48-Hour Book Challenge Finish Line 2015

It was a sad moment when I realized it was now 100% impossible for me to squeeze in 12 hours by midnight. But as I said on Facebook earlier to my sister, "Sondy, somehow I just now realized (how did I not realize?) that I can't make it up to 12 hours magically with a little bit of time here and a little bit there, I need 6 hours today and 6 hours tomorrow. Or, you know, if 2 hours today, 10 hours tomorrow. Hahaha, I'm so not making it. Oh well, it's fun anyway."


Was still hoping and working to beat last year's total, 7 hours 45 minutes. I guess I sort of squeaked in a win on that, since I added a small section in this post for which I forgot to track the time spent writing? Though I'm not sure what I had rounded from last year. And then next year... it all resets, as I will have a three-year-old and a BABY again. Someday I will conquer. Someday. Hey, who knows, if the timing works out really well and I can pump enough ahead of time, maybe I can take a day away for myself... a mother can dream, right?

Oh, and though I'm VERY grateful for the work that goes in to organizing and running the Challenge, and I love the whole thing, I would like to put in a vote for lowering the minimum for the "official" participation. Okay, I don't need prizes. But for the sake of other mothers of small children, I want to say that one doesn't have to do an average of six hours a day for two days in a row in order to "make it a challenge." Even for us bibliophile mothers. Oh, and while we're at it, since networking counts for the total, why shouldn't at least a little bit of picture book reading count, too? Throw the mamas a bone, here! :)

But anyway, back to talking about how this year went. Since I didn't do any progress posts earlier, I'll mention I really enjoyed the section I read of The Brothers Karamazov. I knew it was a classic, knew Dostoevsky was a Christian, had read Crime and Punishment just before this, so I guess my Brothers K expectations were based on sort of a mix of Crime and Punishment and Les Miserables.

I didn't realize how much mystery there is in it. Of a rather modern flavor, at times! So that's been fun.

And I completed my goal of reading through the rest of Part III, up to the beginning of Part IV; as Part III is "due" tomorrow in my book club. Yay!

Though my copy doesn't have Kindle pages enabled, I remembered belatedly that it does have page numbers, they're just clumsily "printed" in the text, so to speak, so that with the font size and style adjusted they appear willy nilly throughout the text, here in the middle of the first paragraph on your screen, there down in the middle, and so on. And either they appear somewhat intermittently, or I've just grown so used to skipping over and ignoring them that they're hard to find when I want to find them. But they are there, whether intermittent or not. So, going by those page numbers, I started my hours this weekend on page 399, and ended on page 578. 179 pages read. Kindle locations 7217-10,526; 45%-65%. Though it looks like my copy may have some back matter after the novel that's included in the calculation of the percentages. Anyway.

After my 4 hours 38 minutes to read that, and drafting this post, tempting though it was to keep going with Brothers K, as it had gotten rather exciting, it was also tempting to switch to Anne! So I did!

A little while back I started the Anne of Green Gables series for the "book from your childhood" category of a modest 2015 reading challenge, and apparently I had made it almost to the end of Anne of Avonlea before picking up Brothers K for the book club and aaaah, it fell away in the dust to the Brothers K pace...

But it was very cheery to pick it up for a little while and enjoy the last 30 pages! It was sweet, charming, perfect, and so very Anne.

So, 48hbc stats:

[I didn't feel a need to round to the nearest quarter hour -- I used Toggl as a time tracker, and it did all the sums for me.]

Total hours: 7 hours 47 minutes

Books read: Parts of 2, including a chunk of a Russian novel

Pages read: Roughly 209

Hours reading: 5 hours 13 minutes

Hours blogging: 2 hours 11 minutes

Hours networking: 23 minutes


Mmm, I'm not the fastest reader (or writer) ever, but I'm thorough, darn it. Heh.

I may not be an official participant, but at least my daughter is objectively The Cutest. :D