This last summer one of my friends participated in BookTubeAThon, a seven day reading challenge on YouTube. The overall challenge was to read seven books in seven days, along with sub-challenges to determine which books to read (read a classic, finish a series, etc). There were daily video challenges for people to post and Twitter sprints to help you keep going. I thought it sounded terrifying and wonderful, especially as a slow reader. I was hooked from the day I heard about it…which happened to be two days after it started. No BookTubeAThon for me.

Then this last Thursday I saw a few photos pop up on my Facebook wall for Christmas BookTubeAThon (known as #xmasbooktubathon), a shortened version of the regular challenge. I was feeling busy and swamped and overwhelmed and for some reason it seemed like the perfect time to commit to something gigantic.

For #xmasbooktubeathon this year, there were four challenges:

1) Read a book with red and green on the cover

2) Read a book you really wanted to read this year

3) Read a book that was gifted to you

4) Read three books in three days

The book I wanted to read this year was The 4-Hour Workweek, which I started Friday morning and took to work to read on breaks. For the last few weeks I’ve been listening to Tim Ferris’s podcast, which is really interesting despite Tim being a terrible interviewer. He just knows a lot of fantastic people who are all willing to talk with him for hours on end. I’ve known about The 4-Hour Workweek for years, but discounted it because I thought it was all about high-powered executives outsourcing their lives to India in order to dump their 70-hour workweeks in favor of golf in Havana. Not really my scene.

It’s a little strange to read a book at work that says “WARNING: DO NOT READ THIS BOOK UNLESS YOU WANT TO QUIT YOUR JOB” on the back, but I did it anyway. And in the end, some of the best take-aways from the book were ways I could improve efficiency at work and interact better with the staff. While there’s plenty in the book that I disagree with, I found myself recommending it to two different people by the end of the weekend.

Finding a book with red and green on the cover proved surprisingly difficult. I went through every book on my shelf looking for one, even looking to my boyfriend’s bookshelf for a while. Eventually I found Century Girl: A Hundred Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfield Follies. It’s half biography, half scrapbook. It’s full of images and drawings, which meant it would be an especially fast read. Since this was my first attempt at BookTubeAThon, I thought at least one truly fast read was acceptable. The whole thing took me about two hours, three with breaks.

I wasn’t sure how much I’d like Century Girl, but Doris led a truly fascinating life. From lying about her age to get into vaudeville, to staring in silent movies, to doing ten-cent taxi dances to make it through the depression, to being on the ground floor of the Arthur Murray empire, owning a horse ranch, going to college at 77, and eventually performing at 100 years old on the same stage she started on, Doris was a pretty outstanding lady. Not to mention she was physically and mentally sharp after 100 years having never taken a single pill (she was a Christian Scientist).

Sunday morning I opened The Partly Cloudy Patriot, my choice for a book that was given to me. It was small enough that it didn’t terrify me to read it in a day, and large enough that it counted as a real book. It’s a series of essays about Sarah Vowell’s travels through America. You know, exactly the kind of thing I write. While it was generally good, a few of the essays were a bit dated and not all of them moved as quickly as I’d hoped. I like Sarah’s work on This American Life, so maybe I just don’t like hearing her through my voice.

I closed the final page at around 10:30PM on Sunday night, proud of my accomplishment and surprised it was so easy. Sure I didn’t pick anything especially long or dense (the longest was 300 pages), but it was still three books, start to finish, in three pages. Monday morning I was talking to a co-worker about the challenge. “I wish I had time to read three books in three days,” he lamented.

“I didn’t have time,” I replied, “but I did it.”

I recently overheard some people talking about how there’s no good time to have a baby, which is why there’s no use in couples waiting for the timing to be right. It’s true. There’s no good time for a baby, no good time to write a novel, no good time to drive around the country. There’s no good time for almost anything worth doing, and yet somehow it manages to get done.

If reading seven books in seven days sounds like something worth doing, I suggest you mark your calendar for July 2015, the next BookTubeAThon. I know I’ll be there.