Happy Read-a-Thon everyone! Like I said in my book stack post yesterday, I’m going to use my neglected Tumblr, A Little Bit of Dorkiness, and my Twitter feed (@kimthedork) for updates throughout the day.

But I saw on Twitter that Jenn of Jenn’s Bookshelves links up her Tumblr posts to a main update past on her blog, which seemed like a good idea. So I’m going to copy here — you can find updates quickly on Tumblr, but I’ll occasionally stop in here to respond to comments as needed and post links to what I’m up to.

Happy Readathon!!

• Update 1: Introductory Questionnaire, 8:10 a.m. (Hour 2)
  
• Update 2: 100 Pages Down, 9:55 a.m. (Hour 3)
• Mini-Challenge: Book Spine Poetry
• Breakfast break!
• Update 3: Reading Slowly, 12:20 p.m. (Hour 6)
• Mini-Challenge: Self-Portrait
• Update 4: I Finished Two Books! 3:45 p.m. (Hour 9)
• Update 5: Zombies and Dinner, 5:40 p.m. (Hour 11)
• Update 6: Mid-Event Survey, 8:30 p.m. (Hour 14)
• Update 7: Sleep Time, 12:20 p.m. (Hour 18)

And that’s where I’m calling it a night. Thanks for all of the comments and cheering and good old bookish nerding out, everyone. I’ll be back tomorrow with my regular Sunday Currently post and the closing survey for the readthon. Happy reading!

• Update 7: End of the Event Meme
  

The Readathon is coming!

Tomorrow, Saturday, April 28, is Dewey’s Read-a-Thon, an excuse for book nerds around the world to set aside their responsibilities for a day to spend an entire day reading. While this is what I end up doing most Saturday afternoons, there’s something special about doing it at the same time as nearly 400 other people around the world.

I’m going to try something a little different this year. Rather than making updates on a post on this blog, I’m going to use my neglected Tumblr, A Little Bit of Dorkiness, and my Twitter feed (@kimthedork) for updates throughout the day. It’s supposed to be beautiful and spring-like in Minnesota tomorrow, so I’m hoping to be outside much of the day. Since I can update Tumblr easily from my phone it seems like a good option.

I may do a couple of check-in posts here as well, but for the most part I hope you’ll see updates on Tumblr if my readathon progress interests you.

One of the traditions for a readathon is to pick out a book pile ahead of time. When I’m in the middle of the readathon, the prospect of choosing my next book from all of the books in my house (well over 300 unread at this point), is overwhelming. So I like to pull out a stack of options to choose from. I also love to go to the library and pick out some special readathon books. Here’s the stack I put together for tomorrow:

And if the titles are hard to read, here’s a list:

• Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
• Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
• A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan
• Divergent by Veronica Roth
• Red Ink by David Wessel
• World War Z by Max Brooks
• Everything Is Perfect When You’re a Liar by Kelly Oxford
• Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel
• The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins
• Telegraph Avenue (section 4) by Michael Chabon
• Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff

It’s way more books than I can read in a day. If I’m lucky, I’ll get through four of them, plus a section of Telegraph Avenue. But that’s pretty darn ambitious, given my past readathon performances.

I think I’m going to start with Frozen in Time because I need to post a review for a book tour on Monday. After that, my day is up for grabs. I’m planning to save Divergent and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children for late in the day, since I’ve had several people suggest they’re fast reads (which is what I need when it gets dark at night).

Tonight I need to go pick out some snacks and finish up the last few chores I didn’t get to this week. Then I can settle in tomorrow without guilt that I’m ignoring something important that needs to be done. I am so very excited.

Are you participating in tomorrow’s readathon? What books are you looking forward to? And thoughts on which books I should make sure to get to tomorrow?

Title: Contagious: Why Things Catch On
Author: Jonah Berger
Narrator: Keith Nobbs
Genre: Nonfiction
Year: 2013
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Acquired: Purchased from Audible
Rating:

Review: What makes things popular?

