M. Suzanne Terry

Do you ever put aside a large block of time just to read? Isn’t it decadent? I occasionally take my own extended reading breaks, but I mostly do it when I participate in online readathons. I love these events, but my planning and execution usually goes like this:

1. Get SUPER excited and exclamation-pointy about it when I read the save-the-date post months in advance!!!!!!! I’m going to read so much! I’m going to catch up on the TBR for the whole year!! I’m going to read for 24 hours straight!!!
2. Put it on the calendar (in ALL CAPS!!!!)
3. Promptly forget about it.
4. Remember that I’m doing it (and was super excited about it) when I make my daily to-do lists for the week in my planner the Sunday before it’s scheduled.
5. Get excited again!!!!
6. Spend the week stacking up more books next to my favorite reading chair than I could feasibly read in a month, much less a weekend. Post pics of it on the Instagram, acknowledging the impossibility of the task I’m setting myself up for in writing while secretly believing that somehow I really can perform the bending of space and time that it would take to finish all those books during the readathon.
7. Drink a strong cup of coffee on the Friday night it starts (because I’m fried from the workweek but feel compelled to start the readathon at the moment it officially begins – usually at midnight). 
8. Read for a good 2-3 hours (typical for any Friday night, although most weeks I definitely start earlier than 12:00), and finally give up and go to bed when I notice that I keep nodding off and thus have been re-reading the same page for the last 20 minutes.
9. Wake up late Saturday morning. Briefly and half-heartedly mourn the lost hours of reading I’ve missed in a sigh-oh-well but also not-sorry, well-rested fashion. Have breakfast and a vat of coffee while watching an episode of whatever show I’m currently bingeing to give my brain time to wake up and start doing that following-a-plot thing.
10. Read for an hour or two.
11. Get a sudden wild hair to do the laundry/dishes/sweeping/cleaning/Marie-Kondo-ing my bedroom or whatever task that I have inexplicably decided I need to accomplish immediately (this can last anywhere from half an hour to early evening). I may listen to an audiobook while I’m doing it if the activity is fairly mindless and not too loud.
12. Read for an hour or two more. 
13. It must be time to eat something, right? I should eat something. And watch another episode of my stories.
14. Scroll through social media while trying to convince myself that, technically, memes and captions are a type of reading.
15. Read a little while (i.e., less than an hour) longer and then go to bed. 

If the official readathon lasts into Sunday, repeat the pattern above, only with more frequent and longer interruptions because I usually go to church to sing with the choir and have at least one meeting in the afternoon and often spend a few hours on my writing job in the evening if my teams have a lot of work they need to be finished.

Well, Dewey’s  24-Hour Readathon is this weekend, and real talk – it may turn out a lot like that. And that’s ok. That is still an enjoyable, relaxed weekend, and I still get to read a lot. I’d like to make it a real retreat, though. More on that in a minute.

For you morning people, Dewey’s is a good readathon. It starts at 8:00 a.m. EST on Saturday, April 30 (that’s 7:00…on a Saturday…for those of us in the Central time zone. I can 100% guarantee I won’t be awake and reading at that time unless I happen to still be up from the night before.). For the rest of us, I (and also the staff of Dewey’s) give us full permission to adapt the schedule to fit whatever we want. Just watch the Dewey’s Instagram for the day if you want to be a little social about it.

My personal goal for this weekend is to actually read 24 hours total but stretch it out over Friday-Sunday. Inspired by this post, I am preparing to succeed by doing the following things:

• Take Friday off work (both jobs) to get a good head start. This also gives me during-the-workday time (i.e., the best time) to go grocery shopping for easy-prep, retreat-ish foods if I haven’t managed to make it to the store before then. I already have to go to the store tonight because I am out of coffee (How, though. How did I not even realize I was running low? I must really need a break.), so hopefully all I’ll need to pick up later in the week is bread, fruit, or other easily-perishables.
• Take Sunday off, too. Have a real weekend. Reserve the right to change my mind Sunday morning if I’m restless or I really like the songs we’re singing in the service.
• Make a personalized schedule for my readathon. Ok, that gets some !!!!! That’s just as exciting as reading all weekend! It allows me to plug in planned breaks for cleaning, cooking, eating, doom scrolling, etc., with specific stop times. It also takes the non-reading but still bookish activities I will be indulging in into account. For example, this particular retreat will include making cookies from Eat this Poem for our cookbook club on Friday. I may go to Patchouli Joe’s for Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, but I’m not committed to actually attending in person because 1) I want it to be successful and thus crowded but also I hate being in a crowd and 2) isn’t every day Independent Bookstore Day for me? Depending on how lovey I feel about the schedule when I get it finalized, I may post the itinerary here for fellow planner nerds to enjoy.
• Meal plan with an abundance of snacks and cozy beverages. I’m currently thinking croissants or toast with butter/jam (maybe an egg) for breakfast, sandwiches/charcuterie for lunch, and delicious things I can slow cook in the Crock Pot all day for supper. This would also give me lunches for the next week, so that’s an extra bonus.
• Create a big, impossible book stack like the one above, all of which I am likely to start and none of which I may actually finish that weekend. Or maybe I’ll include books I am close to finishing that I started a while ago and put down for a practical (i.e., ran out of time/needed to finish something else/etc., not because I wasn’t enjoying it) reason. Perhaps a mix of both, as well as some shorter books I can read in one sitting. I still have a couple of poetry collections I planned to read this month but haven’t yet, so those will probably be included, too.

If you’re participating in Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon (or just doing your own self-designed reading retreat someday soon), I’d love to hear about your experience. Do you plan ahead? Do you wing it? Which do you enjoy more?