Booktube-a-thon 2017 Wrap Up

This was a pretty great first Booktube-a-thon.

I am so glad I decided to partake in the Booktube-a-thon this year. It was so much fun. I participated in Twitter sprints and I just dedicated a week to reading and it was awesome. It was great to have the challenges and the whole community as a push to just read more. And I am pretty satisfied with the end results, especially when you consider the fact that I couldn’t read for two of the seven days of the read-a-thon. So yeah, all in all I am so glad I did this, and I am looking forward to participating next year.

The Stats

Let’s talk numbers.

I’ve finished four books during the read-a-thon. I say finished, because I started one of them before the read-a-thon, but I am still counting it, because I can.

So firstly I finished The Rook by Daniel O’Malley. I have mixed feelings about it. It was good at times, and very convoluted at others. I constantly felt a bit lost and a bit overwhelmed with the information and that took out the pleasure out. Also, one of my main grievances is the fact that our main female character felt very obviously written by a male. And I hated it. So overall, 3 stars, meaning not bad, but not great.

Pages Read: 110

Next, I picked up Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty, and I absolutely LOVED it. The writing and the pacing are so addictive and the characters are beyond well done. The story itself is so gripping and you’re totally absorbed into the suburban drama and the dark undertones of this book. And who doesn’t love dark suburban drama? I know I do.  Obviously, this got 5 stars from me and I highly recommend this one. Review will be coming at you soon.

Pages Read: 377

Then, I finally read The Dark Prophecy, the second book in the Trials of Apollo series by Rick Riordan. Now, I am afraid that the novelty of Riordan is starting to wear off for me. I liked this, but it felt really repetitive and like something I have already seen. The first part was great, but at half point I was pretty much over it. And I hated how Apollo’s character development from the first book sort of disappeared and we were back to square one. However, Leo Valdez will always make a book better for me. I also liked some of the secondary characters we got to me, therefore this got 3.5 stars.

Pages Read: 319

Lastly, I picked up Human Acts by Han Kang, and I quite enjoyed it. This one is structured like a series of interconnected short stories. This had it’s good and it’s bad sides for me. On one hand, it was a really great way to explore this story, but like with any short story collection, I liked some of the chapters and couldn’t care less for some of the others. Overall, this was very powerful. It deals with the Gwangju uprising in 1980 in South Korea. It’s a harrowing topic and Han Kang does it justice. There’s a chapter in here titled The Prisoner, which BLEW ME AWAY and the book is worth reading just for that chapter alone. So I would definitely recommend it, even though I had to give it only 3.5 stars, since I did not enjoy some of the chapters as much.

Pages Read: 218

So that brings my total of pages read to: (insert drumroll)

1024 pages!

The Challenges

I also did pretty well with the challenges too! I managed to finish the following ones:

• Challenge #1: Read a book with a person on the cover (The Dark Prophecy)
• Challenge #2: Read a hyped book (Big Little Lies)
• Challenge #3: Finish a book in one day (The Dark Prophecy)
• Challenge #4: Read about a character that is very different from you (Human Acts) 
• Challenge #5: Finish a book completely outdoors (all of these! I read all of them either on the beach or on my porch (that was a challenge I have given myself))
• Challenge #6: Read a book you bought because of the cover (Human Acts) 

So I managed to finish 6 challenges! Obviously some books doubled, but I have nevertheless completed six of them and I am very pumped about it. The only one I haven’t completed is the Read 7 books in 7 days one, which just wasn’t going to happen. It’s not realistic for me personally.

All in all, I had a wonderful first Booktube-a-thon! Let me know how you did and how was the experience for you!

xxx

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