This questionnaire’s familiarity makes me smile now :) And here we go!

1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today? Portland, Maine

2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to? Probably the first two, the Kane Chronicles books by Rick Riordan, though I’m also pretty psyched about that house for peculiar children business…

3) Which snack are you most looking forward to? Another tough call; cantaloupe and kiwi? Baked cheese and chili dip? Cap’n crunch oops all berries? It’s gonna be a good food day :)

4) Tell us a little something about yourself! I love reading outdoors, at parks and the beach and even in the car with the windows down on a nice day, but for Readathon, I hate to “waste” time getting *to* my favorite reading spots!

5) If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? If this is your first read-a-thon, what are you most looking forward to? I’m going to spend less time stressing over formatting my blog posts when my phone browser won’t play nicely – starting this minute :)

Happy reading, all!

Nothing like waiting until the last minute, but here I am, having just submitted my Mr. Linky for tomorrow’s 24-hour readathon. I seem to manage one of the two each year, and more often in April than October. This weekend looks to be lovely, weather-wise, but I don’t want to spend too much time traveling to outdoor reading destinations, so, we shall see how far I drift from home and the Western Prom.

I’ve finally unpacked ALL THE BOOKS, after nearly three years in my apartment. I also treated myself to the first two books in Rick Riordan’s Kane Chronicles, The Red Pyramid and The Throne of Fire, when I picked up my Flood Certificate at Longfellow Books last weekend. So, in response to family crises and to celebrate quitting smoking and to welcome Spring, Dewey’s Readathon, here I come!

So, I woke up an hour late, started reading an hour later due to tech issues, and crashed an hour and a half before the end, but the Readathon was still a huge success in that I did not let anything (besides Joshua, and only a couple of times, briefly) take me away from my Readathon experience. Here are a few stats:

Books started: 6

Bo0ks finished: 3, and they are as follows –

A Summer to Die, Lois Lowry – YA fiction

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess) – Memoir

Th1rteen R3asons Why, Jay Asher – YA fiction

Books abandoned cuz I couldn’t get into them: 2. Which were –

I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President

Girl Parts

I may or may not get back to each of them. The former felt too juvenile and I quit 10 pages in, and the latter was just bizarrely written, with a strange premise that was a combination of “Weird Science” and Siri. Got 57 pages in, and granted, this was in the last few hours, so I really needed something engaging and that just wasn’t doin’ it for me.

Which leaves the 6th book, Michael Scott’s The Sorceress, on my “to be completed” list.

Pages read: 686. This is a little disappointing, but I also went into the day knowing that I would spend probably a quarter to half of each hour reading tweets, checking out other book blogs, completing mini-challenges, checking in with Joshua, and grabbing snacks and drinks. So, it is what it is.

Mini-challenges participated in: 10. I haven’t checked, but I’m pretty sure that’s way more than I’ve done before; I didn’t do a blog entry for each one, which made it quicker and easier. Of course, I didn’t win any, but they were all fun :)

So in the aftermath of Readathon, I’m about a third of the way into the book I was reading before it started (Rick Riordan’s The Last Olympian) and have gone back to that for now, and about a quarter of the way into The Sorceress, and will head there next. I’m glad that I have given myself permission to abandon books I don’t love in order to give others a chance, and am wholly glad to have read each book I did during Readathon.

I hope you other Readathoners had a great time, and while I won’t make any promises, I’ve missed this ol’ blog and would like to spend more time here, so let’s see what I can do about that, shall we? Back to the Underworld I go….

I’ve gotta say, hosting a mini-challenge asking us to post a picture of ourselves at this point in the night is kinda cruel, especially on a day when I had no reason to beautify myself :-P

I try not to reread during Readathons, but I am a notorious rereader in general. Most of my favorites are series: Orson Scott Card’s Ender saga; Harry Potter; Mercedes Lackey’s Heralds of Valdemar and Magic’s Pawn series. I’m really trying to reread less these days, but sometimes I need the comfort of old friends and don’t have the emotional energy to make new ones – this applies to “real” life and my reading life, as the relationships I have with characters in great books are every bit as real to me as the ones I have with the people around me, they’re just easier to maintain :)

One other book I have reread many times and likely will many more is Les Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. It was life-changing for me the first time, and has had a different and still profound effect on me each time since. It’s always interesting to me how my personal growth and evolution influences the interpretation of books I’ve read at different times in my life.

I finished Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and want to be Jenny Lawson’s BFF forever. I’m currently flying through Thirteen Reasons Why – it’s raw, intriguing, and compelling, making it a perfect Readathon book. Only eight and a half hours to go; we’re nearly two thirds of the way through!

Quickie post for the latest challenge; will add images and formatting and such when I’m at the computer, but Xander is cozy and asleep on my hip, so I’m not going to disturb him :)

The first anti-hero that came to my mind is Peter Wiggin from the Ender saga and parallel novels by Orson Scott Card. He isn’t really fully developed until the second series, which starts with Ender’s Shadow, but if I remember correctly, Xenocide begins the task of making him a person and not only a memory of an evil, heartless older brother. I highly recommend both series, and actually should reread the shadow series myself sometime soon.

There are also some great anti-heroes/villains in Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven series, but as alliances and enemies aren’t all clear and without question, I don’t want to spoil for anyone – absolutely a must-read series if you love good YA fantasy, though!

Back to The Bloggess, now; exactly halfway through the book and love, love, loving it.

For this challenge, you must turn to page 32 of the book you are currently reading (or the nearest page with text on it) and find the most entertaining phrase to complete the following sentence:

“I would rather read than ________ any day!”

I knew that Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened would be the PERFECT book for this challenge, and I needed something funny to follow my last read, so I saved this challenge for when I started this book. My submission:

“I would rather read than [feel] around the deep freeze for the Popsicles and instead [pull] out an enormous frozen rattlesnake that Charles had thrown in while it was still alive any day!”

Yep, I can honestly say that is true. Now back to page one :) Thanks to Alexis at Reflections of a Bookaholic for hosting!

My readathon day is enjoyable, but I always forget that I don’t read as fast as I used to and it can get frustrating (refer to rule #9, Kirsten…!). The good thing about having slowed down my reading is that I truly read everything now, and have a much greater appreciation for skilled writers. Lois Lowry is one such writer, and I find myself experiencing really big emotions when I read even a simple sentence of hers. I just finished A Summer to Die, and while I knew it was going to be sad, I mean duh, I wasn’t expecting so much beauty and loveliness. Which also made me a little sad to read, but in a bittersweet way. Anyway, here are a few of the passages that stood out to me. It was hard to limit it to a reasonable number, honestly.

This last one in particular hit me hard today. The way it is written is reminiscent of a voice I hear speaking in my heart always, the fact that I have cried and laughed in the same breath more often than I care to think about in the past week, and the reminder of the friends who have wiped the tears and brought the laughter all make this a huge takeaway from this book.

This hour’s mini-challenge is a super fun one; thanks to Melissa at One Librarian’s Book Reviews for hosting!

The challenge is to create a rebus, essentially, for a book title. So the pictures below, when put together in order, will give you the title of a book. I saw The Vagina Monologues when I was browsing my shelf for a good title for this one, but man, “monologues” is a hard word to convey through imagery. ;) So, here we go – can you guess the book? Hint: it’s non-fiction.