Thank you to the 1,870 of you that participated in #24in48 readathon! It was our most popular and successful event yet and we are just overwhelmed with the love and support you’ve all demonstrated, not only for us as your hosts, but for each other as a community. (If you haven’t read this love letter from first-time readathon-er Jamie Green, it basically made all three of your hosts leak out of their eyeballs.)

A few admin notes: several prizes are still unclaimed so please make sure you go back through the posts from the weekend to see if you won something. Additionally, if you did win a prize, you will not receive an email notifying you what your prize is. We will be sending mailing information out to publishers in the next week and they will be mailing prizes directly to winners, so please wait a few weeks to a month at minimum to let us know if you did not receive your prize (but do please tell us if you don’t get it so we can reach out to prize donors and publishers). If you won an international prize or a prize that requires you to choose something we will be reaching out to you (also within the next week).

Also, if you haven’t filled out the closing survey yet, please do so. There were tons of you that were first-timers and we’d love your feedback as we look forward to planning our next readathon in July.

Finally, what you’ve been waiting for, our four prize pack winners. Congrats to all of you that completed a full 24 hours of reading (some of you did even more than that!).

Prize Pack #1: $100 Gift Card to the Book Riot store & Jane Austen Print

Morgan Smith

Prize Pack #2: $50 Gift Card to Litographs.com, Emily Dickinson print, and Read the Rainbow tote

Chelsea Kerns

Prize Pack #3: Amazon HD Fire 8 Tablet, $25 Amazon.com Gift Card, and Frederick Douglass tote bag

Danielle Schleicher

Prize Pack #4: $50 worth of books from Amazon.com, Book Depository, or Wordery

Rahaf

Winners, expect an email from me in the next day or so.

So, that’s another readathon in the books! Thank you again to everyone that joined in, officially or unofficially. We hope we see all of you back here in July. Mark your calendars now and get your TBRs ready!

Guys! You did it! You made it a whole 48 hours. Did you hit your goals? (It’s okay if you didn’t!) Did you eat delicious things and get lots of snuggly reading time in? Your hosts had a great time with each and every one of you, whether you were checking in on the reg or not. And there were A LOT of you. Our previous record for readathon participants was 1,400; this weekend, we welcomed 1,850 of your gorgeous faces to #24in48 with us and all three of us are totally overwhelmed by the love. We had lots of first timers and its so great to see this little thing growing.

OKAY, I’m going to stop being sentimental and get to the business of closing this place up. First of all, we have winners to announce from Hour 42’s Challenge:

Katie.cat.books

Bry Boyd

Felkins (kab-89)

Dan Riley

Natasha Barnes

Jeni Smith

Valeria Gerasimova

Tina Porubsky

Qina Liu

Cynthia Desgagné

If you won here (or during any of the previous door prizes or challenges), go to the Prize Page and pick out your top three choices.

Secondly, we’ll be back for another round of 24in48 on….::insert drum roll::…

July 21-22, 2018

Put it on your calendars, request the time off work now, and get your TBRs ready.

Next, we’d love to know how the readathon went for you. There were some changes this time and a lot of you were newbies, so tell us in the closing survey how this round went and if there’s anything you’d like to see change.

Lastly, if you hit 24 hours, you’re eligible to win one of four prize packs, generously donated by our great sponsors. Fill out the form below to provide proof of your full 24 hours read BEFORE midnight ET on Tuesday, January 30th. We’ll announce the winners of those packs next week.

As always, friends, it’s been a wonderful weekend and from all three of your hosts, thank you for joining us and we hope to see you back here in July.

Whoa, nelly. How did it get to be Hour 45 already? Time flies when you’re having fun, apparently, and we are MOST DEFINITELY having fun, are we not? We’ve got three hours left to the finish line, and you know what that means…

A few important countdown reminders from your hosts:

1. BREATHE. Move. Stretch. Breathe again. Repeat as needed.
2. Enjoy yourself — and enjoy that book you’re reading. If you AREN’T enjoying it, put it down! Read something else, go for a walk, give your brain a change of pace/story/language/direction/things to think about for a bit.
3. This readathon is for you, not anybody else. So someone else read 456 books in 24 hours, and you’ve not yet finished one? Who cares. This isn’t a competition. Have fun with it, appreciate this time carved out for reading, and–most importantly–you do you, friend!
4. Don’t worry about making or breaking your goals at this point. It’s easy to look at the 3-hour countdown and feel like you have to read for EVERY SINGLE MINUTE OF IT to hit your time goals, but goals are just that — goals — and it’s totally ok not to reach them. I (Kerry) have had readathons where I’ve read the full 24 hours, and readathons where I’ve barely eeked out 3 hours of audiobook, and that in the car while driving to some event or another. It’s all good. Sometimes it’s the trying that is the most important part. (Whoa, we’re getting all kind of deep and meaningful this late in the game, apparently).

