24 in 48 Reading Challenge - the Day After

I'm in the midst of writing a piece about how academics can use reading challenges to broaden their professional reading and enhance their quality of life, and, just as I finished the first draft of my piece, I saw that the 24in48 reading challenge was starting the next day. Of course, I had to join it, ready or not.

 What I found most challenging about this challenge was using technology to prove/record my reading, and also the social media aspect. Since I kept the timer on only when I was actually reading and pressed "stop" if I was doing something else (refilling my coffee, talking to my husband), I don't know how people also did this challenge while posting their updates on social media. What I probably enjoyed most about the challenge was finding another way to get away from distraction that isn't the Pomodoro technique, because of the practice of keeping a stop-watch going without requiring yourself to go 25 minutes without a break. This allows you to monitor how much of your reading time is really spent reading, if you are good about stopping the clock as soon as your eyes leave the page.  However, the downside of the stopwatch method is that I accidentally turned it off while I was reading for 15 minutes on the first day, and more disastrously accidentally reset the stop-watch after 6 hours and 15 minutes (+the unclocked 15).

 Anyway, I mostly used it to finish books I was half-way through, so I didn't read a single book from start-to-finish, which was a little unsatisfying. Since I was doing primarily academic reading, I also took longhand notes as I was going, which made my pace pretty slow. Despite that, I read a total of 664 pages and listened to 6 hours and 12 minutes of Sarah Pinborough's Behind Her Eyes. In hard copies, I finished Marjorie Spruill's Divided We Stand; the Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics , James Forman's Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America; and Omar El Akkad's American War. I started, but didn't quite finish George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses and at the very end of the challenge, when I decided I was too tired to effectively read Mosse, I got 65 pages into Billy Wayne Sinclair and Jodi Sinclair, A Life in the Balance: The Billy Wayne Sinclair Story, which I've had on my shelf for a long time because it was cited in some other book I read. It turns out to be not at all what I had expected.