firewhiskeyreader

I love participating in readathons even though I’m good at them like one time out of three. This one is a particular favorite though because there are no challenges. It’s just read as much as you can in a weekend and that’s basically my ideal way to spend a weekend! That said, I gave myself a challenge, which was to tackle as many of the 15 books hanging out in my currently reading shelf on Goodreads as possible. Anyway, I’m going to try and go in hourly order of what I was doing, but at some point… I kinda failed at noting that so I may have to guess.

Hour Zero – One: I spent from 12:00 am to about 12:42 am finishing up the last 50% Marriage of Unconvenience by Chelsea Cameron, bringing my total minutes to 41:23 and my total pages to 98. This book is about two best friends who agree to get married because they both need money and one of them has a trust they can’t touch until they get married. One is out as a lesbian and the other thinks she’s straight. As this is a romance novel, that is actually untrue and they fall for each other. It’s a cute, fluffy book that could have used tighter editing.

Hours One-Eight: I was asleep!

Hour Eight: I started listening to Wildfire by Ilona Andrews when I woke up because I didn’t feel like listening to the audiobooks I was actually in the middle of…

Hour Nine: I continued Wildfire as I finished getting ready and in the car as I went to the post office and then City Lights, the cafe part. While I was eating breakfast, I picked up Forged in Desire by Brenda Jackson, which was the book I had chosen to continue first from my Try a Chapter Tag: Romantic Suspense. I started off on page 60 of that one.

Hour Ten: When I finished my latte, I went upstairs to the bookstore. I had reached 204 pages at that point. I bought Zorro by Isabel Allende and… I honestly don’t remember. Two other books.

Hour Eleven: I went to Wal-Mart for provisions and listened to Wildfire as I was driving there and then to my house and then just kept on listening when I got home.

Hours Eleven-Fourteen: I kept listening to Wildfire until I finished it and I really, truly CANNOT wait for Sapphire Flames. Can it please be time to have that book in my hands now? Anyway, this brought my total pages to 633! I also participated in the Hour 12 Challenge, which may have inspired a later book in the readathon… The challenge was to feature a favorite audiobook, which meant I had to feature Daisy Jones & The Six. Obviously.

Hour Fifteen: I took a YouTube break here and then picked up Her Every Wish by Courtney Milan. I was 24% in when I picked this one up. I finished it not long after and just had to marvel at how utterly brilliant Courtney Milan is. She is just… like… I think she might be the smartest person ever?? Not to oversell her talents, but like, she’s Courtney Milan. Anyway, the fact that I left Daisy and Crash hanging out for MONTHS is really excessive. But I did love this novella a whole hecka ton. OH! And I think there was a mention of Crash having previously had relationships with men and women, so we got some bi or pan rep here. This added 89 pages to my pages read, bringing the total to 722.

Hour Seventeen: I needed to hurry up and finish All Through the Night by Suzanne Brockmann, which I was a mere 9% through when I started it. I finished it eventually and wow, I loved it a whole lot. Jules and Robin are truly just the best. I think this book deals with jealousy in an interesting way that I appreciated. This added 260 pages to my pages read bringing the total to 982.

Hour Twenty Two: I finally finished Forged in Desire by Brenda Jackson! It didn’t live up to the promise of the very beginning, but I do want to read the sequels, so I’m pretty sure it was the characters I didn’t like in this one and not the writing style. We’ll find out when I get around to the next one. I’m not positive how many pages were actually in this book because Goodreads says 384 and I just don’t think that’s right, but we’re going to roll with it and say it is. If that’s the case, 180 pages were added to my total here, bringing me to 1,162 pages.

Now is where my documentation gets fuzzy. Like… Very fuzzy.

Hours Twenty Three and Twenty Five: I’m not sure how long it took me, but I finished On the Come Up by Angie Thomas, which I really struggled with, to be honest. Like I said in my Goodreads review, it was obviously good but not for me. I’m too old for teenagers without control over their impulses, especially in moments when it puts them in more danger. Like fight, flight or freeze? Bri was a fighter all the way. I’m a freezer, maybe flight if I can manage. It gives me INTENSE anxiety to read about people being in danger, especially if it’s outside of the context of a romance novel where I know it’ll all fix itself in the end. I had started out at page 130 so I finished the last 317 pages, bringing my total to 1,479.

Hours Twenty Six-Hour Thirty Two: Tbh, I have no idea how long I slept.

Hour Thirty Two: What I do know is that when I woke up, I did not feel like listening to White Fragility because it requires too much brain power, so I resumed my listening of Daisy Jones & The Six because of course I did. I pretty much laid around until I’d completed that audiobook, which I loved just as much this time around. This book is actually perfect. I think I listened to the last 300 pages of the audiobook, bringing my total to 1,779.

Hour Thirty Six: I tried to read Heartbeat Braves, but my eyeballs were not having it, so instead I listened to the last bit of White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, which every white person really needs to read. Seriously. It’s so informative and it will call you out no matter how “woke” you think you are. It really emphasized to me that the work of unlearning racism is a lifelong project and not a thing where reading a few Twitter threads and a few nonfiction books will magically “fix” me. I cannot recommend you read this enough, honestly. I could be wildly wrong with this math, but I think all I had left of this book was the equivalent of 39 pages, which would bring my total pages to 1,818.

Hour Thirty Eight: It was finally time to sit my butt down and force it to read the last 79% of Heartbeat Braves. All things said and done, I did not love this at all and that ending barely felt like HFN so I kind of had a bit of a rage black out. That said, it’s a totally fine, not sexy really, new adult book featuring Native Americans from a variety of Tribes trying to make life better for urban Native Americans. The last 79% meant I read 183 pages, bringing my total to 2,001.

Hour Forty Two: I read a little more of A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas, but mostly I just gave up on physically reading. This did add 87 pages to my total though! In other words, at this point, I’d read 2,088 pages.

Hour Forty Five-Forty Eight: I listened to How to Date Your Dragon by Molly Hooper because I couldn’t bear to physically read anything else. I didn’t get it finished, but it was fun and quick and, most importantly, fills a square on The Ripped Bodice Summer Bingo board that gave me a BINGO! It’s audio only though so who knows how many pages that was. We’ll guesstimate that I read the equivalent of 200 pages and go from there. With that guesstimate, it means I read 2,288 pages in 20 hours, which is quite impressive, if I do say so myself. Shout out to audiobooks for their assistance!

In total, I read 20 hours and some change this weekend. Now to try and calculate all of the pages.