READATHONNNN!

After a year of training, it's finally upon me! Dewey's October 24-hour Readathon. I feel very fit ready for this. And I'm only five hours late.

But Tika, you may ask, what kind of training can one really do in order to read and eat delicious snacks all day? And also, doesn't that sound like... pretty much any weekend for you?

Well, dear readers, the training regimen for these kinds of things is more rigorous than you may think. I had a salad for lunch yesterday, and if that's not extreme self restraint, I don't know what is when there's chicken bruschetta pizza on the menu. I can neither confirm nor deny whether said salad had bleu cheese and bacon on it, but I can confirm that I'm neither a monk nor a nun.

Training for a readathon requires me to visit my wheelhouse, which is aggregating finger foods. I've collected snacks in the form of loads of Kenyan tea (hand-carried halfway around the world to me by my co-worker - who is actually from Kenya - because he knows how much I love tea), Honeycrisp apples (the Cadbury mini-eggs of the apple world), smoked gouda cheese, popcorn, and "Uncured Hot Salami," whose title never fails to make me alternately giggle and think, "ew. Uncured?" Whoever is in charge of naming things at that company clearly needs a vacation but the salami is delicious.

I've also put in a couple of excellent days with the GIF Admiration Society's own MiniReadathons, which most of you will probably recognize as "stuff you have participated in" because everyone who reads this is pretty much my social media buddy, as previously noted. Those of you who made it to #427 on the readers sign-up list,

(Adorable baby courtesy of Raych! Hi Raych!)

I am very impressed by you.

As for your second question, what exactly did you think training was? My brother informed me that 24 hours was a long time to read and that he would probably fall asleep at least 4 times. I gleefully informed him that I will probably only fall asleep ONCE, and that is what training gets you, my friends: fewer naps on a Saturday.

Wanna see what I'm reading?

I've also got the audiobook for All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot on deck for when I need a break from reading with my eyes and want to knit or maybe even take a walk. Being prepared to consume literature in all contingencies is important in these situations.

UPDATE! 

Let's see. Today I have consumed an inordinate amount of chocolate, crackers, apples, posole, and cheese. I finished Black Sun Rising around noon and now it's 8pm and I've taken two naps (100% more than I planned but only half of what my brother would have taken so I'mma call that a win), read the introduction and first several few okay three chapters of Dracula, tweeted a whole bunch, and now I think I'm going to listen to some James Herriot and knit for awhile.

Or maybe I'll play some video games and drink some wine. #readathon

In Which I am Not Dead nor Disappeared

Ariel could use some highlights.

It's been awhile? I guess? Somehow this always happens to me in the fall. I've been reading and doing stuff but I haven't really had anything to SAY about it. Plus I talk to most of you via social media pretty much every day, so it's no like you MISSED me or anything. 

Y'anyway. In the last couple of weeks, my library queue has shrunk and I am left only with the Ambitious Non-fiction on my nightstand. I have every intention of reading it because Reza Aslan is an incredibly amazing historian and also a quite engaging writer. But every time I look at it, I get intimidated and think of him just mentioning in that interview with Fox News how he can't help but imagine that the interviewer did not read his book. 

So instead I combed my shelves for some comfortable sci-fi I haven't read in awhile, and since I finished C.S. Friedman's latest trilogy recently, I picked up the first book in her Coldfire trilogy (sensing a theme here, Friedman...), Black Sun Rising. There are several sci-fi/fantasy series that get an extra point from me because I've been reading them since I was a teenager, and this is one of them. It takes place in the far distant future after Terrans took to the stars, colonized a planet at the far edge of the galaxy, ran into some serious trouble because said planet is prone to serious earthquakes and those earthquakes let loose rivers of fae that manifest the strongest emotions of the people around them. So while you're happy, that's fantastic, but the moment you have a nightmare or are afraid, the planet will try to eat you. 

There's just one thing missing.

In other news, this post should be subtitled "But I Do Succumb to Peer Pressure," because Alice has been BADGERING me for over a week via gchat about joining this Saturday's readathon. She even invoked the California contingent and told me that Megs had already joined.

Which, by way of this post, I am doing. 

I am compelled to point out at this juncture that it was roughly this time last year that the GIF Admiration Society coalesced and decided that a whole 24 hours was FAR too many for us, and that we needed to establish a shorter period of time to work up to participating in the Dewey madness. Since then, we have done two mini-thons - complete with mini-snacks and the mini-theme - with varying degrees of success depending on what your measurement is (a plethora of snacks planned and consumed: success! reporting on said snacks to Twitter and other social media: success! reading of actual books: varying). 

Saturday's readathon probably starts waaaaay too early for me and there's definitely no way I'm going to be able to stay up for 24 hours straight - much less read for that long without going crazy - so my current plan is to set my alarm for a somewhat reasonable hour of a Saturday morning, read and eat until I need to do something else, then knit and listen to an audiobook and maybe take a walk, then probably meet a couple of girlfriends for sangria margaritas. Then I'll come home and stare at my book in confusion before giving up and eating more food. 

I'm anticipating a lot of success in the first two categories, is what I'm saying.