Social Distancing Readathon #84 - October 22 - 24

Welcome to another readathon!

We generally run from Friday at 5 p.m. to Sunday at midnight in whatever time zone you choose, but feel free to start earlier on Friday and wrap up overnight Sunday/Monday, if that's what you want to do.

Here are some things to track throughout the weekend, if you choose:

Books read from:
Books finished:
Time reading:
Time posting:
Snacks:
Thoughts:
Non-book activities:

Total books finished:
Total read from:
Total time reading:

Who is participating -

1. SilverWolf (SilverWolf28) -- Tennessee, USA
2. The_Hibernator (Rachel) - Richfield, Minnesota, USA
3. Cyrel (torontoc) -- Toronto, Canada
4. Nancy (nrmay) -- North Carolina, USA
5. Luci (elkiedee) -- London, UK
6. Benita (benitastrnad) -- Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA
7. Suzanne (Chatterbox) -- Rhode Island, USA
8. PawsforThought -- Sweden
9. Chris (ChrisG1)

Hi! I am doing Dewey's 24-hour readathon this weekend - I might as well make a full weekend of reading. 😁

I'm in. During the pandemic, my pace of reading has slowed down-although I like what I have been reading.

>2 The_Hibernator: Welcome!

I'm in! Going out of town for the weekend but I'll be reading while I'm away.

Currently reading The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street, a nice family story for middle readers.

I'm in. I hope to finish at least one book today, Malibu Rising, today, but whether this will be before or during the readathon I'm not sure. Then on Monday I'm doing a library outing. But last weekend I was close enough to the end of so many books I finished 4 during the Readathon and another, The Lincoln Highway overnight just afterwards.

I am in again. I am going to take a knitting class on Saturday but I plan on a quiet weekend at home otherwise so will be reading.

I've got work and housework to do, but wotthehell. I've had an infuriating week.

Friday update

Books reading from: Color of the Sea by John Hamamura. I have a good start on Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep and am about 2/3's done with Thieves of Baghdad by Matthew Bogdanos. I hope to finish this one this weekend. My audio book is I started An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard

Books finished in the last week:

Time reading: 1 hour while at lunch today
Time posting:
Food: leftovers from my refrig
Thoughts: I am disappointed in Unkindness of Magicians. This book has a great premise but the story is boring. The book just has no life. I am not sure that I will continue listening to it.
Non-book activities: Work. It is Homecoming weekend here and UA will be playing the University of Tennessee in a night game. The game starts at 6 PM so that means that I will be able to miss all the traffic tomorrow while I am doing my traveling. I am excited about my knitting class. I am going to learn to make socks. I have wanted to do this for years. I want to become known as the sock maker of Munden when I retire.

Total books finished since the read-a-thon began: 171
Total time reading for the Read-A-Thon since the Social Distancing read-a-thon began: 454 hours since April 2020.

I am starting early. 😊

Books read from: The Siege if Macindaw, by John Flannagan
Books finished: n/a
Time reading: 20 minutes
Time posting: 1 minute
Snacks: fruit bowl and pizza
Thoughts: I love readathons!
Non-book activities: working an 8 hour shift

Total books finished: n/a
Total read from: 1
Total time reading: 20 minutes

I’m in. I finally got my university library card this week so went slightly power hungry and borrowed four new books even though I have tons that need to be read already.

I’ll try to finish Busman’s Honeymoon and The Borrowers Afield as well as get started on Something Wicked This Way Comes.

I'm in again - another spousal work weekend, so much reading will happen! Just started The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel, final installment in her much praised Thomas Cromwell series. Also reading Harlan Ellison's classic short story collection I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

I'll join again, although I do have to spend a big chunk of the weekend doing work.

I'm in Silver and up and running with The Promise by Damon Galgut

Saturday 1.30 pm

Books read from: 7
Lucy Mangan, Are We Having Fun Yet?
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Malibu Rising - FINISHED 22.10.21
Frances Brody, A Snapshot of Murder
editor Sinead Gleeson, The Glass Shore
Mary Lawson, A Town Called Solace
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You
Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies

Books finished: 1
Pages read: 156
Book related:
Returning, borrowing and returning various library ebooks, and I've manged to join yet another neighbouring London borough's library service and borrow/reserve more ebooks. No, I'm never going to get to read everything at once but I can return/cancel things from my desk
LibraryThing and Goodreads additions and updates, checking latest Kindle bargains

Non-book activities: Radio, TV, Bejeweled Blitz, WhatsApp, other social media

Total books finished: 1
Total read from: 7
Total pages read: 156

I wasn't sure if I'd be able to participate this weekend but here I am.

