On the eve of my Dewey Debut

So, unless you don’t read books, or have been living under a rock, or do not know me in real life, everyone knows that Dewey’s readathon happens tomorrow. Over 1600 participants, isn’t that amazing? The idea of just bunch of people from all around the world dedicated the same chunk of time towards reading books and gushing about them on social media, is giving me all the feels:

This is my first time participating in the readathon (although if you follow me on social media I’ve only been gushing about it for a month now). I found the readathon when participating in 24in48 readathon back in January, went wayyyy down the rabbit-hole of the origin story and the posts from the October event, predictably fell in love with the premise, and have had my calendar marked with this event. Since then, I have been interacting with Andi and Heather (our champion organizers) on and off on social media over the last couple of months, so I’ve been EVEN more excited about this (Here’s a well-known secret- if it’s about books, it doesn’t take me that long to get excited about it). 

Andi was kind enough to allow me to host twitter parties at the beginning of this week, and it was a blast! We chatted about themes, TBRs, beverages, snacks, and ALL OF THE BOOKS! Got some great advice from readathon veterans, a few of which I’m putting in place.

Shaina, who is the coolest, and the wittiest, and the nerdism in Readathon is insidious… (hehe, see where I’m going with this. I’m not even a little sorry.)

Anyway, Shaina started the #thon4ham tag a few nights ago, and she’s come up with so many brilliant ones that I just had to Storify them (I had a few, but nowhere as good as the ones she came up with).

I curated my readathon stack- started out feeling completely overwhelmed by the GIANT pile of unread books in my room. So I decided to throw in some criteria for selection: books I owned that were written by women, so that anything I read tomorrow will count towards Read My Own Damn Books and the Read The Books You Buy challenges.

Look at how pretty they are 😍

I put this off for the last possible minute for two reasons: in order to stick to a written grocery list, and not to eat all of the snacks before Readathon even started. The checkout person at Mariano’s was definitely judging me (she was barely 18 and probably wondering why I’m not just buying booze on a Friday night).

Knowing me, this is what is going to keep me going after midnight anyway.

The Facebook Readathon page has been ON FIRE, and someone on there suggested that a group of us could meet up at some point in the day for silent-reading-time-in-the-proximity-of-local-redathoners. So there’s a few of us meeting up at Bru Chicago in Wicker park, between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. (in case more people want to hang).

Got me some Readathon swag, because, I had to. 

That design on the mug is EVERYTHING. 

My social media strategy for tomorrow is going to be…err, I don’t know yet. I’m drafting two major blog posts tonight, for the 12-hour and 24-hour marks. Blogging is time-consuming, so I’m not going to kill myself trying to be super active here. I will tweet and instagram every 3-4 hours, participate in the mini-challenges on the readathon website at the same times, and occasionally Snapchat (you can find me at jananivaidya). This is sounding terribly complicated as I sit here typing this.  As for cheering, I will be cheering on twitter only, because even though I really want to go on people’s blogs, my focus for this readathon is still going to be reading. I know there’s people like my friend RDB who will exclusively be cheering this time, so I don’t feel terribly guilty for not making the effort. 

Okay, gotta run, got a bunch of chores to finish up tonight and get a good night’s sleep. If you’re not really doing anything tomorrow, go sign up for the readathon! You don’t have to read/stay awake/social media for 24 hours, you can have fun with it however you want. 

Fellow ‘thoners, hope you have a BLAST tomorrow! Woo!

Until tomorrow,

-J