Olympic Readathon

Random House Canada has decided to hold an epic readathon during the upcoming Olympics. You may have noticed a bit of a lag in reviews lately. That's because I've been reading like a mad fiend preparing for the craziness that's about to hit Books Etc.! I'm looking forward to this readathon because it's going to give me an extra nudge to get all sorts of reading done.

I have to admit that I'm not as excited about these Olympics as I could be. Part of it is because Canada hosted the last Olympics in Vancouver in 2010 so we had great coverage and amazing patriotic awesomeness happening. We lived and breathed the Olympics. Also...let's be real here...Canadians are much better at the sports that involve snow so there aren't as many proud medal moments in the summer Olympics. But...the argument could be made that it's even better when we do win a medal in the summer games because it's so rare. Hmm...bit of research...Wikipedia is telling me that we were 19th in gold medals (3 total) in Beijing and 14th in total medals (we got 18 total). Hey, that's actually not too bad. *checks top medal winning countries* Hm. China won 100 medals (51 gold) and the US won 110 (36 gold). Ahem. Right. Woo, 18 medals! The good news is that we did better in 2008 than in 2004 so fingers crossed this trend continues! Just for comparison, we were number one in 2010 when we hosted the winter games with 14 gold medals and a total of 26 medals. See? We excel in the snow :)

Anyway.

I have a ridiculous amount of books to get through in the next little while so I'm glad to have this extra motivation. I decided on a goal of 1,300 pages during the two weeks. Why 1,300? Everyone else seemed to be settling on 1,000, 1,500, or 2,000 so I went for something a little different. Though, I suppose if I wanted to be really different I could have set a goal of 1,372 pages. Maybe that will be my new goal :) I'm sure I'm going to hit 1,300 easily so it'll be interesting to see what happens. Want to join in? You can sign up here or just follow the fun on Twitter (@RandomHouseCA and #OlympicReadathon...PS I'm @KaleyS23).

Fellow blogger Lindsay at Turning the Pages did an intro post to the readathon the other day (read it here). I liked that she included a list of books she's hoping to finish over the two weeks so I have included a list myself!

- Ripple the Twine - Jenn Flynn-Shon
- A Place in the Country - Elizabeth Adler
- Rum Punch Regrets - Anne Kemp
- Living in Glass Houses - Zoe McKnight

And just because I can, here's a picture of me with John Morris who was on the gold medal men's curling team in 2010. Yes, I am holding a gold medal. They're heavy!

In closing I will say Happy Reading and GO CANADA! :)