essays about unruly women and their impact on popular culture.
• The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer (288 pages) — In the 1980s, librarians banded together to save ancient Arabic texts from Al Qaeda.

Fiction

• The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel (272 pages) — A young man brought up in a corrupt family agrees to one last heist in order to break free.
• Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (288 pages) — “The suspenseful and heartbreaking story of an immigrant family driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences.”
• The Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland (272 pages) — The last transcriptionist at a New York City newspaper has a simple life, until a story shocks her out of her reverie.
• The Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo (288 pages) — Short stories set in the world of one of my favorite YA books, the Grisha Trilogy.

I’ve also got several comics on my pile — four volumes of Lumberjanes, Saga Volume 7, Wonder Woman Vol. 3: The Truth, and a couple volumes of Phoebe and Her Unicorn. I am pretty psyched about those too!

Like usual, I’ll have a post up here on Saturday where I’ll collect my updates from the day, primarily my Twitter feed (@kimthedork) and Instagram (kimthedork). For the last several Readathons, I’ve been using Storify to collect all of my updates in one place, and I anticipate doing that again because it’s really convenient.

Happy Readathon, see you then!