Now that I have slept like the dead for several hours, here is my #24in48 summary. I completed the pictured books and got a few chapters into the tagged book. I didn't reach 24 hours this time, which annoys me a bit, but today is a new day of summer holiday and I can keep reading. Yeet! (As my kids say.)

@24in48

I'm at 19 hours now, and so can technically reach #24in48 if I read non-stop until the end of the readathon - which is 5 am for me. This is a doubtful scenario, but I'll at least read some Sandman and contemplate starting another book. It's only just midnight.

@24in48

It's a pick. It feels like a guilty pleasure, sugar and spice and everything nice and full of empty calories. It went down a treat.

Excited about this book! But also a bit apprehensive as it is posed to pit a 16 year old in a love triangle/competition with two immortals, one of which is a psycho who kills with a kiss and the other a compulsive liar who could teach Machiavelli a thing or two about manipulation. I sort of hope they go off with eachother and leave her to grow up in peace. (Yeah, I'm not really in the YA target audience 🤣)
#24in48

Madcap, unbelievable, larger that life, shocking, crude, sophisticated, yet down to earth. This book contains multitudes in just 232 wildly tangential pages. And I think it must be the ultimate book of sisterhood.

I didn't manage as many hours as I'd hoped today, but I might still get to #24in48. I just need to close my eyes for an hour or eight. 😆

9h30 min of reading. 2 1/2 hours spent on Pokémon Adventures (lap 3 and 4), and seven on Angela Carter's Wise Children.

Happy continued reading for those of you who are awake. I'll be back in the morning. 💤

#24in48 Hour 6 challenge
I love #SFF
The tagged book is a much read favourite posed with my SFF TBR for the readathon.

@24in48

I have my #24in48 #TBR ready in the sofa corner. 😃
I‘ve gone with tried and tested authors (can you tell I like SFF? 😂), and because it‘s both a #readathon and the start of the summer holiday I wanted nothing taxing or sad, or likely to give me a book hangover.
Super excited to get started tomorrow morning, and only regret that there‘s no way I‘ll be able to read them all in one weekend.😅

The high school awards trophies to their word millionaires. My daughter‘s form also read the most in total, with over 16 million words this school year. (She contributed 2.6 million.) 💪📚🥳

Some end of year items my youngest got from his teacher. They had an award ceremony where all the kids got a diploma based on a distinguishing trait. He was really chuffed to get "Book Lover - for being so enthusiastic about reading".
The bookmark with the lovely poem is personalised with an acrostic of his name on the back, which he announced made it UNIQUE and his very special bookmark to use and keep forever. ?

About to start my pinkest book. 😲😆
One kid is on a school trip coming back late, and the other is going home with a friend after school. So I have some extra time and decided to treat myself to an iced latte (which became a whole lunch deal 🤣).
#Reading1001

I posted my kid's Book Bingo Blackout a while ago. His teacher gave him this diploma and a £10 National Book Token card!
We don't have a proper bookstore in town, just a W.H.Smith. But we are going to London in a couple of weeks. So help me out, Kittens: Where's the best store to shop for children's books in London? 😃

Horrific. Poetic. Thought provoking. Strange. Oddly beautiful. Possibly not everyone's cup of tea.

Look at those endorsements! Award winning writer of The Wire, Gold standard character driven crime writing, Gripping. Stephen King himself calls him “perhaps the greatest living crime writer”. Surely not! I saw no sign of any of this. Except that I fully believe that the author is used to writing for TV. It‘s like someone took a B-movie script and added internal monologue. Every scene we are told what everybody‘s wearing and other visuals.
⤵️

I'm... just gonna leave this right here. No comment. 🇬🇧

“The reader should be reminded that it was crusaders and not the Muslims who originally sacked Constantinople, which should have caused perpetual scepticism about the value of noble causes. Apparently it has not, as the human race is incapable of learning anything from history.”

"The self-anointed superior races, drunk on Darwin and nationalist hyperbole, besotted with eugenics and beguiled by myth, were winding up machines of genocide that soon would be unleashed upon a world already weary to the heart of such infinite foolery and contemptible vainglory."

