Bout of Books Final Day and Wrapup post - I survived my first on-line read-a-thon

Well, I have now officially survived my very first on-line read-a-thon ever!  Hurray!

Sunday, January 12, 2014 

Number of pages I’ve read today: 18 + 40

Total number of books I’ve read: 4
Total number of pages I've read: 2167 (woo hoo!)

Books today:

I carried around The Golem and the Jinnni by Helene Wecker all day trying to get a chance to read it but, it was laundry and homework day so there weren't many free minutes. I only managed 18 pages.  

On my e-reader I read another 40 pages of Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell. I saw several reviews of the book mention that they worried about Eleanor - and I just keep thinking, "there are four other, younger children in that house - what about them ??" Do they have toothbrushes, how often over the past year have they huddled together alone in the dark listening. AAAAHHH!  So, honestly - the relationship between Eleanor and Park is developing sweetly and everything, but I keep wanting to call child protective services (yes I know they can end up separating kids, but they can also be helpful when the alternative situation is worse). Those kids are going to be seriously messed up. In my mind their existence is not a sidebar to Eleanor's story. I am going to try to keep going to see what happens, but if there is no resolution for those kids I am going to be livid. 

My Goals - wrap-up

• To read 3 books for pleasure and examine at least 6 books for use in one of my classes. 

Right, so do to the weather this one didn't go quite as planned. I didn't make it into work to read anything for classes so I will have to do all extra work reading this week (eek). I also only read one of the books on my original list The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde.

I read three other books though: To the Moon and Back by Jill Mansell, The Name of This Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch, and The Grand Tour: or the Purloined Coronation Regalia by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. So - I will count the pleasure reading as more or less a success.  

• Complete at least a summary review for each book read

I do have short like/don't like notes for each of the books or sections of books that I read , which are listed on the daily review pages (all of which are linked to the main Bout of Books post), and I wrote a formal review for The Last Dragonslayer see review here and for The Grand Tour (review here).

I also ended up writing a postmortem for my DNF of A Discovery of Witches because that book threw me off my stride so badly. I probably would have been able to cope with Sweet Tooth (even though that book was ticking me off something fierce too) if I hadn't had to deal with ADoW first.  So to get it out of my system I wrote up something explaining why I have chosen not to finish that book.  So again, a somewhat guarded success I think.

• I also want to participate in at least one challenge 

 Now here I had fun.  I ended up participating in all but one of the challenges.  I didn't do the last one on Sunday because I just really could not get myself interested. I have been happily married for 15 years and have two kids.  I did the whole wedding thing.  I am not even remotely interested in even trying to fantasy organize another one.  I tried, since I really wanted to make a clean sweeps of the challenges - I looked at the list of questions and on question one kept thinking - this would make me and the character I would likely choose fantasy bigamists.  Nope, nope, nope. I just couldn't make it go. I get literal like that sometimes. Either way - I count goal as a rousing success!  

I had a great time doing this. I hope that I hang on blogging long enough to do this again and to have a few followers by then.  That would be fun.  I hope that everyone else had a fun Bout of Books as well.