The 2012 End of the World Reading Challenge

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper. [Sorry, Tommy, but we are going out with a bang up in this bitch.-GGG]

Welcome to our latest and greatest reading challenge. This challenge is the mac-daddy pants-backwards (give yourself two points if you got that reference right away) challenge for the upcoming year; this is the Whopper, Le Big Mac, The Royale with Cheese, the Big Kahuna washed down with a motherfucking Sprite–mm-mm-MMM, that is a tasty burger! I mean, challenge. A tasty challenge.

What, pray tell, is this challenge? you ask.

This is a simple challenge. And it’s a challenge that has a prize. A good prize. Well, it’s a decent prize. And all you have to do is read.

(Note: I lied a little, there are a couple more things you have to do. But the biggest thing is just read.)

Some people think that the world is going to end next year. Even though we think that 100% of people who believe that the world is ending in 2012 should be outfitted for a straitjacket to lounge in while they relax in a plush padded cell, for the 2012 END OF THE WORLD reading challenge, we’re racking up page counts like Armageddon is nigh. Yep, it’s not a book count, it’s a page count–pages that you’ve read of any book at all that you’ve never read before, any genre, any quality writing, from Stephenie Meyer to William Shakespeare. We went with the page count format because some books, like War and Peace, are a bit more of an undertaking than, say, the new J.D. Robb–even if Roarke is a handsome, handsome man–and I wanted the extra effort in undertaking a thicker tome to be rewarded. The person who reads the most pages in 2012 wins the prize: we will give you one cent per page read, up to 3500 pages (that’s $35.00) in the form of a gift card to your favorite bookshop (if they allow online purchases of gift cards) or online bookseller.

Not a fast reader? Don’t fret; I would love to give away a random consolation prize or two, so please enter anyway! (What prizes we have to give away are dependent on what kind and how much merch we sell throughout the year. That’s how I’ve been funding the giveaways and such–either credit to get the prizes or proceeds from the sales to buy prizes. Just in case you were wondering where that money went when you buy things from IB shops! Mostly it goes to buy fun things for you guys, and occasionally, pizza.)

Since we’re giving away an actual good-as-cash prize, this challenge is going to have somewhat stricter rules than the last challenges. Mostly because when money is involved, there are just a few jerks who tend to want to cheat and ruin everything for the largely honest folks out there. So, in order to qualify, here are a few token hoops that we ask you to jump through–bonus points if you set them on fire first:

• Be a registered follower of our blog, either via e-mail or via WordPress (check out that sidebar button or the “+Follow” button up top if you use WordPress.com and you’re logged in).
• Comment on five blog posts sometime before the end of 2012 under the same e-mail address/username that you followed us with. This is mostly to ascertain that you’re a real human being and that you’re actually someone who keeps up with our blog somewhat. We’d much rather give our prizes to our followers than someone who randomly signs up to win the cash money and never participates in our little community.  You will learn to love us.  All glory to the hypnotoad.
• Have a blog or an account on Goodreads, Shelfari, or Amazon where you review the books that you are counting toward the total. Each book needs to be reviewed, and something a little more than “I loved this book, it’s awesome!” (It doesn’t, however, need to be a dissertation.) Link the place where you plan to keep up with your reviews here, where you sign up. BTW? I have a Goodreads group set up for Insatiable Booksluts. And I have a discussion folder that could be used to help keep track of your challenge. And I will probably make other folders for other challenges. If you’re into that sort of thing and use Goodreads.
• Each book counted toward your total should be a book that you have never read before 2012. Every book read between 12:00 a.m. January 1, 2012, up until 11:59 p.m. December 31st, 2012, is eligible, provided it meets all other guidelines.
• Each book’s total pages should be counted not necessarily from the edition that you read, but from the most standard edition–for example, if you read the large print version of a book, it would have many, many more pages than a regular hardback. If there is a hardback edition available, use that edition; if not, use trade paperback, and if nothing else, then mass-market paperback or e-format. We will check the page counts, because we have a sense of fairness that you might call anal, except that sounds pretty suggestive.
• Each book should be a full-length work that is a book–for example, reading one story out of a book of short stories won’t count toward the total, or a magazine article or a short story published in a magazine. You can read a whole book of short stories and count the entire work. We are not including poetry because the word count on the page is not quite as dense as prose fiction, and therefore might give some an unseemly advantage.
• You have to finish the whole book to count any pages.
• How you keep track is up to you, as long as the reviews are publicly accessible–not just to us, but to everyone who cares to check them out.
• Contributors to IB are not eligible for this contest. Frowny face.
• Your final tally needs to be submitted before the balls drop (teehehe) on New Year’s Day, 2013. So if you’re trying to get that last-minute read in, keep in mind that you’ll need to review it and officially log it wherever you’re logging things.

Some additional guidelines:

• We reserve the right to call foul if we think you’re cheating in any way–padding your page count by using books you’ve already read, padding your page count by using summaries from Wikipedia, adding books far more quickly than we believe people should reasonably be able to read them, adding a ton of e-books that have ridiculously large formatting and inflated page counts, et cetera. We are very reasonable people, so we will give you a chance to argue your virtue if we sense something is awry–certainly, we could be wrong, after all. Dealing with us in a very civil manner if this happens will go a very long way toward resolving the issue in your favor, although we can make no promises. Dealing with us in a non-civil manner will basically guarantee that we will consider you disqualified.
• In the vein of the bullet point above, I suggest adding books as you read them to whatever list or shelf you are keeping track on, and noting the dates that you read them, even if you’re saving the review process for when you have more time. It’s not mandatory, but it could make things run more smoothly. Good documentation makes the qualification process easier, which means you get your prize faster!
• We reserve the right to disqualify you if you violate our comment policy.
• We may occasionally post updates, or call for counts. Some of these may be mandatory in order to be considered eligible; a year is quite a long time to keep up with a challenge, and we may need to see where we stand. In order to remain eligible, you must respond to any mandatory requests; we promise, in return, to keep these requests as simple as possible and post them with a very generous deadline for responding.
• Although we don’t want to, we reserve the right to cancel this contest at any time. Reasons that could possibly lead to us canceling this contest could include, but are not limited to, death, dismemberment, rabies, job loss, having to deal with too many assholes who just want to use us for our vast fortune meager earnings, ghosts, harassment and abuse, nobody following guidelines or rules, the revolution not being televised, nuclear war, the suicidal depression that would cripple me if Twitter were to suddenly stop working, and the voices in my head telling me that I should use that money to buy ice cream instead.
• We may find that we need to implement further rules or guidelines if someone outsmarts us and violates the spirit of the challenge. We will post new guidelines if needed; joining this challenge binds you to all past, present, and future guidelines, even if we all become robot androids and are alive in the year 3749.
• If you pass 3500 pages, you do not automatically win–the person who has the most pages at the end wins, even if it’s 10,000 pages against 10,001 pages. So it’s anybody’s game until 2013!
• Do not underestimate my Google-fu. I can find things. Oh, the things I can find.

Please sign up on this page if you want to participate. You can add your link after you get it set up, if you don’t already have a designated spot. If you have any questions, or if anything is unclear, please ask! You may not be the only person who has that question! ^_^

This is basically the first BIG-big reading challenge that we’ll have hosted, and by big I mean having a prize, so please bear with us while we work out the kinks. If we have to change anything around, it’s not to make it harder for you guys to win; we just want to make it hard for people to take advantage of us giving stuff away. We only like to give things to AWESOME people, like our loyal followers and future loyal followers.

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