48hr Readathon Diary – August 2019

Hello Everyone!

I am writing this on the 10th of August as i sit in my bed after I have spent the morning reading. As I’m sure you can infer from the title, today i am going to be telling you all about the 48 hour readathon I have decided to do this weekend! I am going to be writing this post in chunks through the weekend instead of simply re-capping my thoughts after, so you will be getting some real-time talk!

For those of you who don’t know, a Readathon is simply a period of time (usually 24 hours, but you can choose the time frame yourself) where you simply sit down and read as much as you can in the time frame. It doesn’t mean you can’t do other things or that you have to stay up really late like I know some people do; the only goal is to read as much as possible. I wanted to dedicate this weekend to reading because, as you may know if you have been reading my blog the last few months, I am doing a book vs movie comparison of the Harry Potter series. My reading has slowed down the last week or so though as I’ve had other things to do and since I am now onto Order of the Phoenix, which is an incredibly book, I really do need to get reading if I want to have all the posts written before I go to college in a little over 4 weeks time!

Just so you know, I am also vlogging the whole weekend, so if you want to watch what I did this weekend and see me doing everything I am going to talk about here, then you can check out my YouTube Channel: Samantha Drage and watch the vlog, which I will leave a link to here!

My TBR:

My soul aim of this Readathon is to finish reading ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’, so that I can make sure I stay on track to finish the series before the end of August. As it stands far, I had already managed to get to the half-way point when I put my book down to have some lunch and a break at 12:15.

I started the day on page 243 and managed to far exceed my goal of getting to page 300 before I do anything else by getting to page 408, which is a great start! I’ve done a bit of maths and I think I should be on track to finish OotP by the end of today, which still leaves me all of tomorrow to start of Half-Blood Prince. I don’t want to get my hopes up yet as I may be needed to do something around the house, but if all goes to plan, I should finish it today.

I have a few things to do on Sunday that will cut down on the amount of reading time I have, but I’ll be talking a bit more about that in the vlog, so check that out for more details!

Saturday

I had originally planned to go out on Saturday and read at my local library and probably pop into the Starbucks near by as well; however, the weather wasn’t on my side this weekend as there were 50mph winds all day and it rained on and off, which left me very much stuck inside!

I didn’t let that ruin my plan though because I still got plenty read, I just did it from my bed instead! As I mentioned at the beginning, I started the day on page 243 and managed to end it on page 648, which means I managed to read 405 pages in total on Saturday! I defintiyl could have read more if I had tried and certainly a lot more if I had decided to stay up late, but I had to go in and out throughout the day to help my dad re-build my PC and (I won’t lie) I also got distracted on my phone for quite a while at one point – The discover page on any app is such a dangerous place!

My original plan for the day may have been foiled and I may have gotten a little distracted here and there, but all in all, I think Saturday was a damn good reading day and I did get the majority of the book read, so I only had a 7 chapters left to read on Sunday.

Sunday

If you watched the vlog of the weekend, then you will know I had a fair few other things I had to do on Sunday since that is usually when I tidy up and organise things for the new week ahead and I also had to sort out my PC and make sure everything was working again after I got it back. This did take up a sizable chunk of my day, but I knew that would be the case going into this weekend, so I decided to take my book out to ensure I wouldn’t be interrupted. The winds had died down by the time we made it to Sunday, so i left the house bright and early and got to Starbucks for when it opened, where I firmly planted myself in a chair and told myself I couldn’t leave until I had finished the book!

I have used this tactic a lot in the past few years for both reading an more undesirable tasks that I just need to get done, so I do recommend it. It was already about mid-day by the time I got home from Starbucks, which meant I had to crack on with everything else I had to get done that day. I had intended to watch the Half-Blood Prince originally and make notes on it for my book vs movie series here on this blog, but I decided I needed a proper break, so I just put on Order of the Phoenix instead and just relaxed while watching it.

I had also fully intended to either watch Half-Blood Prince straight after or to start reading it, but that didn’t end up happening as I had a few more things I had to check up on and sort out before I went to bed at my normal time.

Wrap-Up

As you can see, not all of my readathon plans ended up happening both due to the weather and how tired I was, but I still achieved my goal of finishing Order of the Phoenix never the less. My only goal was to make sure I finished OotP by the end of the weekend to give myself a head start to the weeks plans for blog post writing and other such things I achieved it, so I am happy with how the readathon went!

It would have been nice to start Half-Blood Prince and get even further ahead, but I guess now I get a new book to start the week on, so that’s fine with me!

I hope you enjoyed my Readathon Diary and don’t forget to check out my vlog of the weekend on my YouTube Channel, which you can find here:

What books did you read this weekend? What are you currently reading?

Goodbye for now!

Over and Out