Let's Raise A Glass To The Late 48-Hour Book Challenge

 For ten years beginning in 2006, the childlit blogging community took part in the 48-Hour Book Challenge during a weekend early in June. It was created by Pam Coughlin of MotherReader and was a social reading experience for children's lit bloggers. You read and blogged as much as you could during a 48-hour period. 

My first year, I read magical realism. Another year I read and blogged about friends' books. Looking back through the archives, it appears that I took at least three years off, two for eldercare issues and one because I'd made some kind of crazy self-commitment to not do anything work-related on weekends during the summer months because the family had so much going on. What was wrong with me? 

As part of my 20th anniversary observance, I'm republishing below my post marking the end of the challenge and, pretty much, the end of an era.

Friday, June 03, 2016

At the end of May, 2006  I signed up for the first 48-Hour Book Challenge, the inspiration of Pam Coughlin at MotherReader.  I did a magical realism tour for my first book challenge with seven stops. I took part in 2007 and 2008 and again in 2014 and 2015.

The 48-Hour Book Challenge was a reading and blogging binge. You picked 48-hours over a 3-day weekend Pam selected, usually at the beginning of June, and during that period read as much as you could of whatever you wanted and blogged about the books you completed. Because that's what litbloggers do. There was a list of participating bloggers at Pam's site so you knew which of your friends were reading and blogging with you. There were prizes.

No 48-Hour Book Challenge this year. Pam/MotherReader is calling it a day, figuring ten years is a good wrap-up point. There may be some interest in bringing it back next year, but for now the Challenge is a happy memory.

Some litbloggers who were around back then refer to the mid '00s as the Golden Age of Blogging. As I'm sure I've said before, I think of that time as a wild west/frontier experience. There were no instructions on how to blog, no talk of writers building platform, no articles on why writers need blogs or how they can get by with a blog instead of a website. Internet book bullying was still in the future. No one had come up with ways to use blogs to market books. No one had started companies organizing blog tours for writers. Magazines weren't sponsoring blogs.

Because we sponsored ourselves! Yeah! Ya just went out and blogged in those days! Sink or swim. Blog free or die hard.

Blogging was truly social media then, at least in the childlit world, because bloggers interacted, commenting on each others' work and posting links to one another. You were part of a community. Kind of an underground community. Which was cool. The 48-Hour Book Challenge was an on-line ball for the childlit blogging world.

Well, nostalgia isn't healthy. So let's hitch up our big blogger pants, toss back a little of whatever we like to toss back when we're paying tribute, and get back to whatever bloggy things we do these days. And Twitter. I'm going over to Twitter when I'm done here.

We had some good times, Book Challenge. Have fun in retirement.

The 48-Hour Book Challenge: That's A Wrap

At the end of May, 2006  I signed up for the first 48-Hour Book Challenge, the inspiration of Pam Coughlin at  MotherReader.  I did a magical realism tour for my first book challenge with seven stops. I took part in 2007 and 2008 and again in 2014 and 2015.

The 48-Hour Book Challenge was a reading and blogging binge. You picked 48-hours over a 3-day weekend Pam selected, usually at the beginning of June, and during that period read as much as you could of whatever you wanted and blogged about the books you completed. Because that's what litbloggers do. There was a list of participating bloggers at Pam's site so you knew which of your friends were reading and blogging with you. There were prizes.

No 48-Hour Book Challenge this year. Pam/MotherReader is calling it a day, figuring ten years is a good wrap-up point. There may be some interest in bringing it back next year, but for now the Challenge is a happy memory.

Some litbloggers who were around back then refer to the mid '00s as the Golden Age of Blogging. As I'm sure I've said before, I think of that time as a wild west/frontier experience. There were no instructions on how to blog, no talk of writers building platform, no articles on why writers need blogs or how they can get by with a blog instead of a website. Internet book bullying was still in the future. No one had come up with ways to use blogs to market books. No one had started companies organizing blog tours for writers. Magazines weren't sponsoring blogs.

