An Ode to Dewey, Founder of Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon (April 26)

An Ode to Our Dewey
by Joy Renee
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We Miss You Dewey

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What is Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon? -- 24 hours of reading, sharing, mini-challenges, prizes, cheerleading, blogging, social 
networking...

This twice a year event was founded by book blogger Dewey in 2007 and hosted at her original blog, The Underside of the Leaf, which I can't link because it no longer exists.  Which is so sad and not just because I didn't get to  finish reading her archives but because there was a lot of valuable insight in her reviews and they could have added richly to her legacy.

Dewey passed in late November of 2008, after organizing and hosting four events in the spring and fall of 2007 and 2008.


Since then her legacy--the world wide community of book lovers she wove together by those 4 events--has continued to thrive under the dedicated administering of a slew of organizers, hour hosts at the hub, gift and postage donors and cheerleaders.  And the numbers of participants increase each thon--nearly 500 this fall--which is now hosted on a dedicated blog, Dewey's Read-a-Thon

I have no set-in-stone goals for this one other than to enjoy it and go with the flow. It will depend on my mood when the time comes what the ratio between reading and the other possible activities will be.

The Book of Heaven
by Patricia Storace

But I do have a tentative reading plan:

• To finish the ebook Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One and Never Lets Go by Les Edgerton if I haven't already.  I've been reading this slowly all month to aid in the structural rewrite of my short story Blow Me a Candy Kiss which is my Camp NaNo project.
• Select two or three books I'm close to finishing from my mile long currently reading list as posted in my most recent IMWAYR? and finish them.
• Spend a sustained amount time with the library tree-book The Book of Heaven by Patricia Storace.  It is a lovely, lyrical, mythopoeic retelling from a woman's point of view of stories from the Biblical Old Testament era.  
• If my eyes give out I'll listen to the audio book, A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness.  I started this during the last hours of a previous thon (October 2012) and then didn't return to it until I had to restart it.  That has happened several times now.  That opening scene talking place in a library haunts me every time I see the title sitting in the list on IMWAYR?

I used to pride myself on my ability to stay awake the full 24 but that is no longer a given.  Unless I have had a solid week of good sleep (7.5+ per night) I shouldn't even try.  But even then I would have to do it without fudging on my med schedule which is tricky with the bedtime Trazadone which I'm rarely able to resist more than an hour.  I'm supposed to take it between 9 and 9:30 PM but for the thon I will push it past midnight but I'm not sure yet how far.