We love you all, we’re so excited you’re a part of this, and we can’t wait to cheer in these last few hours with you all.

Our last round of door prize winners:

Trisa @ Absolute Bookishness

Rebecca Simonin

Jessie @ Dwell in Possibility

Jenny @ Reading the End

Allie @ A Literary Odyssey

Jenna Morrison Campbell

Kimberly Nelson

Callie LaFleur

If you’ve won a prize here (or on any of the past hours — don’t forget to check!), you can claim your prize at the Prizes Page.

And don’t forget, you still have time to enter the LAST CHALLENGE from Hour 42, which is open until hour 48 (aka the finish line!).

We are so close to the end! Which means you’re either sad that it’s almost over, panicked because you haven’t read as much as you wanted, or kind of losing it a little bit from lack of sleep. (Or likely all three hashtag readathonlife.)

Before you go fully batty, we’ve got Hour 36 winners to announce:

Erika Morris

Ashley Kemp

Holly Latta

Heather Conley

Benni (librarybenni)

Candice Zablan

Susie Kirk

Staijah Unciano-Pantohan

Derby (derbylanereviews)

Erin Flynn

Go check out the Prize page and make your picks.

AND FOR OUR VERY LAST CHALLENGE OF THE READATHON, we want to to see your covers! Find the best book cover and the worst cover on your shelves and post a photo of them on social media (don’t forget to hashtag them with #24in48).

Here are mine:

(And yes, I know the cover for Made for Love is supposed to be terrible.)

Drop the link to your photo in the form below. We’ll pull winners at Hour 48 (the end of this journey!). Until next post, happy reading.

Hour 39 is upon us, and that means it’s time for more door prizes! But first, a few words of love:

You, yes YOU, are amazing. You are a perfect reading machine, a fantastical whimsical book merperson, a beautiful wonderful literary leprechaun. We’re so, so happy you’re joining us that we can’t even quite make compliments that make sense (though maybe that’s just a by-product of it being hour 39, and yours truly (Kerry) veering just a touch to the loopy side of things). But for reals, this readathon is such an incredible event, and it’s amazing to see its growth, and we couldn’t do any of it without ALL OF YOU WONDERBOOKSTARS. Without further ado…

This hour’s door prize winners are:

Sydney Sullivan

Stephanie Hildreth

Regina Renee Ward

Felicia The Geeky Blogger

Melissa Pickford

Lady @ FreeFormLady

If you won a prize here (or on a past post… don’t forget to check!) you can claim your prize over on the Prize Page. And don’t forget you can still enter the Bookends Challenge from Hour 36, which is open until Hour 42. See you all in a few hours!

We’re closing in on the end of readathon, but we’re not losing momentum! It’s the perfect time for another challenge to get you moving and sharing, so get up, stretch, and head back over to your home library.

While you’re walking over there, we’ve got the winners from our last challenge!

Shawntaye Hopkins

Sally Taylor

Ali (@Aliiii0685)

Diana (dnearhos)

Christina Hickey

Cathy Sedge

Jessica Bolton

Alan Compton

Tara Colaruotolo

Abby Mason

For this challenge, we want to see the first book on your shelves, and the last book on your shelves. (Drop your email address and entry into the form at the bottom of this post; you have until Hour 42 to enter!)

I’m always intrigued by the way readers choose to organize their shelves, if at all. Overall, I break things down by Fiction and NonFiction. Within that, I separate hardcover and paperback, and then alphabetize by author. There are a few exceptions, of course; my first bookcase starts out two full shelves of various editions of Harry Potter that my partner and I have collected over the years before flowing into my romance shelves.

I could go on and on, but I know you all would rather see my bookends.

Show us yours, then get back to the books!

We are well and truly into day two of this readathon, and you are CRUSHING IT. It’s 9am for me (Kerry), and if I know me (I think I do), I’m currently pouring myself a MASSIVE cup of coffee and getting ready for the day to come. We’ve got 15 hours left on the official readathon clock, and we believe in you.

That said, we all know that the second day of a readathon can be harder than the first. Your mind starts to wander, your eyelids start to droop. So get up and move around a bit. Stretch! Walk! Breathe! Then make yourself a cup of coffee (or tea, or whatever floats your boat), focus, and get back to the books.

