The Terror of Knowing

I’m tentatively participating in the 2015 Winter Cramathon, yay I do love a go readathon to make me make reading a priority! (Technically I guess this following post also counts as a Friday Reads since this is my sole reading intention for the weekend.)

For those who aren’t aware Cramathon is a 3-day readathon running from midnight on 19th December to 11:59PM on 21st December, and it’s hosted by the lovely Whitney from Whittynovels, who creates several challenges to help guide people’s TBRs and reading over the course of the weekend. The point of this readathon is in the title – cram as many books as you can into a short readathon. It tends to help if you haven’t yet reached your Goodreads goal for the year since you readathon encourages you to cram in a lot of helpful short and sweet novels or novellas or graphic novels.

However, since I’ve already met my Goodreads goal for the year (the advantages of having realistic goals of setting it at 52 books this year so a book a week), I intended to join in just for the fun of it. Because of this, I’ll be taking quite a loose approach to the challenges; I’m in the middle of some books and I won’t be putting them down in favour of reading books only because they fit the challenges. (Am I doing readathoning wrong? Probably. Oh well!) For posterity’s sake though, the challenges, and my intended picks to fulfil each of them, are as follows:

1. read an audiobook or ebook – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone or Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling (read by Stephen Fry)
I’m currently in the middle of a re-read of The Philosopher’s Stone via the audiobook and have the next two also checked out from the library right now, so it’s very likely that I’ll be continuing to listen to the first one or, if I’ve already finished it by the time Cramathon starts, I’ll move onto The Chamber of Secrets. Either way I’m going to have Stephen Fry’s lovely narration to enjoy!

2. read a bindup – potential fail
This is the challenge that I’m probably going to definitely fail. The only bindup I think I own is the Queen of Babble books and unless I’m suddenly struck by the deep desire to re-read some fluffy chick lit, I don’t think I’ll be reaching for these just for the sake of completing a challenge. Likewise, the only other sort of bindups I own are anthologies of Late Victorian Gothic short stories, or one that collects together a few Oscar Wilde plays, or An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, and I can’t envisage me having a burning desire for these on a Sunday afternoon so… we’ll see.

3. finish a series/read the last book of a series – Prodigy and Champion by Marie Lu
I have the entire series checked out from the library right now and, having just finished the first book, I’d like to get the other two finished so I can return them all before Christmas. Marathoning both Prodigy and Champion seems like something I could feasibly do over this weekend so I hope to binge on this series and finish it off. The jury is still out on how much I’m enjoying it so far.

4. read a book under 200 pages – Little Black Classics series from Penguin
I have a bunch of Penguin’s Little Black Classics so it’s very likely that I will be using a couple of those for this challenge since I don’t really tend to buy short books and it feels less like cheating if I read a couple of these in lieu of one single 190 page book. Some likely contenders include The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, and/or Antigone by Sophocles. I could also finally get around to some elusive Shakespeare plays I’ve put off reading but, let’s face it, it’s unlikely I’m going to have the right level of concentration to consume some Renaissance drama.

5. Finish a book you DNF’ed – probable fail
The reason I will probably fail this? A lot of the books I’ve recently DNFed have been mammoth monsters of books (see: The Name of the Wind and Anna Karenina) so it’s unlikely I will actually get to these since they would defeat the entire point of cramming multiple short books into a short readathon.

6. Read a graphic novel series (or as many graphic novels as you can) – TBC
Yes, I will do that rare thing and read some graphic novels. How many I will read depends entirely on how efficient my council’s library reservations system is since I’ve reserved a few graphic novels and intend to head there Monday morning to see if they’ve arrived. So I could be reading V for Vendetta, Batman: The Killing Joke, and/or Sally Heathcote: Suffragette. If all else fails I’m about halfway through Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret which is half graphic novel half traditional novel so I could always finish that off and half-win this challenge. But if I do manage to get hold of any others it will be on Monday so my guess is Motnday afternoon will be me (hopefully) devouring some graphic novels in order to meet the final challenge which is…

7. Read 5 books total
Provided I get around to the other challenges, even without the probable fail ones, I should complete this challenge at least. Here’s to good intentions, cheers!

What can be gathered from this post? That I intend to participate in the Cramathon with enthusiasm! But that I probably won’t really stick to most of the challenges… still, the spirit of prioritising reading is definitely there so I hope to channel that spirit, if nothing else. I’ll probably also lurk a little around Twitter following Whitney and Danni on the Cramathon account. If you’re participating in the Cramathon please do let me know down in the comments, I’d love to see your TBRs and progress over the course of the weekend.