That’s the fiendishly complex question at the center of Contagious by Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In the book, Berger looks to explain “social epidemics” — moments where ideas, products or behaviors spread through a population — and to look at what features converge to make these ideas, products or behaviors viral or likely to spread by word-of-mouth. Berger and his colleagues have outlined six principles of contagiousness: products or ideas that contain social currency and are triggered, emotional, public, practically valuable, and wrapped into stories.

The book is an interesting mix of the obvious and the counter-intuitive. I wish I had examples for you, but since I listened to the audio book I didn’t take any notes and the specifics have faded in my brain. But, I do distinctly remember having moments where I thought his conclusion gelled with what I assumed about viral content, while other times his research indicated features of popular content that I wouldn’t have pegged before.

The book is also full of interesting, real-world examples. I was most curious about some research Berger and his colleagues did on what newspaper stories are shared most and how emotions play into what we remember and share with others. If I remember correctly, people are just as likely to share content that is “positive” as they are to share content that is “negative,” but only when the emotions that a story triggers are very strong. That’s not the conclusion I would have expected.

Overall, this is an excellent piece of accessible nonfiction. And despite not having a narrative arc to move forward like I usually like in audio books, this one works well to listen to. Keith Nobbs is an engaging narrator, and the structure of the book is clearly laid out in the introduction. Plus, it’s pretty short (around 7 hours), so I didn’t feel like I’d forgotten the beginning by the time I made it to the end.

If you’re into marketing or curious about what makes thins go viral, Contagious would be a great place to start reading.

Other Reviews: Lesa’s Book Critiques |

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!

Title: Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls: Essays, Etc.
Author: David Sedaris
Genre: Nonfiction/essays
Year: 2013
Publisher: Little Brown
Acquired: From the publisher for review consideration
Rating:

Review: Oh, David Sedaris. When a copy of Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls arrived on my doorstep, I actually squealed because getting one his essay collections always delights me. Admittedly, I was pretty disappointed with his last collection, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, because it felt familiar and formulaic. In my review, I wrote that it seemed like Sedaris relied too heavily on a single formula — silly opening anecdote, story about Sedaris and family/Hugh, tangentially related anecdote, really great line, tangentially related anecdote, clever last line tying the story together. I also remember feeling like the book was a little over-the-top, like Sedaris was pushing too hard to make his stories funny.

I was so happy to discover that Sedaris decided to use a little more restraint in Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls. The essays are extremely funny, but in a way that feels more realistic. They’re more subdued, but in a way that makes them feel richer and more reflective. They’re still full of Sedaris’ skewed and strange way of seeing the world, but it doesn’t feel quite so absurd this time around. The collection is delightful.

One of my favorite essays was one called “Standing By,” which is all about flight delays. It sounds boring, I suppose, but I loved the way Sedaris nailed how we all sort of respond the same way, being melodramatic and judge-y and not our best selves:

We’re forever blaming the airline industry for turning us into monsters: it’s the fault of the ticket agents, the baggage handlers, the slowpokes at the newsstands and the fast-food restaurants. But what if this is who we truly are, and the airport’s just a forum that allows us to be our real selves, not just hateful but gloriously so? … It’s a depressing thought and one that proved hard to shake.

That excerpt is a little dark, I suppose, but the essay isn’t really cheerful. Funny, a little twisted, and full of strange people, not exactly sunshine and rainbows. But I liked it anyway.

Sedaris intersperses the nonfiction essays with a series of fictional monologues (the Etc. of the subtitle) written in a series of personas — a religious zealot hoping to use Jesus to deal with some personal vendettas, a woman angry about a bad wedding gift, a man worried about what gay marriage will do to his marriage, and others. I think they fit into the greater scheme of the book because they’re, at least in part, about how people can misunderstand the world or have trouble seeing themselves for who they are, a flaw in himself that Sedaris writes about continually. If you’re politically conservative, I think this might border on the offensive, but since I’m more of a moderate I thought they were pretty funny caricatures.

If you are a fan of Sedaris, or are looking for a collection to get into him for the first time, you won’t be disappointed starting with this one. Although it feels quieter than some of his previous work, his restraint highlights what is so funny about his way of viewing the world.

Other Reviews: S. Krishna’s Books |

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!