My youngest is feeling very proud to have completed this book bingo that his teacher set the class earlier in the school year. It has taken us a while to find books for some of the categories, (True Story was the hardest one; true stories tend to be so sad and dramatic!) but he thinks he is the first one to have achieved blackout. 💪📚

#RaisingReaders
#BookBingo

Yes, because a man would be better off dead than to have a wife who is intelligent, well read, perceptive, self-assured, and outspoken. 🙄 I hope for the girl's sake that she discovers a preference for women.

I find this series simultaneously interesting and dull. I‘d like to see what happens (although the second book was really predictable), but I also keep wanting to do other things or read something else.
This is the third book and I (fortunately?) don‘t have the rest of the series. Not saying I won‘t ever read the rest, but I don‘t think I‘ll be in a hurry to get hold of them.

Look at these beauties! 😍
Sadly it is high time I return them to the library. If I‘m lucky they‘ll have found book 5 for me. The sixth and final book will be out later this year. Maybe I‘ll just have to buy a full set for our non-existent spare shelf space. 😬😆

I was practically holding my breath and in an adrenaline rush throughout this whole book. It was uncomfortable but great. What would you do if you were suddenly pulled through time to ante bellum Maryland? How would you survive? How would it change you? Recommended.

This is one strange book. Really heavy on the magical realism. Actually, I think the key word is magical and the realism only drops by now and then. I like it!

I love these covers so much!

Starting book two. Spawn1 is halfway through book three, and we both have to press on because we have to return book four on Friday. 😅

#RaisingReaders

"This exchange was unproductive as Louis the One Handed did not speak very good English, and Pete was from Oklahoma and had only loneliness as his second language."

I'm so glad I let my youngest child persuade me to start reading Pokémon Adventures. I only started because he was so obsessed so I was going to be a good parent and force myself to take an interest. But these are getting more and more fun! I think I'm now a fan. Of the manga. Still not interested in the games or TV/Film animations.

Found the first Jack Reacher book in the library app, and decided to see what the popularity is about. I'm finding it hard to adjust to the narrator. He reads in a drawl, a bit staccato, like a list. With stress on nouns and the final word like it's almost an exclamation. "I was Arrested in Eno's DINER. At 12 o'CLOCK. I was eating EGGS and drinking COFFEE. A late Breakfast, not Lunch. I was wet and Tired after a long Walk in heavy RAIN." ?

How it should have ended: They all die of cholera.
How it should have ended 2: Florentino Ariza gets struck by lightning, is castrated by the parents of América Vicuña, lives to see Fermina Daza reject him a second time, now with pitiless contempt, and THEN he dies of cholera.
The prose is beautiful, the translation stellar, but all the atmospheric and evocative writing in the world can not get me to like this drawn out, rapey, stalker story.

I only have 36 pages to go. Given the weird romanticising of rape and morbid obsession, I really hope this ends with castration and murder. Or, given the title, an outbreak of cholera that kills all the main characters and several minor ones. Because I have read enough Shakespeare and Greek tragedies to know that is how it is supposed to go.

It's gone midnight, so technically Monday. I also feel wiped out and ready for shutdown. Didn't make it to #24B4Monday but I'm happy with my effort. Managed to finish off several books, and the end is even neigh for Love in the Age of Cholera. I'm almost ready for May now. 🌻

@TheReadingMermaid @Andrew65

No, dude. It is not just a shield for her timidity. You're her ex and she wants you to bugger off out of her life and stop obsessively stalking her.

Seriously, I felt for the guy to begin with but I really hope they don't get together in the end (don't tell me if they do!) Morbid obsession should not be rewarded, nor should it be romanticised.

#24B4Monday

Paranormal/Psychological thriller with elements from the horror genre.
The good: Page turner, genuinely had my pulse racing. Genuinely scary where it meant to be. Ends on a change but not on a cliffhanger.
The bad: Excruciatingly slow-witted MC. Foreshadowing so heavy it's practically in technicolour. At least one cardinal sin in plot twist tropes. Does go on a bit with the explanations (see dim MC).

