Tomorrow is the first ever Classics Club Readathon event and, since I rather enjoy readathons and am curious about a classics only event might play out, I am signed up to take part. :)

My usual readathon rule applies – I don’t match the US hours they’re always aligned to. Reading noon till noon to fit in with the official times makes absolutely no sense for me, it pretty writes off any other plans for Saturday and Sunday and messes with my body clock. Instead I’ll be reading from 00:01-23:59 on Saturday (and sleeping most of Sunday morning away to recover). :)

I’m curious to see how the classics themed event compares to the regular anything goes Dewey’s Readathon events which take place in April and October every year. For this smaller, themed event the goal obviously isn’t reading X number of books and there’s none of the ‘cheerleading’ that you get with the Dewey events. I can see it being very satisfying to indulge in a day of dedicated effort on slower, more complex reads though.

After looking at my own Classics Club list and debating which titles to focus on, my own TBR for tomorrow includes four books, two older titles and two that would count for my century of books:

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (1722)
Hester by Margaret Oliphant (1883)
The Road To Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1937)
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford (1945)

So that’s the great pestilence, depression era Northern England, a Mrs Oliphant drama and my first Mitford. I’ve gone for variety and writing styles I think or know I can read at a decent pace. It’s not that I want to read more books than anyone else or am desperate to race through them but I enjoy readathons as a day where the reading is mostly for pleasure and there’s a flow to the experience. Picking a huge tome and reading that one book all day or choosing something with lots of footnotes probably wouldn’t work for me because those kinds of books I need to pick up and put down regularly to absorb and reflect on the ideas as well the writing.

I’ll be updating a separate post about the event throughout tomorrow and I have a review of Bricks and Mortar (a Classics Club read from December) to go up in the morning as well. I do love bookish weekends. :)