Bout of Books 6.0 – The Results

Bout of Books is over and I’m super proud of myself for finishing what I set out to do. My goal for the week was to read 5 books and I did it! (View the original post here) I ended up squeezing the last book on the last day possible, but I’m just glad that I sat down, read the whole thing and completed the read-a-thon.

Here’s a few things I learned from Bout of Books that I just wasn’t expecting:

Planning ahead what I’m going to read is awesome.

I don’t usually plan ahead what I’m going to read. I end up choosing what I’m going to read based solely on either the cover or if I have to review it soon. That’s it, that’s my criteria. So… planning the 5 books ahead of time was incredible helpful. I only had those 5 to choose from and I knew that I would be getting to all of them this week, so I just ended up picking randomly every time I had to start a new one. Inspired by the challenge, I’m going  to start choosing 5 books every week and out of those I will need to read at least 3. I think this will keep me organized and reading more. Of course, once school starts it’ll be harder to read 3 books a week, but I can definitely do it.

I ended up loving the books I didn’t feel like reading.

You know when you just don’t feel like reading a book that you wanted to read so bad before? I hate that, if I have the book it’s because I wanted to read it. Because I had already chosen the 5 books I was going to read, I had no other options and sometimes I just didn’t feel like reading any of them. As hard as it was, I stuck to my initial choices and some of the ones that I dreaded the most turned out to be the best ones, which was pretty awesome.

I love being put on a deadline.

OMG. I love this. I kind of knew this about me, but oh man… I loved it! It kept me motivated and eager to continue reading because I didn’t want to lose. Another fact about me: I hate to lose. Needless to say, I was not going to lose this reading challenge. No way. That’s why I think this new weekly reading “challenge” thing that I want to do will work so well, I won’t want to lose against myself. Good job Nancy!