Readathon: Hour 17

Snacks: Val's garlic-and-vegetable pasta salad breathed new life into me.

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Blogs visited: 11

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Pages read: 8 pages. I read a little from They Shoot Horses, Don't They? while I was eating. Horace McCoy's nameless narrator also addresses the importance of multi-tasking during marathon events:

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The rules were you danced for an hour and fifty minutes, then you had a ten-minute rest in which you could sleep if you wanted to. But in those ten minutes you also had to shave or bathe or get your feet fixed or whatever was necessary. [...] Gloria and I had been tipped off by some old-timers that the way to beat a marathon dance was to perfect a system for those ten-minute rest periods: learning to eat your sandwich while you shaved, learning to eat when you went to the john, when you had your feet fixed, learning to read newspapers while you danced, learning to sleep on your partner's shoulder while you were dancing; but these were all tricks of the trade you had to practise. They were very difficult for Gloria and me at first.