Books read from: Apocalypse Suite, Invisible Women, Friend of the Family, Anthropocene Reviewed
Books finished: Apocalypse Suite
Time posting: 11am
Snacks: Currently drinking all the coffee!
Non-book activities: Attending a virtual conference - this is day 3.

Total books finished this weekend: 1
Total read from: 4

Report on Friday reading

Books read from: Henry and Clara, Homeland Elegies, Shuggie Bain
Books finished: 0
Time reading: 2 hours
Pages read: 109
Snacks: tater tots
Thoughts: I have tons of work to do this weekend but gave myself Friday evening off.
Non-book activities: Work, episode of the Crown, sleep

Total books finished: 0
Total read from: 3 Henry and Clara, Homeland Elegies, Shuggie Bain
Total pages read: 109
Total time reading: 2 hours

It's early afternoon on a pleasantly cool Saturday afternoon in Rhode Island.

My first check-in, so this covers yesterday afternoon/evening's reading, as well as some from my perpetual struggle with insomnia overnight.

Books read from: Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette, Femlandia by Christina Dalcher, The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick, and Your Inner Hedgehog by Alexander McCall Smith. Also a bit of long nonfiction book, A New World Begins, that promises to be an excellent look at the French Revolution.

Books finished: none yet
Time reading: Abt 5 hours
Pages read: 109

Snacks: a rice bowl with salmon/tuna/edamame/seaweed salad/mango for dinner last night; nothing yet today.
Thoughts: Remain worried about my father's growing confusion. Stressed about, well, everything, really.
Non-book activities: Going to try to catch up on my sleep this afternoon, then do some work this evening. Have a lot of laundry and organizational stuff to deal with.

Total books finished: 0
Total read from: 5, see above
Total time reading: 5 hours, though it's tough to keep track.

I just made the magical 75.

Books read from: Apocalypse Suite, Invisible Women, Friend of the Family, Anthropocene Reviewed
Books finished: Apocalypse Suite, Friend of the Family
Time posting: 7:30pm
Snacks: Left over Thai food
Non-book activities: Laundry and dishes

Total books finished this weekend: 2
Total read from: 4

>19 Deedledee: Congrats on the 75!!

This will be my early evening check-in; I don't think I'll be back this evening.

Books read from: Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette, Femlandia by Christina Dalcher, The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick, Your Inner Hedgehog by Alexander McCall Smith, and more of A New World Begins by Jeremy Popkin.

Books finished: none yet
Time reading: 4 hours?

Snacks: sandwiches for lunch/dinner (I only really eat one meal and a small snack per day, these days...)
Thoughts: Nice to be in touch with friends.
Non-book activities: Organizing stuff for my father. Unpacked grocery delivery. Tomorrow will be a big day for my father, as the elder daughter of his oldest friend, whom I have known all her life, is being kind enough to drive from Kitchener-Waterloo to Guelph in Ontario, to help him resolve some of the pesky technical issues he's been dealing with, and his landlord is dropping by in the afternoon to replace lightbulbs in a ceiling fixture. Such is my exciting life these days.

Total books finished: none yet! I should finish the Alexander McCall Smith book tonight; although it's an audiobook, it's also short. May wrap up the other two novels tomorrow.
Total read from: 5, see above
Total time reading: 9 hours, though it's tough to keep track.