Because we sponsored ourselves! Yeah! Ya just went out and blogged in those days! Sink or swim. Blog free or die hard.

Blogging was truly social media then, at least in the childlit world, because bloggers interacted, commenting on each others' work and posting links to one another. You were part of a community. Kind of an underground community. Which was cool. The 48-Hour Book Challenge was an on-line ball for the childlit blogging world.

Well, nostalgia isn't healthy. So let's hitch up our big blogger pants, toss back a little of whatever we like to toss back when we're paying tribute, and get back to whatever bloggy things we do these days. And Twitter. I'm going over to Twitter when I'm done here.

We had some good times, Book Challenge. Have fun in retirement.

How Are You Going To Keep Them Down On The Farm, After They've Seen Paree?

My third book for this year's 48 Hour Book Challenge is also written in the present tense. Is this happening all over the place, and I just haven't been noticing?

Mare's War by Tanita S. Davis is sort of like the finding grandparents books I wrote about recently. However, Octavia and Talitha have always known their chain-smoking, stiletto wearing grandmother. The discovery in this book is her incredible past/story as a WWII era WAC. And her incredible past/story as a WWII era WAC is even more incredible because she's African American, and she was serving in a segregated Women's Army Corps.

Book Structure

Mare's War is structured around a road trip. Octavia and Talitha are stuck driving cross-country with their 80-year-old grandmother who is headed for a family reunion. Marey Lee Boylen is fond of wigs, push-up bras, and stiletto heels. We get short sections involving the road trip in which Marey Lee Boylen (Mare to both friends and granddaughters) is quite a sophisticated, well spoken woman of the world. She's very knowledgeable about black history, particularly as it relates to the parts of the U.S. they're traveling through, and she appears to be quite capable of paying for the nice hotels where she likes to stay. These sections are told from the point of view of Octavia, who I believe, is around 15 years old. (Her sister Talitha is older, not in college yet, but old enough to drive.)

These sections alternate with longer, historical sections in which the 16 to 17-year-old Mare is the first person narrator. She tells of her rough life in Alabama, how she escaped it by joining the service, and her experiences while in that service. In these sections, Mare speaks in the voice of a very, rural, inexperienced rural girl. A rube, to be blunt. She sounds nothing like the mature Mare. That totally works. To a great extent this book is about how young Mare becomes very mature Mare.

YA Characters

 

Interesting aspect of this book is that we have two YA worlds, Octavia and Talitha's contemporary world and Mare's WWII era world. Octavia and Talitha's YA life is bland and dull compared to their grandmother's. And that works.

I could say more about characters--the sister issues, is Mare like her mother, but I have less than three hours left for reading. Allez!!!

Disclosure: I've "known" Tanita for years as bloggers. She has been a frequent commenter here, and I've done the same at the blog she maintains with Sarah Stevenson, Finding Wonderland. (Can't figure out how to comment at her personal blog.) I read a library copy of Mare's War.

By the way, my computer guy was so intrigued when he heard about the historical subject of this book that he's planning to research it this evening.

"As For Me And My House, We Will Serve The Lord"

What was I reading this Sunday morning of 48 Hour Book Challenge weekend? Why Scripture at church. It just happened to be my week to do that. Included was the "as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord" passage from Joshua. You know how obsessive I am. Of course, I consider it part of my Challenge weekend reading.

"As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord" is a popular Bible passage. I've seen it on wall plaques. It has booky significance for me. I was brought up in a not very observant Catholic family that was not all Bible literate. So the first time I saw that passage was in my Canadian Lit class in college. We read As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross. All I remember about the book is that it includes the "as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord" passage. I was struck by it, and that's probably the reason I've noticed it here and there in the years since. Otherwise, it might have just rolled off my back, as so much of the Bible does for so many of us.

