Saturday morning, 10:30 AM
…wishing a belated good luck to everyone starting off on their reading challenge this morning!!!

So yesterday was my day off work, which I devoted to reading as much as possible. I’m showing that I spent a total of 10.26 hours on the Challenge yesterday, of which 9.42 were reading and .84 were blogging. (This is a little messy due to my trying to record the occasional 10-minute interval instead of sticking to 15-minute increments as Pam at MotherReader recommended.) I read half an hour of Jinx by Sage Blackwood to my son for his bedtime reading, finished Tankborn by Karen Sandler and got just a couple of chapters into The Savage Fortress by Sarwat Chadda. This morning, I read just a little more over breakfast (feeling wimpy for not setting my alarm early to have more reading time before work) and then had half an hour to listen in the car on my commute.

My plan for the rest of the day is to try to write the reviews of the books I read yesterday and catch up with what everyone else is reading between patrons, read over breaks, and hope to get the kids to bed early enough to read some more before I conk out myself.

Yesterday, Ms. Yingling was kind enough to compliment me on having done my homework for finding my big pile of books to read. Thanks, Ms. Yingling! I did spend the last several weeks making a list of potential books to read, putting holds on ones I knew I wanted so that they would be in on time, and checking out a couple of books at a time until I wound up with the giant stack (even if the stack is only half the books on my list). I decided to focus on speculative fiction, partly because it’s my favorite, partly because it’s even harder to find genre fiction with diversity, and partly because I realized that while diversity has been on my radar for a long time, I’m often likely to stick these diverse books on my mental list of cool books to maybe get to someday, and then actually read the books I hear about more often – which aren’t diverse. But all the titles (except one) were gathered from reading other bloggers’ reviews – so thank you especially to Charlotte and the Book Smugglers for helping me to find all of these books. Also, thank you to our page R., who steered me towards Marie Lu for an audiobook.