I finished reading Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
Dinner- tofu with vegetables and peanut sauce

Saturday night update

Books reading from: Color of the Sea by John Hamamura. I have a good start on Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep and am about 2/3's done with Thieves of Baghdad by Matthew Bogdanos. I hope to finish this one this weekend. My audio book is I started An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard

Books finished in the last week:

Time reading: 1 hour while at eating supper this evening.
Time posting:
Food: coffee from Starbucks for breakfast and hashbrowns loaded, chunked, and covered from Waffle House - the South's best gourmet restaurant.
Thoughts: I listened to a great deal of Unkindness of Magicians and the story is picking up. I keep trying to read Color of the Sea and find that a different book has to be read to meet some closer deadline, so I push it back on my reading list. One of these days I will get to it in earnest. I also read about 15 pages in Thieves of Baghdad while eating my supper tonight. I was fortunate enough to find a Waffle House that allowed people to eat inside. This Southern fast food chain has been hit hard by the labor shortage and many of them are only doing take-out because they don't have enough employees. This particular Waffle House was trying to operate with 2 people when normally they have a crew of 5.
Non-book activities: Drove up to the yarn shop in Gadsden this morning and had a terrible time dragging myself out of bed early this morning in order to get myself there by 10 AM. I managed it, and am learning a whole new knitting technique. It is very different from the way I have been knitting, so if proving to be very interesting. This was a class that was offered for free if you purchased your yarn at this shop. I am happy to be learning a new knitting skill. This shop also sells tea and I had a very good smoky Lapsing Sochong that was perfect for the weather. It is trying to be fall down here in Alabama and not quite succeeding. They had to turn on the Air Conditioning in the shop because the temperature got up into the lower 80's this afternoon. I am going to bed early tonight and plan on reading alot later tonight and tomorrow.
Total books finished since the read-a-thon began: 171
Total time reading for the Read-A-Thon since the Social Distancing read-a-thon began: 455 hours since April 2020.

Sunday 11 am

Books read from: 7
Frances Brody, A Snapshot of Murder - FINISHED 23.10.21
Frances Brody, Kate Shackleton's First Case
editor Sinead Gleeson, The Glass Shore
Mary Lawson, A Town Called Solace
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You
Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies
Elaine di Rollo, A Proper Education for Girls

A Snapshot of Murder is #10 of 12 novels in a historical crime series featuring a woman in her 30s working as a sort of private detective in and around 1920s Leeds. They have a more "cosy" feel than the American hardboiled PI novel of the 1930s or the modern counterpart, but I like the character and I enjoy the fact that Kate lives between the two houses where I grew up in Woodhouse and Headingley, Leeds and also the house in Headingley where my dad lived with his second wife and their kids for 13 years.

Many of the stories are set in familiar locations - for example, Kate, her niece and the Headingley Photographic Society group she's a member of go on a weekend trip to Haworth, where the parsonage occupied by the Bronte sisters with their brother Branwell and father Patrick is about to be opened as a museum - this is a real place where we regularly took visiting friends from around the country and the world when I was a kid.

I only realised after I started reading that this book also includes a 74 page novella, Kate Shackleton's First Case, a welcome discovery since it's currently on sale as a standalone Kindle book for £1.99. The opening scenes of this take place in Betty's Tea Rooms in Harrogate, a very upmarket cafe in a spa town a few miles from Leeds, one of a small chain. They also have a branch in Ilkley, another attractive little town north of Leeds, and quite popular with affluent commuters as well as retired people - a very good train link to Leeds and Bradford - where my mum lived for her last 18 years - she married again in 1997 and moved in with her husband there.

Sol wow, this series is just so nostalgic

Books finished:
Pages read: 110
Book related:
More exploring library catalogues
LibraryThing and Goodreads additions and updates

Non-book activities: Radio, TV, Bejeweled Blitz, WhatsApp, other social media

Total books finished: 2
Total read from: 9
Total pages read: 266

Report on Saturday reading

Books read from: Henry and Clara, Homeland Elegies, Shuggie Bain, The Mapping of Love and Death, Flora and Ulysses
Books finished: 1
Time reading: 3 hours plus 9 hours listening
Pages read: 549
Dinner: Korean chicken stew with rice that I picked up at the farmers' market--delicious
Thoughts: I seem to have started and finished The Mapping of Love and Death in one day. It was a reread, and an audiobook, and I was able to listen while going for a walk and tackling a big photo-organizing project that I've been putting off. I realized this is the point I stopped reading the Maisie Dobbs series, and that the reason I stopped reading was because it was too sad for me at the time.
Non-book activities: Work, walk, farmers market, trip to the Container Store, organizing a big box of photos from my mother's house that have been partially organized and occupying a table in our dining room since the beginning of 2020, episode of the Crown, dishes

