Everyone, Clear Your Calendars… (w/ a couple bookpile pics thrown in!)

…because it’s offical: Dewey is slightly insane. Not only is she now doing the Weekly Geeks thing, but she’s hosting another Read-a-Thon. Fortunately, the rest of us get to benefit from her insanity! I highly, highly, highly encourage everyone who can to get out of their obligations for twenty-four hours, beginning at 9 AM Pacific time on June 28th (yay! that’s 10 AM my time! last read-a-thon began at 7 AM my time, which was friggin’ brutal).

I was a reader in last year’s read-a-thon, and I stayed up all twenty-four hours. You can see all of my posts by selecting the ‘ReadathonI’ category from that drop-down menu on the right. But I’m going to quote from my wrap-up post in an effort to convince y’all to sign up. Keep in mind this is a very sleep-deprived Eva talking, which justifies the corniness:

Mugs of Hot Tea: 4
Mugs of Hot Chocolate: 2
Glasses of Iced Tea: 3
Cans of Diet Pepsi: 1

Reading over 2,000 pages in 24 hours: Priceless!

Pages Read (cum.): 2014
Books Completed: 7 (Tithe by Holly Black, The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander, The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie, Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson, Marked by P.C. and Kristin Cast, The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith, The Children of Green Knowe by L.M. Boston)
Books Partially Completed: 1 (Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett)
Stories Read: 2 (”The Death of a Government Clerk” and “The Sly Little Boy” by Anton Chekhov)
Mini-Challenges Participated In: 15

That works out to about 84 pages an hour, which certainly isn’t bad. Especially since I also managed to visit every active reader at least once every other hour. I had a ton of fun with this whole experience, and I feel very indebted to Dewey for running the whole thing and to the cheerleaders who came out and supported me (both official and unofficial). On twenty-three posts, I’ve had 77 comments not made by me! That’s a whole lot of comments for one day.

SO, not only will you get to catch up on your reading, but you get to make new friends! And get a ton of comments! That was my favourite part of the whole thing; the way that the bloggers became closer and closer.

In case you can’t tell, I’m totally going to sign up as a Reader again. And, since I enjoyed visiting the other blogs so much, I’m going to make it official and sign up as a Cheerleader too! And if you don’t have a very important event that day, you should to. Don’t give me any guff about not being able to stay up twenty-four hours; most of the participants took at least a nap, and quite a few got a full night’s rest: Dewey doesn’t have secret police that come arrest you if you fall asleep. If you can’t participate that day, but you still want to be involved, Dewey’s looking for helpers. And hopefully she’ll host one again in the fall, so don’t be too bummed about missing it this time around.

And now, I need your help! I need a nice big list of books that will keep me turning pages. I’m not looking for books that will change my life, or amazing literature; last year, YA books were definitely my friends. I’m open to any genre of fiction or non-fiction. I only have one criterion: books that made you stay up at night. Maybe not literally, but you know what I mean! Books that you meant to only read a few pages of and suddenly looked up to realise hours had gone by. After everyone gives me their suggestions (and seriously, I’m expecting a lot), I’ll combine them with books I’ve researched into a big annotated reading list post. :)

Now, for the book pictures of the day. The one to your left is delicious: I just went to pick up about half my library holds. Yay! The poppets are very impressed. The other, sitting on the right, well, I was going to explain why I wasn’t participating in Weekly Geeks this time around (catch up on all your reviews), but a picture is worth a thousand, thousand words. The poppets think they’ve found a way to talk to that Grand Poppet In the Sky, but really it’s just my “to be reviewed” pile. And that’s not counting the library books I’ve read and returned and still haven’t reviewed! Or reviews I’ve written but are still hanging out in the drafts, because I don’t think it’s nice to make y’all read a review every single day of the week. Both of them you can click to make bigger, where you should be able to read all the titles.

Confession time: how many books to you have waiting for reviews?