Since I’ve taken this HUGE break to shack thing up on the blog, I never got to tell you how was my first readathon, The BookTube-A-Thon. If you heard, you’ll know it took place at the end of July. Today is September 9th and here I am rambling about something that should have been rambled last month. At that time, I was excited to try this new thing that would bring together a whole community. A few times I cross path with people saying they did not enjoy the idea of making a challenge out of reading. I understand why. Most importantly, you should be reading because you like, not to read more books then person X or accomplish some pointless goal. It’s not a race.

Even though I was curious and once I get the curiosity bug only trying out can make it go away. After all, I could quit anytime. Sadly, my experience was cut short since I had to work for the last 4 days of the readathon. Although, it gave me enough time to experience different mind sets that came along.

Now thinking about it, I think is so funny how seriously I was going to take this challenge. I made an overall weekly plan of what I should be reading in those days and writing down my process each day. I getter a list of the seven books and how many pages they had giving me the total amount of pages in the end of the week. If I read 240 pages every day I would complete the challenge – and math doesn’t lie!

On the first day, I started off really good. I read one book and accomplished one of the challenges. Plus got 100 pages down on the biggest book of the pile. Which put me near the pages per day number. I was excited, motivated and ready for day two. In the following day, I had a breakdown. On the second day of the readathon, I was already sick of it. Don’t ask me what happen that day, just wasn’t a good day for reading. I got nearly half of my daily goal and, in the evening, I did not want to spend time reading. In that moment I started to have the guilty feeling for-not-doing-something-that-you-should or better something-that-your-mind-thinks-you-should.

If I wanted to see a movie it was fine, but I was kept thinking “STOP! Go read!!” It was starting to put too much pressure on myself for something I was doing for fun. Suddenly, the pleasure was disappearing and started to be a responsibility. I was feeling bad for not be reading and while thinking of that I wasn’t paying much attention to the movie. In the end, I wasn’t enjoying anything. But like my mother says nothing like a good night of sleep to solve the problem. On the third day, I was decided to read more and make up for the lost time. When everything changed and I had to abort the mission.

Despite having that one bit of self-pressure, I enjoyed so much the whole experience. In the end, my Twitter feed was full of people sharing their books, having a laugh, and communicating with each other, like a huge Book Club. The funniest parts were the Twitter sprints when at some point everyone should be reading for 5, 10 or 20 minutes non-stop. It gives you the extra push and the motivation to continue reading. I never read so much in one day as I did during the readathon. I was reading about 4 to 6 hours. It was giving me so much pleasure. And on a normal day, I wouldn’t be able because life isn’t just reading books – which would be the dream.

Sadly, I still don’t know if I would be able to complete the challenge. And taking one week off for reading isn’t the best plan at the moment. I’m gonna need to delay that. Even though, thinking of a 24 hours readathon don’t excite me as much, this fall I’ll be trying out. If I don’t like at least is one more thing I know I don’t like. Whatever I do, I can’t wait for next year and *fingers-cross* participate again for the entire week.