Total books finished: 1 (The Mapping of Love and Death)
Total read from: 3 (Henry and Clara, Homeland Elegies, Shuggie Bain, The Mapping of Love and Death, Flora and Ulysses)
Total pages read: 658
Total time reading: 5 hours plus 9 hours listening

Midday update on Sunday

Books read from this period (since yesterday evening): Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette, Femlandia by Christina Dalcher, Your Inner Hedgehog by Alexander McCall Smith, and more of A New World Begins by Jeremy Popkin. A bit of Justinian's Flea, a re-read of this book by William Rosen via audiobook late last night

Books finished: Still none!!
Time reading: 5 hours

Snacks: waiting for a food delivery -- chicken and waffles.
Thoughts: Too exhausted to think. Feeling overwhelmed. Don't know how I'm going to find time to work today.
Non-book activities: A two-hour Zoom with my father and Julie T., daughter of his oldest friend. Julie and her bf drove over to help him get audiobooks up and running (he's going to piggyback on my Audible account) and also set up links so he can stream two radio stations. That's all done, and now Julie is going to walk him through it a few more times so he remembers.

Total books finished: none yet! Kind of weird...
Total read from: 5, the 4 up top plus The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick,
Total time reading: 13 hours, though it's tough to keep track. Less than a usual weekend thus far.

Sunday afternoon update

Books reading from: Color of the Sea by John Hamamura. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep and have one chapter left in Thieves of Baghdad by Matthew Bogdanos. I hope to finish this one this weekend. On audio I started Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

Books finished in the last week: An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard

Time reading: 1 hour at lunch and 30 minutes while waiting for the lawn man to get done mowing and doing yard work.
Time posting:
Food: Indian food. This time I sat down in the restaurant and ate my lunch.
Thoughts: I finished An Unkindness of Magicians and think I would be generous to give it a 3 start rating. It was so slow and confusing at the beginning that I should have quit listening. It did pick up close to the end and gave me a reason to finish it, but not my favorite book of the year. I went to the library and checked out a new audio book. I got Other Black Girl and will started listening to it immediately.
Non-book activities: Talked to my sister and friends on the phone this morning. This afternoon I sat and watched a Curtis Stone marathon on PBS and knitted on my sock. I will knit more on it while I am watching my PBS shows tonight.
Total books finished since the read-a-thon began: 172
Total time reading for the Read-A-Thon since the Social Distancing read-a-thon began: 456.5 hours since April 2020.

Sunday afternoon/evenng update

Books read from: 6
Frances Brody, Kate Shackleton's First Case
editor Sinead Gleeson, The Glass Shore
Nadifa Mohamed, The Fortune Men
Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws
K M Peyton, Snowfall
Ruth Jones, Never Greener - STARTED 24,10.21

Books finished:
Pages read: 121
Non-book activities: Radio, TV, Bejeweled Blitz, WhatsApp, other social media, trying to schedule various half term invites for the kids, long phone conversation with a friend

Total books finished: 2
Total read from: 13
Total pages read: 387

Sunday reading

Books read from: Henry and Clara, Shuggie Bain, Flora and Ulysses, The Ghost Fields, Homeland Elegies
Books finished: 1
Time reading: 2 hours plus 5 and 1/2 hours listening
Pages read: 131
Lunch and Dinner: Pastrami sandwich (1/2 lunch, 1/2 dinner), apples
Thoughts: I'm dreading next week.
Non-book activities: Work, walk the dog, more photo organizing plus organized coats and bags in the entryway (a child who isn't currently living here probably does not need to have a dozen coats and jackets at the ready), latest episode of Great British Baking Show

Total books finished: 2 (The Mapping of Love and Death, Flora and Ulysses)
Total read from: 6 (Henry and Clara, Homeland Elegies, Shuggie Bain, The Mapping of Love and Death, Flora and Ulysses, The Ghost Fields)
Total pages read: 799
Total time reading: 7 hours plus 14 and 1/2 hours listening

I finished a very odd history of the Detroit Yiddish Theatre- it was written by a man who was involved in the 1920's.
I watched an episode of the Great Canadian Baking Show ( it was cookie week) and two very good series on PBS- Grantchester and Baptiste.
Dinner -the last of the tofu and veg with rice.

