Hour 6 Challenge | Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon

My "Name Your Read-a-Thon" entry - sadly, my e-books aren't too photogenic so just imagine Anatomy of a Misfit and The Cuckoo's Calling are in the stack.

Hour 5 Challenge | Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon

Another hour gone, another 64 pages down. Time to break for the Book Staging challenge! (I don't have easy access to a pitchfork so I've gone with the kitchen variety.)

4 Hours | Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon

We're four hours in and, not gonna lie, I missed a bit of that when I fell asleep with my open book on my face. Still, I've made decent progress - 114 pages of Horns (I started on 84, so I'm at 198 right now) and 20 minutes (whatever that converts to) of The Cuckoo's Calling while I made breakfast.

watch | The Maze Runner

I read The Maze Runner a million years ago, and I remembered that it involves boys running through a maze. So I went in to this story for pretty much the first time. This is a fun new installment in that cool trend where everything's a trilogy (any bets that part three is just too action-packed to be contained by a single film?). And it shows. Not that this is a bad thing, I'm just sick of watching twelve Part Ones a year. This movie presents (brace yourself) a dystopian world where pretty much nothing makes sense. And then the film's resolution... takes what you already didn't know and mixes it up some more. Do I want to see the next movie? Yes, good job Hollywood. Am I satisfied with The Maze Runner as a film? Nope. There's a lot of racing toward something, I just wish I had any idea what that might be.

read | Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon

So I have rather spontaneously decided to participate in Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon. While I do have some commitments that require me to function as a person for a few hours, I'm just looking at them as built-in breaks. Which I am sure I will desperately need. I have stocked up on pre-made meals and varieties of tea, let's do this!

My reading goals (or should I say opportunities?) are:

Horns by Joe Hill
The Eternal Ones by Kirsten Miller
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Anatomy of a Misfit by Andrea Portes

And an audiobook that lets me do mobile things while still reading (not quite sure how to convert pages to minutes):

The Cuckoo's Calling by *ahem* Robert Galbraith ;)

read | Dad Is Fat

Dad Is Fat is everything you would want from this book. I didn’t laugh out loud as much as I do at Gaffigan’s stand-up, but it was definitely an amusing read. The essays, while thematically grouped, can seem a little too short, though it’s better to want more from a story than to wish there was less. I started out reading a couple of essays at a time, which was a good way to brighten my mood without being concerned that they didn’t necessarily flow together. I eventually finished the last hundred pages in a sitting, and I wouldn’t say either method is better for experiencing this book.

This book is a series of anecdotes about the trials and tribulations of keeping up with five kids. The stories are fun and relatable, and this is a book you can keep around and reread if you need a mental health boost. I would have liked more long essays, but I enjoyed the stories and would definitely read book two.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review. 

read | Fluent Forever

Fluent Forever is a good way to face a language without becoming overwhelmed by it. This book explains methods you can use to learn a language quickly, though they are not for the faint of heart. It's not a too-good-to-be-true scenario, and it does require daily review and eventual immersion. I like to think I would learn a language in my spare time, but it's not an immediate goal for me. Even so, I found this a highly enjoyable read.

The book summarizes the techniques you'll use early on and reiterates them frequently - much like the system for learning itself - so this can get quite repetitive if you're not trying to commit the plan to memory. There's interesting research about how our memories work and better ways to learn, and these explanations are fun to read casually. I feel like people who want to learn how to learn a language quickly might see these sections as obstacles to the "important" information. Another pro (and con) to this book is that it requires a lot of outside information. A lot. You still need to find textbooks, pronunciation guides, etc. The book does provide several free sources, though some of the links I tried to follow were no longer active. Overall, Fluent Forever is an interesting insight into how the mind works whether or not you are actually seeking to learn a new language.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.