Having just attended a sermon on the subject, I could give you a few sentences on me and my house's historic and present day significance. (Hmm. Is it grammatically correct?) But I will spare you that and get back to my reading. I have only 7 hours left.

Thriller? Problem Book?

Last night I said that I was delighted to see that my first book for the 48 Hour Book Challenge was written in the present tense. Well, wouldn't you know, so was my second.

Scars by Cheryl Rainfield is the story of how fifteen-year-old Kendra deals with the trauma of having been a long-term victim of sexual abuse. In short, she deals with it by cutting. She also had a romance go bad and is about to embark on another. I don't want to say too much about that, because I felt that the romance is slowly revealed, and I don't want to do any spoiling.

Scars is sort of a combo thriller and problem book because when our story opens, Kendra is being stalked. She believes the stalker is her abuser, whose identity she has repressed. She's repressed it for good reason. He threatened her if she revealed it. But Kendra is quite a talented artist, and some of her old experience is coming out in her work. Especially in the beginning there is a sense of paranoia and threat because, since Kendra can't recall who raped her repeatedly as a very young child, she has to fear that it is any of the men she knows.

As I was reading this, I kept thinking of Hitchcock, and imagining what I was reading as a movie. I was kind of embarrassed about that, because the book is dealing with some very serious issues. But now I'm thinking of Kendra as a twenty-first century YA teen trapped in a Hitchcock movie, which is at least a little arty. Who would Hitchcock cast as the kind, caring, gay adult friend? Are there any gay characters in Hitchcock movies to provide a model? How about Colin Hanks and someone like him for Dad and Mr. Blair, the math teacher? And lets cast three cool Hitchcock blondes as Mom, Mrs. Archer the art teacher, and Carolyn the therapist. I'm thinking Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron, and somebody else. (I'm on  a tight schedule here, folks, and can't spend much time casting this. I've only got 48 hours, remember.)

Disclosure: Cheryl Rainfield and I were blogging buddies years ago and are Facebook friends now. I read the eBook edition of this book, which I got sometime back during an Amazon promotion.

I Love Albert

At my last writers' group meeting, the question of writing in the past- or present-tense came up. Present tense? I thought. But since then, while working on my present past tense Work-in- Progress, I've been thinking, Past? Present? What? So imagine my delight when I discovered this evening that Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt, my first book for this year's 48-Hour Book Challenge, is written in the present tense! It was a two-fer, a book for the challenge and a training read.

Fish in a Tree is about a sixth-grade girl who is hiding the fact that she can barely read. She diverts attention from herself with humor, sometimes unintentional, and bad behavior, often unintentional. Fish in a Tree is about how a teacher, and Ally herself, come to realize that she is not "dumb," as she feels, but dyslexic, and begin to do something about it. The book is very strong on portraying the emotional impact of serious reading problems.

Ally has her struggles, but so do several of her classmates. Secondary characters, mainly Albert, Oliver, and Keisha, are particularly well developed. Keisha is a power girl, Albert is committed to science, and Oliver is just a wildly enthusiastic kid. Early on, Albert gives one of the most elegant descriptions of the water cycle I can ever recall seeing. And Oliver's light bulb joke at the end of the book is so funny I laughed until I started coughing.

And the present tense worked very well. I'm quite certain I'm going to experiment with that as a result of reading this.

Disclosure: I have known Lynda Mullaly Hunt for many years. I purchased Fish in a Tree at its book launch.   

The 48 Hour Book Challenge Concluding Post

I need a concluding post for my 48 Hour Book Challenge effort. So this is it.

I read 6 books, blogged about them, and did some social networking in around 17 and a half hours. For the sake of a good Google+ post, I'll list the titles here with links to the blogs related to them.

Boxers and Saints

Haters

Josephine

Persepolis

Life is Fine

And now let's all take a look at Ms. Yingling's concluding post and recognize a serious 48 Hour participant. Hail to thee!