I haven't posted, but I have been reading!

Books read from: 3: Busman's Honeymoon, The Borrowers Afield and Something Wicked This Way Comes
Books finished: 2: Busman's Honeymoon and The Borrowers Afield
Time reading: Not sure, but around 10 hours
Snacks: Tea, sandwiches
Thoughts: Mainly anxiety about work
Non-book activities: Yoga, walking, knitting, online shopping

Oops, missed this one.

Are you doing a readathon for next weekend?

Monday morning update:

Books read from: The Mirror and the Light by Hillary Mantel, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

Books completed: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

Pages read: 270 - quite a bit less than I expected, but real life intruded - in good ways.

Non-book activities: college football - all 3 teams I like (Michigan, Oregon, Oregon State) won.

Monday morning update

Books reading from: Color of the Sea by John Hamamura. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. On audio I started Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris.

Books finished in the last week: Thieves of Baghdad by Matthew Bogdanos and An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard

Time reading: 1 hour at bedtime.
Time posting:
Food: no supper - wasn't hungry.
Thoughts: I finished reading Thieves of Baghdad by Matthew Bogdanos. This was a memoir. I had started reading it because I thought it would be mostly about the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. It wasn't. It was a memoir of the life of Bogdanos. As such it was a whole lot of braggadocio and less about what I was looking for. Even so I found the book interesting and compelling as Bogdanos is a very curious mixture of testosterone overload, learned classics scholar, and lawyer - not a polymath but close. I am glad I read this book as I do have a much better understanding of what exactly happened at the Iraq museum and why it happened. My conclusion is that there is nothing to be done about looting as it is a old as civilization, but that the root cause of this incident was greed and corruption at the highest levels previous to the war itself. Most of the oldest works were replicas because the real item had been stolen years before 1993 or 2003. All of the people who worked at the Iraq museum before 2003 should have been fired and told not to come back to work because they were part and parcel with the scam to skim these works and use them as a cash reservoir from which the high government officials could draw at will. The museum employees were no help in finding the looted items and in several cases didn't have the knowledge they needed to run a museum of that size and scope anyway. They had received their appointments as favors and reciprocity agreements with those in power in the government. Add to that the problem that the real looting had been done in the 30 years that Saddam Hussein was in power, and was probably done with his knowledge and consent by his sons and other party apparatchiks years before the actual First Gulf War let alone the second.

Non-book activities: I knitted more on my sock while I watched PBS this evening. I watched "Call the Midwife" and "Grantchester." I really like "Baptiste" but was so tired that I went to bed before it came on. I choose to read in bed rather than watch TV and so finished Thieves of Baghdad then turned out the light.
Total books finished since the read-a-thon began: 173
Total time reading for the Read-A-Thon since the Social Distancing read-a-thon began: 457.5 hours since April 2020.

>32 fuzzi: For the past year and a half, there's been a readathon every weekend. There will be one this upcoming weekend too. SilverWolf28 usually creates the new thread on Thursday/Friday so just keep an eye out.

>35 PawsforThought: thanks, I've just recently noticed it!

My weekend was full of helping my family, didn't get one whole book read although I did make headway in People of Darkness.

weekend wrap-up

Books:
Vanderbeekers of 141st Street, Karina Yan Glaser.
Had to return to library before I finished it. Put a hold on it for later.
Forgotten City by Michael Ford -
Set in Seattle; sci fi/dystopia/survival. Aggressive super-plants take over the world!
Still exploring newer books for middle readers.
Lost track of recent J books when I retired from the public library.

Breakfast: coffee, granola & milk.

Other activity:
Did not read a lot this weekend. I was in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia for a folk festival.
I stayed in a vintage cabin built by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps). No cell service, no internet!
Scheduled my covid booster for later this week.

Mostly sunny, 72 F. (24 C.) in Charlotte NC

Here's the next readathon: https://www.librarything.com/topic/336316