Halfway to #24B4Monday
Fortunately I don't have a lot of plans for tomorrow. Dividing my time between Love in the Time of Cholera (beautiful prose, but the plot isn't my thing) and White Silence (some genuinely tense and scary moments, but the MC is exasperatingly slow witted; to the point where it seems like plot inconsistencies).

Spend approx 4 hours finishing my Miss Marple omnibus, and 1h 42min listening to White Silence by Jodi Taylor (of time travelling historian fame). I might listen to another chapter in bed. Or, at least ten more minutes. 😅

#24B4Monday
@Andrew65 @TheReadingMermaid

"She could hardly admire old Mr Crackenthorpe's taste in art. He seemed to have an unerring instinct for selecting the worst specimen of any period."

Agatha Christie name-drops herself. 😄

It‘s all Golden Age mysteries for me this Easter (except on audio where I‘m going Modern Cozy). I‘ve just finished two Lord Peter stories that I hadn‘t read before, and moving on to a 4-in-1 Miss Marple. (I might have read some of them before, or seen the TV-adaptations, I might not. It‘s been years anyway, I‘m sure I won‘t remember squat of who dunnit.) #Påskekrim #EasterMysteries

The county libraries changed computer systems, which broke user access to their library catalogue and audiobook app for more than 2 weeks. 😣 Now audiobook access is back, at least, just in time for me to renew and download my reserved books before they expired. 😅 Easter is crime/mystery time for all Norwegians, and I'm ready to clean, cook, and decorate whilst listening to this strange title. 😁

When your child has a towering TBR and is going to spend the Easter break making a good dent in it but gets sidetracked by a pretty cover that turns out to be the first in a long series, and it is so good she tells you to put aside your own, even more towering, TBR and read this series - right now!
#BooknerdProblems #thestruggleisreal #raisingreaders will explode your tbr 🤣

Entertaining lunar heist. Would make a fun action movie. Think I'll use this for the "Written by straight white male" category of the #SFFTBRChallenge since the MC is a Saudi woman who grew up in a Kenyan international town on the Moon, but reads like a sassy androgynous American.

Books read during the #readathon
The 24hour readathon might be over but my reading weekend isn't. I should be able to read one more over the afternoon and journey back from the #readingretreat

@DeweysReadathon

#shelfie
Picture taken from the sedentary position in a comfy chair in the History Room of Gladstone's Library.
#readathon

@DeweysReadathon

Wow. Just gone three hours into the 24h #readathon and my 12 y/old... well, she doesn't have a bingo but she's filled almost 2/3 of the board!

@DeweysReadathon

I know that all SFF writers write from their own situation in time and place, but they speculate on social structures as well as technology. And it's a bit disappointing to see that tens of thousands of years from now humanity has a social structure where men work and women are simply classified as wives. (And they're not using the metric system either!)

Book. Train. Welsh countryside. Let the weekend commence!
#ReadingRetreat

@jhod @squirrelbrain @Mitch @julesG @scripturient @RachelO @Oryx @eraderneely

I have gone from not knowing what to write about the #BlindDate book to having two descriptions! Will put them to the vote when the whole family is home. 😁
#readingretreat

I'm only going away for a weekend. I'll be bringing my Kindle. I'll be staying at an actual library and fully intend to browse the shelves. And yet I somehow have four books I want to stuff in my handbag, just in case. 🤦‍♀️ But, I mean, they're only short books, right? For the train? In case I forget to charge my Kindle?
#ReadingRetreat

#BestOfMarch
March was a very good reading month, when it comes to quality. The 3 books in the picture were all 5/5 🌟 I also had several good 4 stars and two ok 3 stars. No pans or bails. Fingers crossed for continuing this trend in April.

My 8 y/o started reading this but found it a bit scary and asked me to read it with him. I'm glad! We both really enjoyed this story of a magical cloak, an evil sorceress ex-step mother, various enchanted (cursed) people, and eerie green-glowing phantoms.