Books 5 And 6. "Boxers" And "Saints" By Gene Luen Yang

My last two Book Challenge books.

First off, this is a two volume set. Be sure to read Boxers first.

Boxers and Saints are Gene Luen Yang's terrific historical graphic novels about the Boxer Rebellion. They're treated as one work because the books treat the same material from different points of view. I knew nothing about the Boxer Rebellion before 3:00 this afternoon. By 8:00 this evening, I had a working knowledge!

So in 1900 a secret organization in China called the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists led an uprising of  peasants against western foreign influence, including the spread of Christianity. They were known as "Boxers" to the west because they practiced exercises they believed would give them powers. Presumably westerners thought they looked as if they were boxing. The Boxers fought against and killed "western devils" and "secondary devils"--those Chinese who either worked for westerners or accepted Christianity, the western devil's faith.

Boxers deals with the experience of a young villager named Little Bao who becomes the leader of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists. Saints deals with the experience of Four-Girl, a young villager who becomes a Christian. One of the particular pleasures in these books is that Four-Girl, the protagonist in Saints, is a minor character in Boxers. Little Bao, the star of Boxers, is a minor character in Saints.

Though, really, neither of them could be called minor.

Earlier today I had trouble with the long descriptions in Haters. The thing with a good graphic novel, and these are good graphic novels, is that the graphic images carry the descriptions and even some of the action. The author doesn't have to stop everything to tell readers how someone is dressed or what their surroundings look like. You can just suck in basic story, character, information.

Reading a good graphic novel is such a rush because you can take in so much so fast.

I am out of books, but it's 9:00 PM on Sunday, anyway. I'm ending this year's 48 Hour Book Challenge on a definite high.

Book 4. "Haters" By Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

Haters by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez was a rough, slow read for me. This is a boys-boys-I-like-cute-boys, shopping-and-clothes, and mean-girls book. That just is not a story situation that holds my attention. I had to start skimming the long paragraphs describing clothes and houses. Also a chapter on shopping and some dating sections. I am very aware, however, that there are many, many of these kinds of books in YA, meaning that there are plenty of people who do like reading them. Those readers may embrace Haters.

So Haters is a boys-boys-I-like-cute-boys, shopping-and-clothes, and mean-girls book with ethnic characters. It's also a kind of teenage fairy tale with all good things coming to main character Paski. A couple of interesting points:

In this LA world, beauty and money are great equalizers. Being Hispanic, Vietnamese, or any variation of African-American isn't an issue for people who are beautiful and rich. That's probably the case in real life.

In one of the magical realism episodes, Paski is visited in a vision by a child who will become the grandmother of her Japanese/African-American classmates/neighbors. This child has the knowledge of the adult she will become and of the world after she leaves it. She says something to the effect (and I'm paraphrasing here), I put in time in a Japanese internment camp as a child here in America so that my grandsons could be treated like crap when they get to high school not because they're Japanese but because they're chess geeks and just middle class? What the hell? With ya on that one, gram.

Book 3. "Josephine" By Patricia Hruby Powell And Christian Robinson

When I first heard about Josephine Baker, way back in my youth, I found her fascinating. I don't know if it was the banana costume, the gyrating hips, or the life in France, but I was impressed. So when I heard there was a picture book bio, I decided to keep an eye out for it.

Josephine, The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker by Patricia Hruby Powell with illustrations by Christian Robinson is a sharp and arty book.  It's written in free verse that is both effortless to read and expressive and intense. Many picture book bios don't cover an entire lifetime. This one does. I think Hurby Powell is able to do that because she uses dance and Baker's experiences with the segregated world she was born into as threads that keep her focused.

Baker's experience with segregation and work as a civil rights activist give this book another level of interest. As with Persepolis, it doesn't feel as if the reader (this reader, at least) is being instructed. A segregated world is just the well-defined setting for the book.

Book 2. "Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi

Oh, my gosh. How could I have waited so long to read Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi? How soon can I get hold of the second volume?

