105 Ways to Give a Book

The 48 Hour Book Challenge: Now Everyone Can Play!

I have a few personal goals for today.
  1. To relocate the snowboots from the foyer closet.
  2. To replace the snowflake placemats with something summerlike.
  3. To remove the sweaters from my dresser drawers.
Are these similar to your goals? Probably not, unless you live in Alaska where the snow season is just ending. But as a resident of a Mid-Atlantic state, I should take care of these things. Now, it would be wonderful if I had, say, 48 hours in which to tackle all of my household needs. But this weekend I have other priorities, no matter how much I wish I could devote the full time to this worthy project.

Are you following my analogy here? Or is it the title that is tipping you off?

When I proposed The 48 Hour Book Challenge, I said that there would be prizes for number of books read, amount of time spent, and... something else. I’ve let it gel in my brain, and I’ve come up with the something else.

I want to offer A Chair, A Fireplace, and A Tea Cozy my thanks for leading me down this path.

On her site, she suggested that you could look at participation as you would a marathon — in other words, reaching your personal goal. Maybe that is plowing through your stack of early chapter books, maybe it is finally tackling that one very long book, or maybe it is writing that perfect book review that finally establishes the connection between Holden from The Catcher in the Rye and the farmer in Click, Clack, Moo.

On Monday, June 19th, write up your goal and experience and I’ll judge it — most subjectively, I might add. For number of books read, and amount of time spent, you have to be a full participant and read fourth-grade books and up. Them’s the breaks. But I hope this opens the challenge up to kids’ lit bloggers, supporters, and book lovers who might not otherwise be able to participate. If you don’t have a blog, A Chair, A Fireplace, and A Tea Cozy has offered space to post and so has Books-A-Plenty .

The final rules will be posted on Thursday night, June 15th. I’ll update them to include the personal goals award and to add page count as a tie-breaker for number of books read. I originally wasn’t going to use page count, because it seemed to involve math. But then I remembered about the invention of calculators, and it seemed like it might be a useful tie-breaker if two (or more) people read the same number of books. There will also be more specifics about how to let me know that you participated, since I can’t just cruise the Internet all day hoping to stumble upon you. Stay tuned.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hope the rules include elastic scheduling. Father's Day will make it difficult for me to give this thing my all next weekend. The following weekend, I can read and blog myself silly.

Camille said...

Oh dear, what makes a book 4th grade and up? Do you want to specify novels not picture books? There are picture books though that are for older readers. Whenever a parent complained that their child was only reading the "easy" books, I would hand them Language of the Doves by Rosemary Wells and a box of tissues and tell them to come see me in 25 minutes. Thirty tissue sodden minutes later they would hand me the book and agree that not all the books in the "E" section were "easy." Ha!

Leila said...

Hi MR! I tried to post this yesterday, but it looks like Blogger ate it. I have to bow out of the 48HBC due to a funeral. Rats. I'd totally rather be reading. Anyhoo, I hope there'll be another challenge soon...