BUT WAIT! First, more door prize winners:

Christina @ Ruff Day Reviews
Eva Shotwell
SHAWNTA M DODSON
Alicia Day
Kristy Harvey
Trish Fitzsimmons

If you’ve won a prize (here or on a past post–be sure to double check!), visit the Prize Page to claim your prize. And don’t forget you can still enter the Share the Shame challenge from Hour 30, which is open for entries until Hour 36.

WHAT UP PARTY PEOPLE. It’s 6am on day two, my favorite day of the ‘thon. For me, day two usually consists of extra coffee, cozy blankets, catching up on the hashtag, and some dedicated hunkering down to try and hit 24 hours.

Wherever you are and however much you’ve read, I’m happy you’re here, and I’m proud of you. Reading for the sake of reading with a community of other readers across the world is the most important part of this weekend. You’ve dedicated your weekend to reading and connecting, and that’s a win all by itself.

To kick off our second day, it’s time for another challenge! Head on over to your bookshelves and take a long, hard look at all the books you haven’t read. Listen to them calling to you. Think about how many times you’ve bought new books and ignored the unread ones you already own.

This hour’s challenge: find the book you’ve owned the longest that you still haven’t read, and share it with us. (Drop your email address and challenge entry into the form at the bottom of this post; you have until Hour 36 to enter!)

I’m a big believer in the right book finding us at the right time, and for me that often means holding onto certain titles through multiple rounds of shelf culling because I know I WANT to read them eventually, I’m just not there yet.

Here’s my entry:

Do you share my habits, or do something entirely different? Do you limit your book buying so you’re reading as fast as you’re acquiring? Maybe you’re like Rachel, and somehow you have three or four copies of a book…and you still haven’t read it yet (no shame, boo, I love you).

We’re sharing our shelf shame here so we can kick it for good. We read how we want. NO REGRETS.

On the official readathon time clock, it’s the wee hours of the morning (3am to be precise), but with such an awesome contingent of around-the-world readers, we know there are ‘thoners out there reading up a storm. Our fearless leader, Rachel, is in the middle of the day in her time zone, but your trusty co-hosts Kristen and Kerry are likely curled up beneath a massive stack of blankets trying to catch a few 3am zzzs before tomorrow’s reading.

Whether you’re sleeping or reading at this very moment, know that we’re all cheering for you. Even Beyonce!

Pro tip: If you’re feeling sleepy and trying to read on through it, some pro-‘thoners suggest switching books to something lighter to keep yourself motivated through the sleepy hours. Don’t be afraid to set aside something that isn’t keeping your attention; you can always come back to it later.

Before we get back to reading (or sleeping, as the case may be), a few door prize winners!

Robyn Schwartzman
Linda Wachlarz
Linda Hurley
Alexandra Endress
Kody Ryan Munson
Neha Kalani

Winners, check out the prize page to claim your door prize.

And don’t forget to check back for another round of challenges to come, starting at Hour 30.

We’re at the halfway point!!! Or at least the official time clock is at the halfway point. If you’re reading this as it posts, you’re either up late like me (Kerry) or not on the East Coast of the US (which is a whole damn lot of you!). Either way, we’re SO PROUD of what you’ve done so far, and you should be too. Give yourself a big ol’ pat on the back, would you?

We’re moving into the second half of this readathon, and we have no doubt you guys are going to crush your reading goals. Remember that the second day of this thing can be harder than the first; you’ve made some progress, and your brain keeps trying to think about other things (Netflix, or to-do lists, or getting ready for Monday, or what have you). But as a community, we know we can support each other through those tempting non-reading moments, and get back to the books. That’s not to say you shouldn’t give yourself a break, of course–the whole point of 24in48 is that we prioritize reading while still leaving room for other non-reading activities over the course of a weekend. So if you need a nap, or a walk, or a quick dose of television, don’t kick yourself over it! You do you. You’re perfect, never change.

Before we move on, we’ve got some prize winners!

From the Hour Zero Intro  Survey Challenge:

Corrie McMurtry
Danielle Bowen
Sherie Gordon
Ryan A. Franklin
Erin @erin_el_issa
Jennifer Miller-Smith
Hannah Ens
Jackie Edwards
Vanessa L. @YouReadMyEyes
Rebekah @adventuresinpages

And from the Hour 18 Challenge:

Michelle @beckesequus
Melissa Fetterman
Cammane
LASHAONDA MILAM
Courtnee
Patty B
Sara Hendrix
Hannah Borden
Rebecca Jo Vincent
Myriam Daoust

Head on over to the prize page to claim your prize. And stay tuned for more challenges to come in the next few hours. Until then, happy reading!