I probably would have been even more blown away by this memoir of living through the fall of the Shah of Iran, the fundamentalist takeover of that country, and its war with Iraq if I hadn't read Reading Lolita in Tehran, which deals with some of the same period but from an adult's experience.  What's amazing in both cases is the way people living under those conditions tried to maintain normality, continuing with their social gatherings in secret, collecting western pop culture trinkets. Oh, my gosh.

No wonder I see this book on my local schools' summer reading lists so often. But this isn't instructive, you-ought-to-learn-about-this-culture stuff. This is simply little Marjane's life, and she has quite a character. She's a very little revolutionary at first, but when the revolution leads to a fundamentalist takeover, she doesn't buckle under to that.

I wasn't expecting to like this as much as I did. Very pleased. Maybe a gift for my brother-in-law, who likes history but probably has never read a graphic novel.

My only complaint--the print seemed small at first. But once I was into the book, I no longer noticed.

Book 1. "Life Is Fine" By Allison Whittenberg

My 48 Hour Book Challenge weekend started a little around 3:00 this afternoon, and I just finished my book around 4:45.

I always like to have a theme for 48HBCs, and this year I accepted the official 48HBC theme as my own. Diversity. I haven't done any reading of the many, many things that have been written on the subject these past couple of months. When selecting my books, I didn't even use any book lists. I had a chance to hit a couple of libraries this past month and for the most part just picked up whatever I found that seemed to fit the bill.

Life is Fine by Allison Whittenberg (who needs a website) was an interesting read for me because I picked it up nearly a month ago. By the time I started reading it today, I no longer remembered what it was about. I like when that happens.

I want to get one thing straight right away. I liked this book. I think one could make an argument that there were a lot of cliched problem novel elements in this thing--neglected child with a single mom who needs men in her life, illness and the specter of death turns up, literature changes lives--and, yet, I liked it. I think main character Samara has a little bit of attitude that shows up not so much in her first-person narration but in her interactions with people. I liked very much the way race was handled here. There are no characters wearing metaphorical signs saying "I'm the African American character!" "I'm the Puerto Rican character!" Yet they are there. Now this may be why you want to see books by ethnic writers. They may be able to create ethnic characters who just are.

Now, after all this, I will tell you the really neat thing about this book. Teenage Samara falls for her substitute teacher--who is seventy, if he's a day. I would have loved to have seen a lot more about that.

I definitely would be interested in reading more of Whittenberg's work.

Lining Up My 48-Hour Book Challenge Reading

I stumbled upon the 2014 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards for Excellence in Children's Literature. Two of the honor winners are on my 48-Hour Book Challenge reading pile for this weekend.

Oh, and now I have their covers on my hard drive, all ready for blogging this weekend. 

The 48 Hour Book Challenge Is Coming Up

The Ninth Annual 48 Hour Book Challenge is coming up the weekend of June 6 through 8. What's the 48 Hour Book Challenge, you ask? To put it as simply as possible, lit bloggers read furiously and then blog madly about it, trying to stay conscious for as much of a 48-hour period as possible.

Good times. Good times.

Back in 2008, my third year taking part in the Challenge, I said I found it more satisfying when I had a theme. This year, Pam Coughlin/ MotherReader, the Challenge's creator, has chosen a theme, diversity for children's books. She's encouraging participants to support the We Need Diverse Books campaign.

I haven't kept up on the We Need Diverse Books issue, but I'll have to bring myself up to speed because, for the first time since 2008, I believe I'll be able to take part, at least from Saturday afternoon until Sunday night. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic.

I may get to play with my blogging buddies.

Patrice Kindl

I've been seeing Keeping the Castle by Patrice Kindl mentioned frequently recently. I kept thinking, I know that name...Patrice Kindl. Sure enough, she is the author of Owl in Love, a book I read back in 2006 as part of a magical realism weekend read I did for the first 48 Hour Book Challenge. This puts Keeping the Castle on my radar.

48-Hour Book Challenge Starts Today

The 48 Hour Book Challenge starts today. Ah, good times in years past. While I do have a little more time this weekend then I've had the last few years, I'm sad to say that I have to use it for maintenance, since I've been away from the house a lot the last couple of weekends. Seriously, I saw a small creature caught in a cobweb in my bathroom yesterday.

I was sorry to see how few bloggers have signed up for the book challenge this year. If memory serves me, the Challenge used to attract a much larger crowd. Or perhaps the sign-ups didn't begin until today, and we'll see a lot more people listed as they begin their particular 48 hour reading period.

I see a couple of old blogging buddies on the list, and I'll try to check in with them over the weekend to see what they're reading.

Read And Blog Furiously

Today is the start of this year's 48 Hour Book Challenge. Have a great time all you reader/bloggers who will be taking part.

The 2010 48-Hour Book Challenge

This year's 48 Hour Book Challenge will be held on June 4 through 6. Nowadays it would be an act of callous selfishness for me to read for an entire weekend. But that shouldn't stop anyone else! Start training. Plot your strategy.

48 Hour Book Challenge--The Final Summary

Number of Books Read: 8
Number of Pages Read: 1,580
Number of Hours Spent Reading: 22 and 3/4
Number of Hours Spent Blogging: 2 hours and 25 minutes

Someone here is disappointed that I didn't make 24 hours of reading. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's never what you did. It's what you could have done.

This was a satisfying Book Challenge. I feel steeped in the short story. In fact, last week before I even started reading short stories I spent some time reading about writing them in What If? to sort of prepare myself for my weekend.

I'm not sure that I've actually learned anything, though I am very aware that the YA or kidlit short story writer should be concerned with making her piece not just a good short story but good YA/kidlit fiction as well. I just don't know how exactly I should go about doing that.

Nonetheless I'm feeling good tonight.

48 Hour Book Challenge--Book Eight

Well, folks, I ran out of books of short stories and the one book of essays (my secondary theme for this weekend) I found looked way too long and dull for me to finish before my time is up. So I took a chance on The Quikpick Adventure Society by Sam Riddleburger, which I sprang for a few weeks ago since it wasn't turning up in any libraries around here.

It's too bad it isn't in the local libraries, because it's really good. And different. In a good way.

I had been anxious about reading it because its author stops by my blog occasionally, and I was worried I wasn't going to like his book. I'd heard that the word "poop" appears numerous times in this story of three kids who head out on a quest to visit a sewage treatment plant on Christmas Day. I have no objection to the concept of poop, but I find the word, itself, way too cute. As I've been pointing out to friends and family for years, I am not a woman who does cute.

Well, the word doesn't appear all that often when you consider what a large place sewage has in the story.

Don't think for a minute that this is a tale that panders to young peoples' taste for toilet humor. On the contrary, it's a charming and funny story about three kids who are old enough to be out from under their parents' watchful eyes but still young enough to get psyched over the prospect of free soda. The first person narrator has a wonderful voice. It's the voice of innocence, I decided. His little asides in his report on the Society's adventures are his way of making sure all the truth gets out, and truth sometimes is funny.

So are the poop haiku. None of those short stories I read this weekend made me laugh the way those things did.

There's a lot more going on in this book than just excrement jokes. Riddleburger hits on some of the same things other kids' authors have been covering--friendship, attraction to girls, fitting in--he just makes you feel as if you're not reading the same old, same old. The fact that he can write about WalMart without getting all high and mighty suggests that this man has a future in literature.

I can't wait to pass this book on to BDT for his classroom library.

Reading Time: 1 and 1/4 hours

Number of Pages: 127

Blogging Time: 25 minutes

It's 11 PM. My 48 hours will be over at 7 tomorrow morning. I think it's time for me to call this a weekend. I'll total up my reading and blogging times tomorrow.